But 80% of fatal's are NOT COPA members
It could also be that there is self selection going on i.e. those who kill themselves are people who have a generally slack attitude to all things in life, and who accidentally / opportunistically made the $$$ to buy the plane with.
It's like the fact that healthy people are much more likely to buy life insurance
Slightly off topic but I was speaking with a pilot who has flown a Columbus 400 and was completely blown away by the aircraft. He said that the handling was delicious and the speed amazing a far superior aircraft to the Cirrus.
Yet the aircraft does not attract the sales! Maybe the selling point with the Cirrus is the chute system?
Odd unless there are technical reasons why the Columbus is not also fitted with a chute system?
The formerly Lancair Colum
bia (now Cessna) 400 is much faster (well to the extent that anything with a piston engine can be "much" faster) than an SR22.
In 2011 Cessna delivered just
one of them.
I don't why it has been a flop. Perhaps a number of reasons
- Cirrus sucked the market dry in the good days (which they were able to do because every other player was totally inept and flogging what was basically WW2 hardware with some eye candy in the panel) and Cessna started when not only the horse but also the underlying economy were both on their last legs
- Inept marketing (that stupid looking businessman claiming he can do 3 deals per day because of the ease of travel)
- They had big problems with the thermal (electric) anti-ice system. I have heard various stories, always denied by others, about the heated elements getting too hot and damaging the wings/elevator. Maybe it was just new technology, not tested well enough. Cessna are a long term player and they would have taken time to sort this before pushing too many out.
- The great performance is bought with avgas, and lots of it
Especially given the fixed gear, which is nuts for a fast plane. If it was retractable it would be amazing. The 400 pushes the "fixed gear is simple and gives you cheap insurance, and to hell with avgas cost" paradigm further than anybody else, and everybody knows it's false now. What the aerodynamic body gives you is entirely thrown away with the fixed gear, because if throttled to 11USG/hr (peak EGT) it does 138kt which is exactly the same as my TB20. The other company which just kept making ever faster avgas burners, at any stupid cost, was Mooney, and they are dead now, apart from the spare parts operation.
- It is very pricey now, and touches some other areas which deliver much more mission capability. Current ads mention $750k with all the eye candy. I know one can make the new v. old argument at every level in flying (or indeed cars, etc) but for $1M you can buy a very nice used Jetprop, which (FL270, 270kt TAS, short field capability, boots, radar, pressurisation) will totally and utterly thrash any piston plane (apart from a Spitfire, etc) and anybody with $750k cannot be totally unaware of this. Oxygen at FL200+ is OK if flying solo but not so good for passengers.
Peter I don't hold with your view about the avionics and engine, why should they be written off ?
The 20G shock is likely to crack PCBs, damage solder joints to tall components and connectors, damage display technologies, etc. All these can be
intermittent faults. This is my expertise (electronics). It is virtually impossible to inspect for this kind of damage. One can probably detect it by specific functional tests on a vibration rig, but nobody is going to do that.
Intermittently faulty avionics get recycled into the exchange avionics pool and just keep going round and round, p1ssing off successive owners, until they end up with an owner who has the resources to sue.
This stuff particularly gets up my nose because a while ago I bought two KC225 autopilot computers, at a very good price, both with original Honeywell overhaul documentation. I took them to an avionics shop (a H. dealer) to calibrate so I had them as immediately usable spares. One was found to have a duff display which didn't surface for about an hour.
Honeywell washed their hands of it, saying it passed their bench test. Even a letter from the avionics shop, and photos from me, didn't shift them. Absolute bastards, but this is fairly normal in avionics. I eventually got it sorted by blowing away my entire "favour reserve" by getting a certain individual I knew inside Honeywell (not in the UK) to put in a word for me. I got another overhauled unit, but this chap no longer answers my emails