Cirrus Death Trap?

Jay,

They sure make that sound terrible, don't they?


Actually, with regard to the Cirrusses, we pilots do more than enough
to give it a bad image. Think of all the times something like your
subject line has been a "legitimate" posting in this very group.

--
Thomas Borchert (EDDH)

Garry, the real question is what actually happened?
Was that an intentional turn or a control failure with the pilots
desperately trying to regain control? Cirrus has a flawed record when
it comes to the control systems...
Was the turn back deliberate and due to engine failure? There are
ground witnesses unreliable, but a datum point who said the engine
was loud i.e. running, even if running rough

Yes, he was a low time pilot, but he had reached the point to start his
instrument training so he wasn't completely green, he had flown the
airplane cross country (coast to coast as I read it) at some point...
USAF pilots are turned loose in supersonic fighters with less time than
he had...

The bad part of such a devastating crash is the airplane being totally
mangled to the point that we will never be able to answer the basic
questions - i.e. control failure, fuel contamination, etc...

OTOH, it has been 51 years since the previous accidental impact of an
airplane against a tall building in NYC... By the time the next one
comes around, you and I won't care...

denny

Dylan,

Compared to other aircraft types, the SR-20 seems to be having a rather
high fatal accident rate.


Care to back that statement up with numbers? For example, compare the
rate to new 182s, like Richard Collins did. You'll be surprised.

--
Thomas Borchert (EDDH)

"Denny" wrote in message
oups.com...
Garry, the real question is what actually happened?
Was that an intentional turn or a control failure with the pilots
desperately trying to regain control? Cirrus has a flawed record when
it comes to the control systems...
Was the turn back deliberate and due to engine failure? There are
ground witnesses unreliable, but a datum point who said the engine
was loud i.e. running, even if running rough

I agree. We have some plausible speculations, but we don't yet know how the
collision came about.

--Gary

Denny,

Cirrus has a flawed record when
it comes to the control systems...


How so?

--
Thomas Borchert (EDDH)

Joe Feise wrote:
Mxsmanic wrote on 10/12/06 21:27:

Jay Honeck writes:

Heck, that means that in, um, er, something like 151.5 years there will
be NO Cirrus SR-20s left flying at all!
The aircraft seem like the type that might appeal to low-time pilots
who think that special gadgets will keep them safe and/or free of
accidents (or surviving accidents). Naturally this would result in
higher accident numbers, even if the aircraft is not fundamentally
unsafe.

Also, it seems like the aircraft is actively marketed to precisely
this type of buyer, which makes things even worse. It looks like Carl
Lidle fell for it (in more ways than one).



Bull. He did the right thing, realizing that he was a low-time pilot, and had a
flight instructor with him.


But did the flight instructor believe he was at any risk? Here's a blurb
I took from one of the many stories:
http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/10/12/plane.crash/index.html

"""
In a 2004 article in the San Gabriel Valley (California) Tribune,
Stanger said that flying is very safe.

"The most dangerous part about flying is the drive to the airport," he
said. "It's a wing. It's very safe. It's the wing that flies, it's not
the engine."

"""

Seems like the instructor believed that the drive to the airport was
more dangerous. Isn't that only true for commercial flight?

--
Mike

Dylan Smith wrote:
On 2006-10-13, Mxsmanic wrote:
Also, it seems like the aircraft is actively marketed to precisely
this type of buyer, which makes things even worse. It looks like Carl
Lidle fell for it (in more ways than one).

The type of aircraft he was in was utterly irrelevant. Smashing into a
building in a Cessna 150 is just as fatal as hitting a building in a
Cirrus, or a Learjet, or an ultralight.


How do you know the aircraft is irrelevant? Please post your source.

--
Mike

"Gary Drescher" wrote:

I agree. We have some plausible speculations, but we don't yet know how the
collision came about.

It is a reasonable (and most likely correct) guess that they just
screwed up. It was time to turn around in a narrow VFR airspace and
they screwed up. Lidle should have known about the narrow VFR
corridor.

As with other Cirrus accidents, this is almost surely another case of
an inexperienced pilot killing himself...not the plane causing a
problem.

Ron Lee

"Jay Honeck" wrote:

They sure make that sound terrible, don't they? Why, in just five
years, 3.3% of the SR-20 fleet has been lost to accidents, resulting in
14 deaths!

If automobiles suffered a similar rate over a similar period in the U. S., it
would produce nearly 2 million deaths.

(Based on production of about 12M/year
http://www.automotive.com/features/9...435/index.html ).


--
Dan
C-172RG at BFM

On 2006-10-13, Mike wrote:
The type of aircraft he was in was utterly irrelevant. Smashing into a
building in a Cessna 150 is just as fatal as hitting a building in a
Cirrus, or a Learjet, or an ultralight.


How do you know the aircraft is irrelevant? Please post your source.

F=ma (force = mass x acceleration). Or in this case, deceleration.

A 100kg human in an ultralight travelling at 25 metres/sec hitting a
building and decelerating to zero in 0.5 sec (entirely plausable) will
experience a force of 100 * 50 newtons (5,000 newtons) in the initial
impact. Not to mention the bits of the building which are likely to
shatter and pierce the body. But a force of 5,000 newtons against a
human body is usually enough to kill. So it's pretty irrelevant whether
a plane is a slow one or a fast one like a Cirrus - slamming (to use
Lune's favorite word) into the side of a building is usually not going
to be survivable.

--
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