Originally Posted by englishal
It would be very interesting to compare the number of fatalities or serious injuries in SEP aircraft since the Cirrus was released, in both Cirrus and other aircraft and then normalise the hours to give an X:100000 hrly figure to compare the Cirrus with other aeroplanes...
But I can't be bothered to do it. I would be very happy to fly a Cirrus with the BRS and if I needed to pull the handle, then I would.
SDBeach, you are outnumbered on these forums by predominately British pilots. In Britian we have a CAN'T DO attitude in aviation, compared to the US CAN DO attitude, so you will always lose the argument (or rather someone will always have to have the last word!)
Good luck, I am going to pull the Red Handle and bail out of this one now.........
Hope you haven't bailed out just yet because I have some data for your query.
This is taken from my work posted on the COPA site:
Cirrus SR20/SR22 fatal accident history - Cirrus Owners and Pilots Association
The NTSB and the FAA survey of general aviation activity provide numbers for the GA fleet, although predominantly in the US or N-reg airplanes. For 2011, the reported fatal accident rate was
1.17 fatal accidents per 100,000 hours of flying time. Since 2000, the number has ranged from 1.16 to 1.34 fatal accidents per 100,000 hours.
Caution: these numbers include instructional and commercial operations, where there are few fatal accidents and about 40% of the flying hours. The NTSB published numbers for Personal and Business flying. In 2011,
Personal and Business flying was 2.38 and ranged from 1.91 to 2.49 since 2000. (Note: this rate has increased over the past decade, contrary to conventional wisdom that the GA fatal accident rate has been steady and resistant to change. It got worse!)
So you might compare the Cirrus numbers to 1.17 or 2.38 fatal accidents per 100,000 hours.
How to get the Cirrus numbers? COPA tracks all fatal accidents, including those foreign accidents for which the NTSB rarely gets involved, like Brazil and Germany. Since 2000, there have been 96 fatal Cirrus accidents and about 5,700,000 flying hours. Flying time is tracked by the Reliability Engineering folks at Cirrus Aircraft by serial number based on warranty cards, service bulletins and parachute repacks.
In the past 12 months, we have 8 fatal accidents and about 700,000 flying hours, or
1.16 Cirrus fatals per 100,000 hours.
Since the Cirrus fleet of 5400 airplanes is 1/40 of the SEP fleet, small numbers perturb the rates, so we also track 36 months, where we have 33 fatal accidents and about 2,000,000 flying hours or
1.63 fatals per 100,000 hours. (Sadly, we had a very bad interval in fall of 2011 with 8 accidents in just 3 months.)
So, given the work of tracking Cirrus flying hours, you can compare the numbers you like:
1.16 Cirrus fatal accidents/100,000 hours in past 12 months
1.17 GA fatal accidents/100,000 hours in 2011
1.63 Cirrus fatal accidents/100,000 hours in past 36 months
2.38 GA Personal & Business fatal accidents/100,000 hours in 2011
Here is that in chart form:
Have fun.
Cheers
Rick