"fuji" wrote in message
...



But wouldn't fairly regular instrument failures and a reliability record
rivaling a Yugo be considered a fault with the aircraft? How about the
fact
that it is difficult to trim?
snip
Cirrus salesmen, on the other hand, advertise their craft as safe and
easy
to fly.

I think it is a fault with the aircraft if it is beyond the capabilities of
pilots flying it, which may well be the case. However, I have seen nothing
that proves to me that the pilots are poorly trained or incapable. I, like
many others, have a suspicion that this may be the case, but no proof. In
fact, some of the pilots involved seem to me to be people who fly a lot.

The Cirrus has poor stall/spin recovery capabilities. It is difficult to get
the Cirrus to enter a stall, but not impossible, as some of these accidents
have demonstrated. Given that the parachute will not deploy if the airplane
is too close to the ground, the airplane itself is a slippery design that
can easily get away from the pilot, the flaps are too small, and the
airplane cannot recover from even an incipient spin, I would say that low
level flight in the Cirrus must be far more dangerous than it is in most
other aircraft. The Cirrus has a death zone in its normal operating
envelope. This aircraft cannot be safely operated below 900' AGL. What would
the Florida pilot, for example, have done if he had lost his instruments
and/or become spatially disoriented (whichever happened) at 600' AGL instead
of 1000' AGL? He would have died, that's what.

Furthermore, the odd trim button, unfamiliarity with the instruments which
also keep the pilots' eyes more focused in the cockpit than they probably
should be, high speed and slippery design contribute to create more
opportunities for CFIT accidents.

Add to these the demonstrably poor quality control at the factory and the
fact that few maintenance people have any experience whatsoever working on
these airplanes. You are going to get a lot of maintenance problems. A pilot
who is distracted by something going wrong -- perhaps it is only minor, but
a distraction nonetheless, in the soup or at night, over mountainous
terrain, or maybe coming in for a landing where the field is at IMC
minimums, etc., and he may be somewhat behind the airplane anyway after a
long and tiring flight (anyone disagree here that you easily get behind the
airplane in a Cirrus?), and you start to get a serious chain of events that
can lead to a fatal accident. He is too low to deploy the chute safely,
trying to slow the airplane down to get back control, maybe climb steeply to
avoid a sudden obstacle, and now you have four dead people.

Cirrus is not that big of a company. In a litigation environment where
Cessna can pay an award of $480 million for a bogus claim about the seat
tracks failing, I think Cirrus stock would be a high risk investment, to say
the least. Perhaps someone else will pick up the type certificate and
continue manufacturing, but the history is not that good.

You are an FAA guy, seeing these accidents. Comes now Cirrus with its
petition to increase the airframe life limit of the SR22 beyond the
ridiculous 4030 hours it now has. All your life you have been told to err on
the conservative side. Meanwhile you have people in your own organization
suggesting that you ground the entire fleet until Cirrus figures out what is
going wrong. What is your decision likely to be?

Personally, I enjoyed the one Cirrus flight I took. Realistically, though, I
think the Klapmeiers may be the worst thing to happen to general aviation
since Jim Bede. They took new and promising technology and made it
disreputable, probably setting general aviation back more than 20 years. I
think that is unforgivable.