Sadly this is not the case - several aircraft have caught fire under chute resulting in the death of the occupants.

Wrong: there has been no such incident.

There has been one fatal accident in which a non-survivable mid air collision triggered the parachute and caused a fire.

Looking at the number of people on the beach, would imagine that paid a factor. Imagine finding a safe space and dealing with whatever had gone wrong was not a real option

Interesting to review his day out on Flight Radar. Down to Exeter area along the coast with a good tailwind and return into quite a headwind. Flight ended 3 miles from destination, makes one wonder if he had enough fuel and suffered from ‘Get home itis’?

They were probably awaiting an armed response unit to arrive on the scene to chute it....


Hat and coat....

You won't get a riser out of me with that one...

Your response will remain shrouded - but let's not open that can-o-peas.

PDR

And the guy that looks like he pulled the ‘chute too late and landed in Orcutt school playground.

Not that new a design, been built since 2001

Ttfn

Shows how old I am!!

That was a post impact fire resulting, as you say, from an attempted deployment well below the minimum deployment height during a base to final stall / spin. The assertion to which I was replying was that there had been cases in which aircraft had been on fire under the chute.

do you think it’s better to get a plane falling on you without a chute?

Yes. In the early days of the CAPS system, Cirrus found people were dying when they could have been saved by the chute. They found pilots were reluctant to use the system. New procedures and training, including the "CAPS available" callout seems to have largely fixed that.

Of course plenty of aircraft must have been destroyed when they would have managed a power off landing, but you don't know in advance which is which. Lives have been saved at the cost of some additional aircraft destroyed.

Regrettably, there is much less data on the number of successful forced landings than the number of unsuccessful ones, which tends to skew opinion somewhat. When I've flown a Cirrus, I have absolutely maintained that I might use the CAPS in some situations, but my default option would be a proper forced landing with the hope of using the aircraft again, and I have never flown in situations where I have relied on planning to use CAPS (eg IMC down to the ground). That said, one has to be (a) good enough and (b) in currency at such things to take that route. A gliding background and history of successful field landings certainly informs my perspective.

Talking of Cirrus, someone just bought a new one.


The paint scheme is pretty awful. I wonder if it has a purple CAPS canopy as well. One way to find out!

Yes, except I didn't write "ditch or land on a less than ideal beach". I said (paraphrase) glide toward the beach first and thereby have a better chance of landing on terra firma than just pull without thinking and ride down as a passenger with absolutely no control, possibly to the detriment of oneself or more importantly the people below. The photo of the aircraft inverted should make the risk to occupants obvious, people rarely drown on dry land.

BRS systems are a great tool but in too many cases people think they abrogate all responsibility. The pilot chooses to take the risk, the innocents below do not.

Pray tell, why is a BRS equipped aircraft any different with respect to “the innocents below” when faced with non-BRS structural failure, or as we’ve seen recently, someone not putting the gear down then doing a go-around over a city suburb?

In life, we take risks every time we walk out the door. Unfortunately, that’s the way it is.

The attitude of aircrew was the same when ejection seats were first introduced in that they’d stay with the aircraft through ‘machismo’ (I can recover this) rather than the easier “Martin Baker let-down.”

I suspect that BRS doesn't have any inbuilt capability to avoid schools and hospitals. :O

We had one come down behind our house a few years back - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-englan...shire-25344780

Another UK-based N-reg. Lots about