Without wanting to take this tread off course - does anyone know where a Cirrus pilot has actually pulled off a successful forced landing and deliberately opted NOT to pull the 'chute?
My view is that CAPS is like an ejection seat. Just as when I was learning to fly in the RAF we had ejections seats in Jet Provosts and Hawks BUT we were still taught how to do forced landings.
If all we had been taught was to "pull the handle" many aircraft would have been lost un-necessarily and many were saved by successfully being landed dead-stick and this was sometimes done in IMC/night - we needed a 600 foot cloud base to give it a go. There was even a procedure to dead-stick aircraft such as the Harrier and the Hunter just as I think there still is for the F16, which like the others mentioned is also a single-engine jet.
I'm not saying that having a CAPS option is bad, all I would like to see is perhaps some discretion first. Clearly if over mountains or water there's no contest but if a forced landing was an option I'd start the profile and only take CAPS if it was clear that my forced landing was not going to work, at say CAPS AGL minima plus 250 feet.
MB