Dan,

The causal connection is that the perceived safety of the 'chute causes
people to attempt flights they otherwise wouldn't. Or, as you wrote, "I
think the TKS/chute combo would allow a lot of flights that would keep me on
the ground otherwise."

It's true that the Cirrus fleet is small, and I'll agree it's too soon to
make sound statistical statements. My opinion is thus just that. I counted
14 accidents in the NTSB database from 1999-2003, with one being a factory
test pilot. It could just be a case of clustering, but it's certainly not
good. Reading the reports, I had a "what the @#$! was he thinking" reaction
to at least half of them.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that "If anything goes wrong
I'll just pull that lever" is what at least some of them were thinking. The
irony here is that a "safer" airplane may in the short run turn out to be
more accident-prone precisely because the perceived safety is higher than
the actual safety.

I certainly hope the accident rates in the Cirrus regress to the mean,
because I want to see innovation and lower costs and higher capabilities and
balh blah blah. Ultimately it all comes down to pilots to take their flying
more seriously. While the airlines have a harder time with each passing year
of finding new ways to break airplanes, we in GA seem quite happy sticking
to old-fashioned but still-effective methods.

Best,
-cwk.

"Dan Thompson" wrote in message
m...
How is it that having a chute could have a causal connection to
accidentally
flying the airplane into a mountain? Or blowing the altitude on an
instrument approach? Or any other CFIT scenario? Also I challenge your
statement that the "CFIT rates are so high" for Cirrus. I have heard that
there are only a 1000 Cirrus's flying so far, so I can't see how there
would
be any reasonable conclusion that could be made yet due to too few data
points.


"Colin Kingsbury" wrote in message