Wow!
I am new here. Wrote a post few pages back and have not come back till now, prompted by the latest pull in Australia. Anybody seen that amazing video?
Reading all these posts I sense an "unfair" treatment of Cirrus owners. Wonder why? The Columbia has fancy screens, but nobody speaks of their owners the same way...
By the way, not having the central column/yoke, allows for a lower dash and much better forward visibility.
I have flown gliders, high wing Cessna, Cirrus, and Eclipse Jet, and I have trained for emergency in different way in the different planes.
In gliders, in Europe, I always wore a parachute! First time in Australia, renting a glider, no chute, I felt so naked that I could not fly relaxed.
The Eclipse has two engines, flies at 410, but has no chute. My wife does not like that. Now she has to learn a lot more in case of my incapacitation, than just pulling that handle.
In my years of flying I have had three engine failures. Real ones. One was the Stinson towing my glider on take off. No use for the chute there. Was lucky enough to hear it, it stopped on the runway, I took off, flew over his rudder, disengaged, and landed in front of his prop.
The second one was in our new second Cirrus. That was more a partial loss of power than a full failure. We were at 17,500, kept it at gliding range of a airport, till a Bonanza hit its tail landing and they closed that runway (lucky me) and so I sputtered to the next airport where I landed with no incident. In that one, had I found myself crossing 1000, with no airport in sight and not enough power to stop my descend, I WOULD HAVE PULLED.
Third time, you would think I am kidding, in a Cardinal, 177RG which I rented because you cannot do your commercial in a Cirrus since it has fixed gear! So here I am renting this plane, which after 50 minutes of flying around the foot hills of the rockies (where I live) decides to quit (fuel pump completely separated from case) suddenly 5 miles from base at 1200 feet. Declared and was lucky enough to glide it home.
With the jet, every year we have recurrent training and a check ride. Part of it is going to idle at 15,000 and land it from there. My point being is you better train to be ready in the machine you are flying. USING ALL THE EQUIPMENT that machine offers you. So, if the chute is part of that equipment, I had made the decision, ON THE GROUND, of the circumstances in which I would use it.
Regarding the comments about having the chute in the Cirrus makes for less prudent pilots, or lazier pilots because of the perceived safety I cite the training of military pilots with eject-able seats... They don't take more risks just because of that equipment.
I am sure that most of are here because of a fundamental common factor... OUR LOVE FOR BEING UP THERE! Like someone said here I rather see an alive stupid pilot than a dead stupid pilot, or an alive unlucky one, or an alive incapacitated one.
A final comment, the Cirrus allows for great fulfillment in both leisure flying as well as business flying. So, while other types have higher use as trainers or sightseeing platforms, the Cirrus can perform both well. When used "on business" it is a solid IFR platform, with an amazing set of avionics and great families of autopilots. Both the DFC series as well as the Garmins provide envelope protection and the latter has an hypoxia "recovery" systems.
The hours flown this way are statistically very "different hours" from the ones flown either in VFR or around the pattern.
Finally, from a public page about safety on COPA, I would like to quote the rates, which actually confute the ones here who have stated that Cirrus have higher rates than the average in general aviation.
See the web here.
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Cirrus Fatal Accident Rate
Because Cirrus Design collaborates with COPA, we have access to their compilation of fleet flying hours. This enables COPA to calculate the following fatal accident rates.*
Past 36 months: 1.57
We use a 3-year average because, with a modest fleet size of 5,500 airplanes flying about 800,000 hours per year, the accident rate varies substantially with only a few accidents. By contrast, the GA fleet contains 200,000 airplanes flying about 20,000,000 hours per year, or about 40 times more aircraft flying about 30 times more hours.
In the past 36 months, there have been 35 fatal accidents and approximately 2,200,000 flying hours for a rate of 1.57 fatal accident per 100,000 hours of flying time.
Past 12 months: 1.07
In the past 12 months, there have been 9 accidents in approximately 840,000 flight hours for a rate of 1.07 fatal accidents per 100,000 hours.
GA fleet: 1.24 overall, 2.38 for Personal & Business flying
We compare the Cirrus fatal accident rate to the overall general aviation rate for non-commercial fixed-wing aircraft of 1.24 for 2011 (ref NTSB aviation safety statistics).
The Cirrus rates appears higher than the overall GA rate of 1.24. However, the NTSB report covers all types of GA flying, including corporate flying with professional pilots, as well as twin-engine aircraft and turbo-prop and turbojet aircraft, which skew the activity comparable to flying done by Cirrus SR2X aircraft.*
Consequently, we also compare the civil aviation accident analysis published by the NTSB, which separates the purposes of flying into Personal, Business, Instructional, Corporate and various other activities. Using that data, we determined the accident rate for Personal and Business flying to be 2.38 for 2009. The Cirrus SR2X rates compare favorably with those more comparable activities.
The fatal accident rates for Cirrus aircraft averaged over 12-months (blue) and 36-months (red) compared with the Nall report GA fatal accident rate (green) and the NTSB Personal & Business rate (grey).
*Caution on comparing fatal accident rates
Care must be taken when comparing fatal accident rates with other models or manufacturers. Because the Reliability Engineering staff at Cirrus Aircraft maintain a database of flight hours by serial number for their world-wide fleet, we have access to the estimated fleet hours for Cirrus SR2X aircraft. COPA then uses those hours with the world-wide number of accidents to compute a rate. We know of no other manufacturer that shares their fleet flying hours. And as stated above, we use both the 12-month and 36-month intervals to address the effects of a small fleet of about 1/30 of the 150,000 single-engine fixed-wind piston aircraft in the FAA database.
The NTSB and FAA fatal accident rates are focused on N-reg aircraft primarily based in the US and flight activity from a survey also based primarily in the US. Furthermore, the types of operations in the survey include commercial, business, pleasure, instructional, aerial application and other purposes. Those operations are weighted quite differently than the Cirrus fleet. For instance, commercial and instructional flying have extraordinarily few accidents and large numbers of flying hours, so when you remove those from the NTSB calculation, the remaining large number of accidents and modest number of flying hours result in a much higher accident rate. While there are some commercial and instructional flight activity in the Cirrus fleet, the proportions appear to be quite different.
Comparing the Cirrus rate to other models or manufacturers cannot be done reliably without an estimate of flying hours for those aircraft. Because the age of the Cirrus fleet, where all airplanes were produced since mid-1999, and because of the limited roles for Cirrus aircraft compared to others, any comparison is fraught with difficulty.
Please be thoughtful about how these accident rates are discussed.
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END RANT.
Enjoy our beautiful skies and be safe!