I'm trying to get my head around 126 "saves" requiring the chute, spread out over 20+ years and 9,000 aircraft. Is that a lot, or about what you'd expect? I guess you'd have to know the flying hours and number of takeoffs to compare with other light aircraft. Does having the chute encourage risk-taking or inattention to detail? (I've asked the same question about the avalanche airbag vests used by some backcountry skiers.) And, as others note, Cirrus and regulators should certainly look at these engine failures to see if there's a recurring issue.
I have the same mathematical question — should we think of 126 as "a lot" or "a little." I don't know how to answer it directly, so here are some data points:
- In the first couple years of Cirrus's operations, its accident and fatality rates were *higher* than for the general-aviation public. In retrospect that seems to be mainly because it attracted a lot of "new" pilots. It was more expensive than beat-up old 172s or Mooneys; it was designed to be cool; it attracted a lot of recently wealthy business people and others. Cirrus wasn't on the market when John Kennedy Jr was learning to fly. If it had been, he would have gotten one — and probably would have met the same fate.
As I mentioned, I have one of the very first Cirruses on the market. And back then there was a lot of eye-rolling from grizzled fly-in habitues about these fancy new wannabes getting into flying.
-Over the past few years, *mainly* because of CAPS emphasis, the Cirrus safety record is *better* than general aviation overall. (And, believe it or not, the overall safety record of general aviation continues to improve.) Also the situational-awareness and other features of the plane have gotten better and better. Whenever I've seen airline pilots look inside a Cirrus for the first them, they've always remarked on how much more sophisticated and informative the instruments and displays are. (On the other hand, the training of the ATP pilots is on an entirely different level.)
- On risk taking, or what they used to call "risk hysteresis," I think: with the debut of the parachute, this was the conventional wisdom from the grizzled-vet crowd. The safer you make the plane, the more dangerous pilots will become. Within the COPA (Cirrus pilot) community, there was a huge amount of emphasis on: If you wouldn't make a flight *without* a parachute, you damned well shouldn't make it just because you have a parachute.
But over the years I think the evidence has worked against that. One reason is illustrated by these three cases. The engines (apparently) failed. There's no reason (yet) to think the pilots did anything to make that happen. So they were more likely to have died if they didn't have a parachute. Everyone in Cirrus-land knows of very skillful and cautious pilots who encountered some kind of bad luck, and were saved by a parachute. The other reason/evidence, as mentioned below, is that the overall Cirrus fatality rate is better than general aviation as a whole.
The other option is a second engine. The SR22's main competitor these days are the Diamond twins -- the DA-42 and DA-62, which have safety records that exceed even Cirrus's. Their advantage is that if you lose one engine, you've still got a spare (unless the outage is due to a total electrical failure, or bad gas -- there's a very short list of issues that will take both engines at once).
I fly a DA-62 because it has 40% more payload than a Cirrus; and also because during an engine-out, I'd rather have a second engine I can fly another 300 miles on under my own control than be swinging under a parachute, at the mercy of the winds and the terrain. But if I were flying single-engine, I'd want the chute.
The company that makes the CAPS system makes aftermarket versions for several other popular single-engine GA planes, including (IIRC) most of the Cessna and Beech models. They're not cheap, but even at that, I don't know why they're not more popular. Insurance companies should be out front in encouraging their adoption.
Sara, very nice to see you here — and very interesting that you are in the twin world now. I've never actually flown a twin, in "sitting in the left seat" terms, though I have flown *in* them. You're right that it's another option, despite the well-known complications of having one engine fail on takeoff or the very first moments of the flight.
That flipping tendency was a huge issue in the old Barons and Aztecs, and it killed a lot of people. Diamond re-engineered the twin on almost every axis, and reducing this risk was one of their major goals. It has extra-long wings (my wingspan is about the same as a Citation jet) that add stability; a FADEC that uses a computer to integrate and simplify the operation of both engines (and makes recovery far more straightforward), and engines that are set very close-in to the fuselage, which reduces the moment around the longitudinal axis (and thus the flipping tendency) when flying on one engine.
I have lost engine power on one side on takeoff twice. Both times were due to a faulty prop governor (a known flaw with my model year). Fortunately, I was able to level out smoothly and return to the field in both cases. Since I've had both governors replaced, I hope not to see this issue again. But at least I know I'm capable of handling and surviving it with aplomb: it's now on the oh-damn-this-again list, instead of out in oh-f@#!-we're-gonna-die-now territory.
I have had a bunch of this-requires-full-attention episodes. But the only one that happened on takeoff was more than 25 years ago, at BFI in Seattle, when I was doing IFR training in a C172 and we had a bird-strike (seagull) *on takeoff,* and had to get the plane back around the pattern with the window largely clouded with gore. It was bad for the bird, but it was also bad for the two of us (CFII and me) in the plane. He made/let me handle it all the way from bird-strike back to the ground.
I'm smiling (and shouldn't be), because that's such a classic Seattle thing to have happen. I did my first 120 hours or so right next door at KRNT, where the north end of the runway runs straight into Lake Washington. There are a couple families of ospreys that live on the jetty rocks at that end, and they love to play chicken (or, uh, seahawk) with planes that are landing out of the north on short final.
Eighty-plus percent of the time, they'll drop down and fly under you at the last minute. So the trick is to stay high and on track, and let them do their thing. The other 20%, you're at real risk of getting bird guts on the windshield, and some extra feathering in the prop.
Congrats on getting that one right. Wildlife incursions are one of the more common ways people get into real trouble during takeoffs and landings around here, since we have so much of it. "This-requires-full-attention" episodes are always at least a little scary -- but dealing well with them reminds pilots that we're alive, and up to the job. And that's why we remember them so clearly, and love to swap these kinds of stories.
There's something going on here engine-wise. Those three failures are two more than I knew of in ten years of flying around the Central Valley from Sac Exec. And the third wasn't an engine failure so much as it was some idiot who put the baffles in backwards on my Grumman Tiger's engine, a fact I discovered taking out of Fresno headed for VNY, but by the time I was at 3,000 feet the cylinder head temps were at the top of the yellow headed for red. I throttled back and saw Porterville airport off to the right. Fortunately my flight instructor had taught me to fly the Tiger with the throttle chopped from the point of entry to downwind, all the way to touchdown, so I was very familiar with turning it into a glider. Set up best descent and arrived over Porterville at 1800', spiraled down to pattern altitude and then put it on the ground. The mechanic just shook his head when he looked in the engine compartment.
But three failures over such a short period, there's something more than an idiot misplacing the baffles.
That is certainly how it looks — something going on.
Love the Porterville story. I had it hammered into to me that I "should" be able to do the same thing, go all the way from downwind to touchdown with no power, and I have had to do that in various flight reviews and training flights. But I have never had to do it "in anger" and will confess that I am much more comfortable knowing that the throttle is there for adjustments, especially on final.
Not just the minimum altitude, but what is the maximum altitude you can deploy the chute? Too low is too late, and too high would mean you may drift further. Correct? (Not a pilot) What does the manual say?
As far as I'm aware, there's no stated maximum altitude. I suppose if the plane was up in really thin air you could worry about the parachute fully deploying. But SR20s and SR22s are not pressurized, so they can't go really high. And if the air is thick enough to provide lift for the wings, presumably it could fill the parachute.
The main circumstance I can imagine in which you'd do a really high-altitude pull (like, above 5000 feet AGL) would be if *the pilot passed out* or died, and a non-pilot passenger was worried that the plane would dive or get out of control. Then the passenger could cut losses by deploying the parachute (and cutting power to the engine, which is easy to do with one lever and is spelled out in placards.)
But in most cases I think the idea would be to wait until, say, 3000 or 4000 feet AGL. That would give you more time to think, and to look around, and to see if by chance the engine would restart, and to talk with ATC about which direction to head, and to point the plane away from mountains or cities or lakes. And then pull it by 2000 feet, and FOR SURE by 1000 feet.
Yes, I'd say it's time for Cirrus to take a magnifying glass to these engine problems. Saving lives is the number one priority, of course, but there is also the matter of the outrageously expensive vehicle that may or may not be reusable.
I once talked with a colleague who was a former military pilot; I said I had heard that a good landing is one you can walk away from. He said, "Yes, and a great landing is one where you can still use the airplane."
I love the "a good landing is..." mantra and will confess to having used it more than once to others in the plane after a landing that was "good" and "great" by those standards, but less than ideal.
The motors are a mystery. Sheer coincidence? I guess that's possible. Some pilot-induced issue — mixture (too lean/too rich), something else? I don't know. There was one horrendous Cirrus tragedy years ago, a crash on take off that killed some family members, where the cause was apparently the pilot leaving the "prime" switch on during takeoff and flooding the engine. There are similar cases where pilots have neglected to lean the mixture when taking off from a high-altitude airport, and again the engine flooding.
I just don't know, but it gets your attention.
The Cirrus piston engines are made by Continental, in Mobile AL. Both Cirrus and Continental now have as their corporate parent AVIC, the Chinese state aerospace ministry. (It's a long story, told in China Airborne and my recent 'The Wire' piece.) AVIC has so far been a *good* corporate parent for Cirrus, through 15 years, and I don't know that it's done any damage at Continental. But, yes, the magnifying glass is called for.
Jim While I heartily support your personal evidence of the safety of flying, the sustained affect of Boeing bean counters does give me pause.
Given infeasibility of installing CAPS on all recent Boeing planes (or designing a basket to catch all the parts that fall off, it makes me ponder the various meanings of Boing and Boing Boing. (Some are a bit cruder than others).
Personally, right now I’d prefer to fly Airbus than Boing Boing Boeing. (Of course, in 1954, when British Comets were disintegrating over Rome, there was the sterling alternative of Boeing, with no Airbus.)
The Boeing saga is genuinely tragic (on the national-industrial scale, as well as on the personal scale for many many people). I will confess that I, personally, don't give it a second thought when I'm getting on a 787 or 777 or even, gasp, one of the latest MAX models. I figure that the drive to the airport was statistically far more dangerous. But that we have to make these calculations at all about ** Boeing** is such an unnecessary and, again, infuriating change from a generation ago.
On the British Comet saga: My friend Sam Verhovek wrote a great book about just this subject back in 2010. It is called Jet Age — https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/304495/jet-age-by-sam-howe-verhovek/ He explains why the Comet disasters happened, and how they effectively ended Britain's dreams of being a leading global aerospace power.
Jim I just read some reviews of Verhovek’s JET AGE. What a wonderful journey through the story of Boeing and other air travel nostalgia. I hadn’t realized that Boeing, about a century ago, introduced stewardesses (single, registered nurses). Also, that the FDR administration broke up Boeing into three segments: manufacturing (Boeing), an airline (later became United Airlines), and engines (Pratt & Whitney).
It triggered some of my personal memories from yesteryear:
1) People used to get dressed up to fly on an airplane;
2) There was a single price for a plane ticket—no discounts, no frequent flyer miles;
3) On many flights there was only one type of seat (pricy, but never thought of as ‘economy.’) Since there was no price competition, they sought to provide ‘extras.’ I recall being served duck a la orange (before airline deregulation in 1978);
4) In 1941 we flew from Philadelphia to Wyoming on a DC 3. It was extremely bumpy over the Rockies and we had a number of stops. My brother beat me in throw ups, but I got bonus points for throwing up on the ramp when we stopped In Denver;
5) There was an Icelandic Airways charter flight to Europe for students in the early 1950s. It was a welcome alternative to the expensive regular airline flights. One downside was that if you couldn’t make your ticketed flight, you were out of luck—-lost the entire price;
6) In the late 1950s I was ‘commuting’ between New York and Cairo. The TWA flight was interminable, with various stops, including Rome and Athens. I recall, at the time of two Comet crashes in Rome, speculation that the Rome airport was jinxed. I finally figured out that, instead of continuing on a dirty plane from Rome to Athens to Cairo, I could disembark in Rome, go down town for a fine meal, and then take KLM from Rome to Cairo, arriving before the TWA flight completed its circuitous Athens journey;
7) There were hourly shuttle flights (Eastern Airlines) between New York and Boston. No prior ticket necessary. The promise was that if the plane was full, they would add another plane, if only for a single passenger. I commuted weekly between New York and Boston for six months and never had a shuttle delay;
8) My family and I flew Pan Am when I went to Congo as a diplomat. It wasn’t a notable trip, with various stops. At the time Pan Am had two weekly flights from New York to South Africa. Then this was cut to a single flight. American diplomats were obliged to fly on American airlines whenever possible. (I recall when my ambassador had to fly back to Washington for Congo aid discussions. By State regulations, he flew economy, while the Congolese delegation -with our money- flew first class.)
The State Department wasn’t good in dealing with unusual Foreign Service Officer travel. In October, 1964, related to a horrendous hostage situation when Congolese rebels threatened the lives of over 3,000 hostages, I volunteered, with a White House/State mandate, to return to Congo to operate alone in rebel-infested provinces. I flew out on an Air Force C 130 from Tampa to Trinidad, to Recipe (Brazil), to Ascension Island, and finally Congo.
Because of an impending possible Belgian/American military action to rescue the hostages, I was summarily ordered to return to Washington ASAP. Emergency travel funds were obtained from the Secretary of State’s ‘emergency fund.’ However, because of the travel on US airlines whenever possible stricture (and the weekly Pan Am flight wasn’t for days), I had to fly to Belgium and then await an American flight to Washington.
Before airline deregulation, flying was often a formal and pricy experience. Subsequently there was a plethora of new airlines, cut throat competition, and the demise of such companies as Pan Am and TWA.
In, I believe, 1979, I had a personal experience with a soon-to-disappear Pan Am. I was head of Dun & Bradstreet’s location-related management consulting company. I received a call from a British lady who asked that I come see her boss—the CEO of Pan Am.
I came to his office(in the Pan Am building). He wanted me to do a study on possible locations for Pan Am headquarters (and facilities?). I thought that this was a curious request but, for $45,000, I pursued his search alternatives. The principal focus was New York City, San Francisco, and the Washington area.
Soon after I completed the study, he gave a press conference with my study in hand. Evidently he was making a desperate effort to seek ‘goodies’ from any of these locations as Pan Am was on the way to bankruptcy. It didn’t work. Soon Pan Am disappeared as did their logo on the Pan Am building.
Ah, nostalgia. I still have happy memories of being served duck a la orange on a single class flight many years ago. And of Boeing, when it was the unrivaled best in airplanes.
What Boeing needs to do is have a mass hanging on the tarmac of every one of the @#$##@!! MBAscum. Bill Boeing and the rest of the airplane people who built a great company would never have done the Max, and if they had they would have made damn sure it worked when it left the factory - it would have offended them to have this operational history. But a @#$#@#@!! MBA thinks "fixing it" is just another "revenue stream." The MBAs have managed to completely screw up American aerospace - as well as any other company that's ever hired one of the professional morons.
At the last local library book sale before Covid, I managed to pick up Robert J. Serling's "Legend and Legacy: the story of Boeing and its people.
My dad decided he better learn to fly when a Boeing 40B-4 he was taxying at Oakland airport suddenly felt "very smooth" and he climbed up and looked over the side (very deep cockpit if you didn't have a parachute to sit on) and discovered he was 100 feet up. Fortunately it "flew like a kite" and one of the pilots got in another and flew him down to landing. He also flew in Boeing 80A trimotors from Oakland to Reno. On a hot summer day, they usually went over Donner Pass with a clearance of 15-25 feet!
For reasons of space (there's a limit on email length) I didn't quote at length my friend Rick Beach, of COPA, who is the parachute expert. A message he had sent to me:
"1) Pilots flying a Cirrus have a safety feature, the CAPS parachute system, that has proven to be astoundingly effective in getting people on the ground safely, almost always with minor or no injuries. And no one has died if the deployment happens higher than 1000 feet above the ground and slower than the never-exceed speed of 200 knots (230 mph).
"2) The coincidence of three CAPS saves within a short time period has happened before but we now have 9,000 airplanes produced with this safety feature! It just requires pilots to act to use it. If the plane fails or the pilot makes a mistake, the sentence should not be death!"
In terms of minimum altitude, there are a variety of guidelines:
- When you're taking off, the drill is that until you reach 500 feet above ground level, the option for an engine failure is to land (as best you can) straight ahead. So you climb at "best rate" for those first 500 feet and watch all the engine instruments intently.
- Between 500 and 2000 feet AGL, the engine-failure guidance is "CAPS NOW!" Just pull the parachute handle if anything is going wrong. 500 feet is high enough up for the parachute to deploy. (There have been some real-world successful deployments lower than that.) And until 2000 feet, the risk of wasting time by considering options outweighs any benefits.
- Above 2000 feet AGL, if the engine fails you're supposed to think "CONSIDER CAPS." You have enough time to look around, switch gas tanks, check fuel-flow levels, check the rich/lean fuel mixture, and look for other things that might be causing an engine problem. If the engine has really failed, you trim for "best glide" speed and again consider options until you're back down to 1000 feet AGL, when it's time to pull the parachute.
Part of Cirrus's / COPA's / Rick Beach's effective evangelizing is building in the idea that you have to make these decisions *before* you take off. That is to develop muscle-memory to offset the panic and paralysis of things happening in real time.
I have an opinion (surprise!) on preparing for option 3. Back in the dark ages we were taught to close the throttle on downwind abeam the landing runway threshold at 700' AGL(or edge of the pasture, or whatnot) establish a glide and practice the downwind-base-to-final profile without any power at all, except one engine clearing on base. Most often the technique required using some drag to avoid landing long. We learned to plan the set up slightly high on final, but never high and fast. Landing short was not an option. Landing long was forbidden. A go-around, witnessed by the 'hangar fence viewers' was cause for congratulations rather than criticism.
The little FBO at the field would sponsor "spot landing" contests from time to time, to motivate us to practice this skill on every landing we could, given all other considerations. There were always plenty of participants. Prizes varied, but the most popular was a free hour of duel.
Those same instructors taught us spins too. Mine (whose name was Wilbur [no kidding! but not That Wilbur...] made sure I could do a two-an-a-half turn spin out of a power-on stall, and recover on a per-determined heading, before he let me fly to the practice area by myself to work on my maneuvers.
Lots of things were different then. Even now, with all the sophisticated electronics and other advancements, I think the old "stick & rudder" stuff should be part of every pilot's skill set.
This brings it all back! I also went through this "cut the throttle when abeam the numbers and bring it all the way in" drill back in the day.
For a few weeks of primary training, I was out at my parents' house and got to do this at the former Norton Air Force Base, now KSBD. It was psychologically reassuring to glide it in when you're looking at a former B-52 runway that is 10,000 feet long. Even if you're trying for a spot landing, it's somehow comforting to know you're not *actually* going to run out of pavement. Most of my training was at KGAI, 4000 feet and the goal was to be stopped halfway down the runway.
I never did any spin training until I had gotten my IFR rating, and then I went for several sessions of aerobatic training in a 152 at Boeing Field, in Seattle. I was glad to have done it, so if I encountered a spin it wouldn't be for the first time. But didn't seek aerobatic flight after that.
Main point: I was never a "this comes naturally!" stick-and-rudder whiz, and viewed these drills as things that would be "good for me." And while I've had a zillion things go wrong in flight — electric-system and ALT failures, oil pressure drop, sudden re-route because intended airport is suddenly closed because of a crash, ceilings much lower than forecast, flying into a zone with unforeseen GPS jamming, etc — not yet any for-real experience either with engine-out landings or recovering from spins.
Same range of experience in over 60 years of flying. Three engine failures in the first 15 minutes or so of flight within 2 weeks. Probability of that happening by chance would seem to approach zero. It'd sure get me to up my preflight game! Thanks for the usual well-written piece.
But will the dog (or the 2 year old) agree to get on the plane again?
I'm trying to get my head around 126 "saves" requiring the chute, spread out over 20+ years and 9,000 aircraft. Is that a lot, or about what you'd expect? I guess you'd have to know the flying hours and number of takeoffs to compare with other light aircraft. Does having the chute encourage risk-taking or inattention to detail? (I've asked the same question about the avalanche airbag vests used by some backcountry skiers.) And, as others note, Cirrus and regulators should certainly look at these engine failures to see if there's a recurring issue.
I have the same mathematical question — should we think of 126 as "a lot" or "a little." I don't know how to answer it directly, so here are some data points:
- In the first couple years of Cirrus's operations, its accident and fatality rates were *higher* than for the general-aviation public. In retrospect that seems to be mainly because it attracted a lot of "new" pilots. It was more expensive than beat-up old 172s or Mooneys; it was designed to be cool; it attracted a lot of recently wealthy business people and others. Cirrus wasn't on the market when John Kennedy Jr was learning to fly. If it had been, he would have gotten one — and probably would have met the same fate.
As I mentioned, I have one of the very first Cirruses on the market. And back then there was a lot of eye-rolling from grizzled fly-in habitues about these fancy new wannabes getting into flying.
-Over the past few years, *mainly* because of CAPS emphasis, the Cirrus safety record is *better* than general aviation overall. (And, believe it or not, the overall safety record of general aviation continues to improve.) Also the situational-awareness and other features of the plane have gotten better and better. Whenever I've seen airline pilots look inside a Cirrus for the first them, they've always remarked on how much more sophisticated and informative the instruments and displays are. (On the other hand, the training of the ATP pilots is on an entirely different level.)
- On risk taking, or what they used to call "risk hysteresis," I think: with the debut of the parachute, this was the conventional wisdom from the grizzled-vet crowd. The safer you make the plane, the more dangerous pilots will become. Within the COPA (Cirrus pilot) community, there was a huge amount of emphasis on: If you wouldn't make a flight *without* a parachute, you damned well shouldn't make it just because you have a parachute.
But over the years I think the evidence has worked against that. One reason is illustrated by these three cases. The engines (apparently) failed. There's no reason (yet) to think the pilots did anything to make that happen. So they were more likely to have died if they didn't have a parachute. Everyone in Cirrus-land knows of very skillful and cautious pilots who encountered some kind of bad luck, and were saved by a parachute. The other reason/evidence, as mentioned below, is that the overall Cirrus fatality rate is better than general aviation as a whole.
-Yes, time to look at the engines.
The other option is a second engine. The SR22's main competitor these days are the Diamond twins -- the DA-42 and DA-62, which have safety records that exceed even Cirrus's. Their advantage is that if you lose one engine, you've still got a spare (unless the outage is due to a total electrical failure, or bad gas -- there's a very short list of issues that will take both engines at once).
I fly a DA-62 because it has 40% more payload than a Cirrus; and also because during an engine-out, I'd rather have a second engine I can fly another 300 miles on under my own control than be swinging under a parachute, at the mercy of the winds and the terrain. But if I were flying single-engine, I'd want the chute.
The company that makes the CAPS system makes aftermarket versions for several other popular single-engine GA planes, including (IIRC) most of the Cessna and Beech models. They're not cheap, but even at that, I don't know why they're not more popular. Insurance companies should be out front in encouraging their adoption.
Sara, very nice to see you here — and very interesting that you are in the twin world now. I've never actually flown a twin, in "sitting in the left seat" terms, though I have flown *in* them. You're right that it's another option, despite the well-known complications of having one engine fail on takeoff or the very first moments of the flight.
That flipping tendency was a huge issue in the old Barons and Aztecs, and it killed a lot of people. Diamond re-engineered the twin on almost every axis, and reducing this risk was one of their major goals. It has extra-long wings (my wingspan is about the same as a Citation jet) that add stability; a FADEC that uses a computer to integrate and simplify the operation of both engines (and makes recovery far more straightforward), and engines that are set very close-in to the fuselage, which reduces the moment around the longitudinal axis (and thus the flipping tendency) when flying on one engine.
I have lost engine power on one side on takeoff twice. Both times were due to a faulty prop governor (a known flaw with my model year). Fortunately, I was able to level out smoothly and return to the field in both cases. Since I've had both governors replaced, I hope not to see this issue again. But at least I know I'm capable of handling and surviving it with aplomb: it's now on the oh-damn-this-again list, instead of out in oh-f@#!-we're-gonna-die-now territory.
Well done!
I have had a bunch of this-requires-full-attention episodes. But the only one that happened on takeoff was more than 25 years ago, at BFI in Seattle, when I was doing IFR training in a C172 and we had a bird-strike (seagull) *on takeoff,* and had to get the plane back around the pattern with the window largely clouded with gore. It was bad for the bird, but it was also bad for the two of us (CFII and me) in the plane. He made/let me handle it all the way from bird-strike back to the ground.
I'm smiling (and shouldn't be), because that's such a classic Seattle thing to have happen. I did my first 120 hours or so right next door at KRNT, where the north end of the runway runs straight into Lake Washington. There are a couple families of ospreys that live on the jetty rocks at that end, and they love to play chicken (or, uh, seahawk) with planes that are landing out of the north on short final.
Eighty-plus percent of the time, they'll drop down and fly under you at the last minute. So the trick is to stay high and on track, and let them do their thing. The other 20%, you're at real risk of getting bird guts on the windshield, and some extra feathering in the prop.
Congrats on getting that one right. Wildlife incursions are one of the more common ways people get into real trouble during takeoffs and landings around here, since we have so much of it. "This-requires-full-attention" episodes are always at least a little scary -- but dealing well with them reminds pilots that we're alive, and up to the job. And that's why we remember them so clearly, and love to swap these kinds of stories.
There's something going on here engine-wise. Those three failures are two more than I knew of in ten years of flying around the Central Valley from Sac Exec. And the third wasn't an engine failure so much as it was some idiot who put the baffles in backwards on my Grumman Tiger's engine, a fact I discovered taking out of Fresno headed for VNY, but by the time I was at 3,000 feet the cylinder head temps were at the top of the yellow headed for red. I throttled back and saw Porterville airport off to the right. Fortunately my flight instructor had taught me to fly the Tiger with the throttle chopped from the point of entry to downwind, all the way to touchdown, so I was very familiar with turning it into a glider. Set up best descent and arrived over Porterville at 1800', spiraled down to pattern altitude and then put it on the ground. The mechanic just shook his head when he looked in the engine compartment.
But three failures over such a short period, there's something more than an idiot misplacing the baffles.
Tom You leave me baffled.
I laughed out loud.
That is certainly how it looks — something going on.
Love the Porterville story. I had it hammered into to me that I "should" be able to do the same thing, go all the way from downwind to touchdown with no power, and I have had to do that in various flight reviews and training flights. But I have never had to do it "in anger" and will confess that I am much more comfortable knowing that the throttle is there for adjustments, especially on final.
Yeah, the way he taught it, it was a mark of being able to "fly" to not touch the throttle. Saved my butt that day!
Tom ‘Luke, go with the force.”
Not just the minimum altitude, but what is the maximum altitude you can deploy the chute? Too low is too late, and too high would mean you may drift further. Correct? (Not a pilot) What does the manual say?
As far as I'm aware, there's no stated maximum altitude. I suppose if the plane was up in really thin air you could worry about the parachute fully deploying. But SR20s and SR22s are not pressurized, so they can't go really high. And if the air is thick enough to provide lift for the wings, presumably it could fill the parachute.
The main circumstance I can imagine in which you'd do a really high-altitude pull (like, above 5000 feet AGL) would be if *the pilot passed out* or died, and a non-pilot passenger was worried that the plane would dive or get out of control. Then the passenger could cut losses by deploying the parachute (and cutting power to the engine, which is easy to do with one lever and is spelled out in placards.)
But in most cases I think the idea would be to wait until, say, 3000 or 4000 feet AGL. That would give you more time to think, and to look around, and to see if by chance the engine would restart, and to talk with ATC about which direction to head, and to point the plane away from mountains or cities or lakes. And then pull it by 2000 feet, and FOR SURE by 1000 feet.
Yes, I'd say it's time for Cirrus to take a magnifying glass to these engine problems. Saving lives is the number one priority, of course, but there is also the matter of the outrageously expensive vehicle that may or may not be reusable.
I once talked with a colleague who was a former military pilot; I said I had heard that a good landing is one you can walk away from. He said, "Yes, and a great landing is one where you can still use the airplane."
I love the "a good landing is..." mantra and will confess to having used it more than once to others in the plane after a landing that was "good" and "great" by those standards, but less than ideal.
The motors are a mystery. Sheer coincidence? I guess that's possible. Some pilot-induced issue — mixture (too lean/too rich), something else? I don't know. There was one horrendous Cirrus tragedy years ago, a crash on take off that killed some family members, where the cause was apparently the pilot leaving the "prime" switch on during takeoff and flooding the engine. There are similar cases where pilots have neglected to lean the mixture when taking off from a high-altitude airport, and again the engine flooding.
I just don't know, but it gets your attention.
The Cirrus piston engines are made by Continental, in Mobile AL. Both Cirrus and Continental now have as their corporate parent AVIC, the Chinese state aerospace ministry. (It's a long story, told in China Airborne and my recent 'The Wire' piece.) AVIC has so far been a *good* corporate parent for Cirrus, through 15 years, and I don't know that it's done any damage at Continental. But, yes, the magnifying glass is called for.
Jim While I heartily support your personal evidence of the safety of flying, the sustained affect of Boeing bean counters does give me pause.
Given infeasibility of installing CAPS on all recent Boeing planes (or designing a basket to catch all the parts that fall off, it makes me ponder the various meanings of Boing and Boing Boing. (Some are a bit cruder than others).
Personally, right now I’d prefer to fly Airbus than Boing Boing Boeing. (Of course, in 1954, when British Comets were disintegrating over Rome, there was the sterling alternative of Boeing, with no Airbus.)
The Boeing saga is genuinely tragic (on the national-industrial scale, as well as on the personal scale for many many people). I will confess that I, personally, don't give it a second thought when I'm getting on a 787 or 777 or even, gasp, one of the latest MAX models. I figure that the drive to the airport was statistically far more dangerous. But that we have to make these calculations at all about ** Boeing** is such an unnecessary and, again, infuriating change from a generation ago.
On the British Comet saga: My friend Sam Verhovek wrote a great book about just this subject back in 2010. It is called Jet Age — https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/304495/jet-age-by-sam-howe-verhovek/ He explains why the Comet disasters happened, and how they effectively ended Britain's dreams of being a leading global aerospace power.
Jim I just read some reviews of Verhovek’s JET AGE. What a wonderful journey through the story of Boeing and other air travel nostalgia. I hadn’t realized that Boeing, about a century ago, introduced stewardesses (single, registered nurses). Also, that the FDR administration broke up Boeing into three segments: manufacturing (Boeing), an airline (later became United Airlines), and engines (Pratt & Whitney).
It triggered some of my personal memories from yesteryear:
1) People used to get dressed up to fly on an airplane;
2) There was a single price for a plane ticket—no discounts, no frequent flyer miles;
3) On many flights there was only one type of seat (pricy, but never thought of as ‘economy.’) Since there was no price competition, they sought to provide ‘extras.’ I recall being served duck a la orange (before airline deregulation in 1978);
4) In 1941 we flew from Philadelphia to Wyoming on a DC 3. It was extremely bumpy over the Rockies and we had a number of stops. My brother beat me in throw ups, but I got bonus points for throwing up on the ramp when we stopped In Denver;
5) There was an Icelandic Airways charter flight to Europe for students in the early 1950s. It was a welcome alternative to the expensive regular airline flights. One downside was that if you couldn’t make your ticketed flight, you were out of luck—-lost the entire price;
6) In the late 1950s I was ‘commuting’ between New York and Cairo. The TWA flight was interminable, with various stops, including Rome and Athens. I recall, at the time of two Comet crashes in Rome, speculation that the Rome airport was jinxed. I finally figured out that, instead of continuing on a dirty plane from Rome to Athens to Cairo, I could disembark in Rome, go down town for a fine meal, and then take KLM from Rome to Cairo, arriving before the TWA flight completed its circuitous Athens journey;
7) There were hourly shuttle flights (Eastern Airlines) between New York and Boston. No prior ticket necessary. The promise was that if the plane was full, they would add another plane, if only for a single passenger. I commuted weekly between New York and Boston for six months and never had a shuttle delay;
8) My family and I flew Pan Am when I went to Congo as a diplomat. It wasn’t a notable trip, with various stops. At the time Pan Am had two weekly flights from New York to South Africa. Then this was cut to a single flight. American diplomats were obliged to fly on American airlines whenever possible. (I recall when my ambassador had to fly back to Washington for Congo aid discussions. By State regulations, he flew economy, while the Congolese delegation -with our money- flew first class.)
The State Department wasn’t good in dealing with unusual Foreign Service Officer travel. In October, 1964, related to a horrendous hostage situation when Congolese rebels threatened the lives of over 3,000 hostages, I volunteered, with a White House/State mandate, to return to Congo to operate alone in rebel-infested provinces. I flew out on an Air Force C 130 from Tampa to Trinidad, to Recipe (Brazil), to Ascension Island, and finally Congo.
Because of an impending possible Belgian/American military action to rescue the hostages, I was summarily ordered to return to Washington ASAP. Emergency travel funds were obtained from the Secretary of State’s ‘emergency fund.’ However, because of the travel on US airlines whenever possible stricture (and the weekly Pan Am flight wasn’t for days), I had to fly to Belgium and then await an American flight to Washington.
Before airline deregulation, flying was often a formal and pricy experience. Subsequently there was a plethora of new airlines, cut throat competition, and the demise of such companies as Pan Am and TWA.
In, I believe, 1979, I had a personal experience with a soon-to-disappear Pan Am. I was head of Dun & Bradstreet’s location-related management consulting company. I received a call from a British lady who asked that I come see her boss—the CEO of Pan Am.
I came to his office(in the Pan Am building). He wanted me to do a study on possible locations for Pan Am headquarters (and facilities?). I thought that this was a curious request but, for $45,000, I pursued his search alternatives. The principal focus was New York City, San Francisco, and the Washington area.
Soon after I completed the study, he gave a press conference with my study in hand. Evidently he was making a desperate effort to seek ‘goodies’ from any of these locations as Pan Am was on the way to bankruptcy. It didn’t work. Soon Pan Am disappeared as did their logo on the Pan Am building.
Ah, nostalgia. I still have happy memories of being served duck a la orange on a single class flight many years ago. And of Boeing, when it was the unrivaled best in airplanes.
On my first flight (1964, Frankfurt-Berlin, PanAm), there were complimentary cigarettes for all passengers, even ten year old me.
Jochen And peanuts! No more.
What Boeing needs to do is have a mass hanging on the tarmac of every one of the @#$##@!! MBAscum. Bill Boeing and the rest of the airplane people who built a great company would never have done the Max, and if they had they would have made damn sure it worked when it left the factory - it would have offended them to have this operational history. But a @#$#@#@!! MBA thinks "fixing it" is just another "revenue stream." The MBAs have managed to completely screw up American aerospace - as well as any other company that's ever hired one of the professional morons.
As you are no doubt aware, you've just put in unvarnished form the case that Peter Robison makes in his book 'Flying Blind.' https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/646497/flying-blind-by-peter-robison/
The financialization of everything is the great tragic theme in our times.
'dead on, that last quote.
At the last local library book sale before Covid, I managed to pick up Robert J. Serling's "Legend and Legacy: the story of Boeing and its people.
My dad decided he better learn to fly when a Boeing 40B-4 he was taxying at Oakland airport suddenly felt "very smooth" and he climbed up and looked over the side (very deep cockpit if you didn't have a parachute to sit on) and discovered he was 100 feet up. Fortunately it "flew like a kite" and one of the pilots got in another and flew him down to landing. He also flew in Boeing 80A trimotors from Oakland to Reno. On a hot summer day, they usually went over Donner Pass with a clearance of 15-25 feet!
Wow. What a thing. Three of these within two weeks.
Glad everyone is okay.
And thank goodness for the “outside-the-box” thinking.
Still would like to connect as per note earlier.
Peace!
Carey Sipp
csipppaces@icloud.com
Thanks, sorry to have been out of touch, lots of assorted pots-aboil here. Will indeed follow up.
Would still love to connect.
csipppaces@icloud.com
Thank you. Would like to connect on topic I discussed with Kay Reed; she said she thought you’d be interested.
It’s timely. Not urgent. But timely and important. You can also reach me via LinkedIn.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/carey-sipp-16ba2711?utm_source=share&utm_campaign=share_via&utm_content=profile&utm_medium=ios_app
Jim: What's the minimum altitude at which the parachute can be deployed and still be effective?
For reasons of space (there's a limit on email length) I didn't quote at length my friend Rick Beach, of COPA, who is the parachute expert. A message he had sent to me:
"1) Pilots flying a Cirrus have a safety feature, the CAPS parachute system, that has proven to be astoundingly effective in getting people on the ground safely, almost always with minor or no injuries. And no one has died if the deployment happens higher than 1000 feet above the ground and slower than the never-exceed speed of 200 knots (230 mph).
"2) The coincidence of three CAPS saves within a short time period has happened before but we now have 9,000 airplanes produced with this safety feature! It just requires pilots to act to use it. If the plane fails or the pilot makes a mistake, the sentence should not be death!"
In terms of minimum altitude, there are a variety of guidelines:
- When you're taking off, the drill is that until you reach 500 feet above ground level, the option for an engine failure is to land (as best you can) straight ahead. So you climb at "best rate" for those first 500 feet and watch all the engine instruments intently.
- Between 500 and 2000 feet AGL, the engine-failure guidance is "CAPS NOW!" Just pull the parachute handle if anything is going wrong. 500 feet is high enough up for the parachute to deploy. (There have been some real-world successful deployments lower than that.) And until 2000 feet, the risk of wasting time by considering options outweighs any benefits.
- Above 2000 feet AGL, if the engine fails you're supposed to think "CONSIDER CAPS." You have enough time to look around, switch gas tanks, check fuel-flow levels, check the rich/lean fuel mixture, and look for other things that might be causing an engine problem. If the engine has really failed, you trim for "best glide" speed and again consider options until you're back down to 1000 feet AGL, when it's time to pull the parachute.
Part of Cirrus's / COPA's / Rick Beach's effective evangelizing is building in the idea that you have to make these decisions *before* you take off. That is to develop muscle-memory to offset the panic and paralysis of things happening in real time.
So, again:
0 - 500 ft AGL: Straight ahead
500 - 2000 ft AGL: CAPS NOW!!
2000ft+ Consider your options and consider CAPS.
I have an opinion (surprise!) on preparing for option 3. Back in the dark ages we were taught to close the throttle on downwind abeam the landing runway threshold at 700' AGL(or edge of the pasture, or whatnot) establish a glide and practice the downwind-base-to-final profile without any power at all, except one engine clearing on base. Most often the technique required using some drag to avoid landing long. We learned to plan the set up slightly high on final, but never high and fast. Landing short was not an option. Landing long was forbidden. A go-around, witnessed by the 'hangar fence viewers' was cause for congratulations rather than criticism.
The little FBO at the field would sponsor "spot landing" contests from time to time, to motivate us to practice this skill on every landing we could, given all other considerations. There were always plenty of participants. Prizes varied, but the most popular was a free hour of duel.
Those same instructors taught us spins too. Mine (whose name was Wilbur [no kidding! but not That Wilbur...] made sure I could do a two-an-a-half turn spin out of a power-on stall, and recover on a per-determined heading, before he let me fly to the practice area by myself to work on my maneuvers.
Lots of things were different then. Even now, with all the sophisticated electronics and other advancements, I think the old "stick & rudder" stuff should be part of every pilot's skill set.
And CAPS as a last resort....Brilliant!
This brings it all back! I also went through this "cut the throttle when abeam the numbers and bring it all the way in" drill back in the day.
For a few weeks of primary training, I was out at my parents' house and got to do this at the former Norton Air Force Base, now KSBD. It was psychologically reassuring to glide it in when you're looking at a former B-52 runway that is 10,000 feet long. Even if you're trying for a spot landing, it's somehow comforting to know you're not *actually* going to run out of pavement. Most of my training was at KGAI, 4000 feet and the goal was to be stopped halfway down the runway.
I never did any spin training until I had gotten my IFR rating, and then I went for several sessions of aerobatic training in a 152 at Boeing Field, in Seattle. I was glad to have done it, so if I encountered a spin it wouldn't be for the first time. But didn't seek aerobatic flight after that.
Main point: I was never a "this comes naturally!" stick-and-rudder whiz, and viewed these drills as things that would be "good for me." And while I've had a zillion things go wrong in flight — electric-system and ALT failures, oil pressure drop, sudden re-route because intended airport is suddenly closed because of a crash, ceilings much lower than forecast, flying into a zone with unforeseen GPS jamming, etc — not yet any for-real experience either with engine-out landings or recovering from spins.
Same range of experience in over 60 years of flying. Three engine failures in the first 15 minutes or so of flight within 2 weeks. Probability of that happening by chance would seem to approach zero. It'd sure get me to up my preflight game! Thanks for the usual well-written piece.