Cirrus parachutes into the Solent
 

Cirrus chute deployed Solent
 

https://www.islandecho.co.uk/plane-c...nt-near-cowes/

Nice to see both passengers were able to extricate themselves after splashdown.

Another one from Twitter :-

*GPS goes offline*
 

F**k me!!! Pull the ‘chute..

Lee-on-Solent based SR22 G-CTAM. Good to see everyone is OK.

They need to fit water pockets (or a disconnect) to that parachute. I'll bet that aircraft was dragged at some speed (leaving its occupants behind in the water), luckily they were in the solent so every wind direction was 'on-shore'. I had something similar happen during a RIB airdrop test when one of the parachutes didn't disconnect, capsizing the RIB and towing it towards America (from the Welsh coast) faster than the range tender could sail.

You have to wonder why, once the parachute had dragged the aircraft to the beach, nobody seems to have had the presence of mind to deflate it. Which then brings one to a second question: can Cirrus parachutes be recycled?

they rapidly become the property of the insurer. Iirc there were some problems with ‘rebuilt’ CAPS systems a few years back....https://www.avweb.com/ownership/cirr...-depreciation/
deployment renders a fair amount of damage to the monocoque as the straps are buried beneath the exterior painted layers..
in addition, the airframe is designed to impact the ground with the gear designed to absorb most of the impact and the seats have a collapsible honeycomb base to save your spine.
Hitting water will likely fuse much more damage to the belly and wings.
looking at the video; inverted with a G1000 full of seawater... someone’s’ premiums are going up!

The Police were clearly keeping people away. I can see your logic though.

You have to wonder when the plane inverted. Hopefully after the occupants got out.

What do you think?

Fortunately everyone was ok.

One has to wonder why these Cirrus’ are crashing, it’s such a new design but many are coming to grief?

There is also, of course, the added consideration of the aircraft landing on persons under parachute (fortunately it didn’t).

Interesting decision whether to pull the chute or attempt a landing on the water or beach.

Many have been no oil...no fuel...icing..the sort of thing that would be far worse without a chute and has been responsible for a fair few of them. Insurance jobs. Coupled with the fact they are the biggest seller so there is a lot of them. As an owner can attest they are almost idiot proof which of course can lead to complacency. Great machine to go places but still need to fuel plan, do your checks, avoid icing etc. With full tanks it has over 5 hrs of flying..well beyond most people's limits.

There is video of a Cirrus parachuting into the Pacific.


Touchdown at 1m 51s (44:00 on clock?)
In a few seconds the water on the RHS door was up to the windows due to the parachute dragging the aircraft.
The sole occupant exited the LHS and the aircraft was inverted and the cabin full of water at 2m 26s (45:06 on clock?).

It appears that therefore it was 65s to invert the aircraft and fill the cabin with water. I suspect that it would have been MUCH sooner if the leeward door had been opened instead of the windward door. I would presume that there was no way that the pilot could control the way the aircraft was pointing at touchdown.

Maybe Cirrus could improve the water landing performance in a bit of breeze? I can't really see how 4 people could have escaped.

Why not a bit of both?

Wind at the time was approximately 140/14 so an onshore breeze. Would the aircraft not have made more track distance toward the beach gliding and then deploying than deploying immediately, out over the water, and drifting landward at 14 knots? Maybe that's what they did, time will tell.

The cirrus training says always pull the chute unless directly over a field. That was drummed in. Their reasoning is that apparently survival rate so far is 100 percent under a cirrus chute. Not the case with their forced landings. I know i would pull the chute rather than ditch or land on a less than ideal beach such as that situation.

https://abcnews.go.com/US/florida-fa...ry?id=24734696

Sadly this is not an isolated incident. By contrast nobody on the ground has ever been injured by a Cirrus coming down under CAPS.

I am a Cirrus driver.

Cirrus engineers said, from 500 to 2000 feet AGL use the CAPS, above 2000 feet AGL that could became an option.

It needs a 'chute release, for activating after touchdown.
Was a big worry for Apollo missions.
I believe F111 had release too.

lsh
:E

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