While all of the points made on this thread have merit, they have sort of turned a discussion on a ditching of an aircraft and the loss of an airman without a Mayday call into a teach-in on D&D, Maydays and the like which gives me two problems:
1 My thoughts are still with my friend and colleague Sascha, named recently as the pilot, who it seems we may have lost, though not all hope has gone yet while the police conduct their enquiries. But I fear we may never know what happened on his flight - he may have been in a spin, upside down, dis-oriented, without windscreen after a huge bird strike, fighting with a spluttering engine, a control issue or structural failure, or unconscious and not on autopilot, or something else quite nasty. But he may have just been unable to get round to the Communicate bit in Aviate-Navigate-Communicate.
2 Whilst the knowledge-sharing is very worthy (for which many thanks) it may never be found again if anyone wishes to understand emergency best practice, which is a shame. So I wonder if the PPrune forum manager might arrange for the thread to be tagged or re-instated under Mayday best practice or something similar, at least that would be a lasting legacy of our friend Sascha. I wonder if others agree ?
In my own case, flying that particular SR22 or others, I always had in my mind what I'd do in an emergency - in case I was incapacitated or upside down - and it was always about cleaning up the plane to glide at best or slow down to 133kts to pull the chute at worst, and I trained to do this in seconds. Radio calls were my last concern and position reports definitely so, but I always flew with one GNS430 set with the lat&long displayed in case I got the chance to relay it but expected that a Mayday on 121.5 would help D&D triangulate my position. Hence my earlier point about depressing the frequency change knob to immediately get 121.5 up. I've even had dreams about these steps, many times.
Even with all that the Cirrus glass cockpit gives you, having experienced 3 near misses in the UK from non-transponding aircraft (one a head-on with an RAF Grob in the Manchester Low Level route) I gave up flying some months ago which saddens me. Sascha's accident underscores how risky it has all become and his young wife must be devastated.