More informed thoughts on the Cirrus

[Genghis the Engineer]

Thanks to the enormous generosity of jonzarno yesterday, I spent a little under an hour hour airborne in his SR22, and several more hours talking through the aeroplane and going through the training material that he had on the aeroplane.


Firstly the aeroplane - there's not a lot to cricitise about it. Putting my test pilot hat on for a few minutes:-

Stick fixed apparent longitudinal static stability: strong
Stick free apparent longitudinal static stability: near neutral in CR, slightly stronger in LD
Phugoid: hard to excite, damps out within 2 cyles
Longitudinal SPO: substantially deadbeat, non-intrusive
Pitch change with power: small
Pitch change with flaps: nose-up, small and easily managable
Physical ergonomics: Good view out, controls easily to hand, seat and harness had good adjustments. Coolie hat on the stick top gave good control of pitch and roll trims. Control forces significant but crisp and manageable.
Yaw change with power: significant, requiring moderate rudder inputs to keep the aeroplane in trim.

So, what could I criticise there? Well, the aeroplane would benefit from a yaw trimmer to deal with the significant pedal forces, and that would reduce pilot workload. I'd like to have seen greater stick displacements as the low stick free longstab made accurately resolving small changes in speed and height manually difficult.

Did these things make the aeroplane unsafe or difficult to fly? No, not particularly: they would bare improvement but there are many aeroplanes with long and good safety records that have worse deficiencies than this.



However, there were two aspects of the aeroplane that were particularly interesting.

Firstly it's fast - 160 knots cruise, 100 knots in the circuit, 80 knots on final (rough numbers). Whilst the handling was fine, it presents a significantly greater requirement to think ahead of the aeroplane.

Secondly, the aeroplane is substantially managed through a very impressive array of electronic systems. Flight data is presented through a data fused presentation, input through some more multi-function boxes. This was all rather complex, and in some parts contradictory - for example that the engine gauge presentation on the right hand screen went clockwise whilst the backup analogue instruments next to them were anticlockwise. Checklists were built into one of the screens, but without any ability to modify them for changes in operating procedure or locality.

The CAPS, by the way - it's there, and going through the training material, there really isn't anything there I could find saying "as soon as you're unhappy, pull the handle". There were many points where the advice was along the lines of "do this, do that, consider whether you should pull the handle", then do the following if you didn't". Engine failures were treated in that way for example - establish glide - pick field - position - decide if you're going to manage - if not pull handle - if you can land carry on and do so.

We also talked through the whole "pull early, pull often" phrase, which: going through the training material: basically meant that if the aircraft is out of control pull the handle before the aeroplane passes out of the safe operation envelope, and when any emergencies are going on, always go through the question of whether you should be using CAPS. Frankly, I can't fault any of that - it's pretty much the same as military training with regard to an ejector seat.



All of this is manageable, but required a level of understanding, training and preparedness that is far beyond baseline PPL pass standard, and that looks to me to be the fundamental problem behind the high fatal accident rate of the Cirrus.

The training that is *available* is impressive - whilst for presumably marketing reasons Cirrus are denying it is, basically the training packages look very like high-end CRM training. And rightly so. However, there's an obvious problem even there which is that this training is neither mandatory, nor assessed as it certainly would be in any professional operating environment.

JZ showed me data which indicated strongly that a disproportionately high proportion of Cirrus fatalities are with the 50%ish of pilots who don't engage with these training programmes. I imagine that's true, both because the pilots missing that training are, well, missing that training - but also they're the ones who probably don't think it's important.





So, my summarised opinions:-

- The aeroplane could be improved, but not much, and it's not unsafe.

- There is a significant mismatch between the skill levels required to *manage* this aircraft and the skill levels required to pass a PPL.


The relatively inexpensive (I was told US$750 for a 2 day inc. 4 flying hours course) and apparently very high quality training being offered with the Cirrus community is obviously trying to plug the gap, and full power to their collective elbows for doing so.



It strikes me that this is all just a very extreme example of a problem we all know about. The vanilla PPL is all about simple aeroplanes and instruments, yet virtually all PPLs then buy themselves some form of complex GPS device and try - without any appropriate training - to integrate that into their flying. The Cirrus is that problem on steroids and a standard PPL either needs to ignore a lot of the kit and just fly it like a PA28, or get a lot of additional training, to be as safe as they want to be. Part of that training is almost certainly not using the CAPS as an excuse for going into conditions that pilots wouldn't go without it.


Many thanks to jonzarno for making this post possible.

G