Iced up Cirrus crashes

I have a friend with perhaps 300hrs TT and an instrument rating who is
buying a new SR20. The insurance company wants 25hrs make and model before
solo and another 25hrs before carrying passengers.

Mike
MU-2


"houstondan" wrote in message
oups.com...
insurance? of course. seems that the insurance companies would be
pretty good judges of the aircraft. what do they have to say? any
special stuff beyond what they demand on similar aircraft and yes, i
just realized that "similar" might be sticky.

dan

"City Dweller" wrote in message
...
I have been following the Cirrus crash statistics closely as I was at one
point considering buying one. I ended up ordering another airplane, and I
am sure glad I did.

The sheer number of destroyed airplanes and dead bodies have gone way
beyond the point where you can use the "too-much-of-an airplane-for-the
typical-buyer" argument. When last December I heard a pilot at our flight
school say "they just keep falling out of the skies" I thought of it as
somewhat of an exaggeration, but not anymore. We are barely half-way
through February, and there's been three fatal crashes taking 5 lives
already this year, and 13 total. Yes sir, they do fall out of the skies
with a vengeance.

I am a software engineer, and I deal with crashes every day -- software
crashes. Almost every recently released product crashes when put in
production, no matter how hard the programmers and testers pounded on it
during development and QA phases. Software usually crashes because of
bugs. A bug is by definition an error in the code which only surfaces in
rare, unusual circumstances. You can run the software package for days,
months and even years and never encounter the bug, because you were lucky
never to recreate that rare sequence of events in data flow and code
execution that causes the bug to manifest itself and crash the system.
However, in a real-world production environment, with thousands of users,
the probability of that happening increases greatly, and that's when the
fun begins.

The reliability of software depends, among other things, on how serious
the programmer is about testing it, and whether he is willing to admit
that an occasional crash of his system maybe the result of a bug in the
software, not a "hardware problem", a common brush-off among my
colleagues.

It seems to me that the general attitude of the Cirrus people is just
that -- "it's not a bug in our system, it's how you use it". Well, the
grim statistics does not back that up anymore. Cirrus is buggy, and them
bugs must be fixed before more people die.

-- City Dweller
Post-solo Student Pilot
(soon-to-be airplane owner, NOT Cirrus)


If the accidents were very similiar, I would say that they would support
your hypothesis, but I don't think that there is a common thread that runs
though the accidents. If 16yr old drivers have a high accident rate driving
red Corvettes off cliffs, does that mean that the color red is attracted to
the bottom of cliffs?

Mike
MU-2

Mike Rapoport wrote:

There is nothing wrong with Cirrus' deicing system. A TKS type sytem is
pretty much immune from being overwhelmed by icing because the fluid runs
back and protects the entire wing.

Mike
MU-2


But surely in this case it MUST have been overwhelmed, otherwise why
would he have crashed?

I was thinking of getting the TKS system on my 182 once it is
certificated, but this has pretty much put me off.

John

Mike Rapoport wrote:

There is nothing wrong with Cirrus' deicing system. A TKS type
sytem is
pretty much immune from being overwhelmed by icing because the fluid
runs
back and protects the entire wing.

Mike
MU-2


But surely in this case it MUST have been overwhelmed, otherwise why
would he have crashed?

I was thinking of getting the TKS system on my 182 once it is
certificated, but this has pretty much put me off.

John

"City Dweller" wrote in message
ups.com...
I am getting the Diamond DA40 Star. Slower than the SR22 and even SR20,
but its safety record is impeccable.

Now back to the bug question: I too agree that there is nothing wrong
with the Cirrus design, but that does not mean it can't have bugs.

A few weeks ago I watched a great program on TLC about NTSB's effort to
investigate a series of 737 crashes more than a decade ago. After years
of meticulous and thorough "debugging", the did find a bug in that
aircraft -- a tiny-teeny rudder valve which sometimes jams. You can
read more about it he

http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/trib.../s_247850.html

Unfortunately, you can't expect that level of effort on NTSB's part
when investigating the crashes of small potatoes like the Cirrus, and
that's a shame. Cirrus will have to do it themselves, or risk having
their entire fleet grounded.


-- City Dweller


True, but the 737 accidents were similiar, pointing to a similiar cause.

If an *inexperienced*, *probably fatigued*, pilot takes off into *known
icing*, *over mountains*, *at night* to fly over an *area known for weather
inhospitable to flying*, and crashes...I can think of a lot more likely
explanations than there being some weird flaw in a mechanical system.

Mike
MU-2

"John Harper" wrote


But surely in this case it MUST have been overwhelmed, otherwise why
would he have crashed?

I was thinking of getting the TKS system on my 182 once it is
certificated, but this has pretty much put me off.

John

There could have been a million other things. Could have been severe hail,
spatial disorientation, airframe failure due to turbulence, or 999,997
other things.
--
Jim in NC

I don't follow the workload issue. Yes, the Mooney may require a bit
more skill to land but in cruise I've not noticed it flying much
different than an Arrow (just faster).

I realize that once you reach a certain level of experience it is hard
to tell the difference, but flying in cruise (IMC) is, IMO, more
difficult in the Mooney. It takes more cycles to have a good overall
scan going and hold altitude and heading, especially in turbulence.
Also, going faster means that you have less time to make decisions as
you proceed into bad weather. Those two issues, IMO, would lead to a
higher accident rate in the Mooney, especially for low time pilots.

Michael

I have a friend with perhaps 300hrs TT and an instrument rating who
is
buying a new SR20. The insurance company wants 25hrs make and model
before
solo and another 25hrs before carrying passengers.

That's typical of what is being required these days for Bonanzas and
such. I think the insurance companies have finally figured out that
they're dealing with a fixed gear Bonanza, not a fast C-182.

Michael

T o d d P a t t i s t wrote:

"The extent to which a material emits thermal energy depends both on
the temperature of the material and nature of its surface. Polished
metal surfaces are poor emitters and poor absorbers of thermal
energy."

Maybe not clear from the brief snippet I quoted, but when they talk
about "nature of the material surface" they don't mean color.

They mean color and other surface characteristics - mainly
shiny vs. rough.

I think much of the confusion has to do with an implication by someone
(or inference drawan by readers) earlier in this thread that surface
color was just as important a factor in determining the extent of
radiational cooling at night as it is in determining solar absorption
during the day. Can we all agree that this is incorrect? If so, can you
quantify the extent to which color is important in determining cooling
rates at night? I always thought the importance was zero, or nearly so.

Jim Rosinski

John Harper wrote:

But surely in this case it MUST have been overwhelmed, otherwise why
would he have crashed?

A few reasons come to mind.

Perhaps the fluid ran out on climb out or just after level off. IIRC, the
Cirrus TKS system is equipped with the smallest glycol reservoir available,
somewhere between 45 minutes and one hour of endurance, depending on
whether it is run at DE-ICE or ANTI-ICE mode.

If you look at the TKS web site, you will see that the systems available
for the other STC-ed aircraft have much larger Glycol reservoirs. I do not
know why Cirrus chose the smallest reservoir. Probably it had something to
do with maximizing useable weight while still providing some type of ice
protection.

Furthermore, there is no information available yet as to whether the Glycol
reservoir was even topped off prior to this ill-fated flight. Like fuel, a
pilot with a TKS-equipped aircraft must include in the preflight an
understanding of how much Glycol is in the tank and to what endurance this
equates. If the pilot used some of the fluid coming into that airport and
failed to top it off, the minimal endurance of his Cirrus' TKS system has
been reduced even further.

Another unknown is whether this pilot's preflighted the system. A pilot
launching into potential icing conditions should preflight the system on
the ground by turning it on high to observe the flow rate from all leading
edges.

If the system is not run periodically (monthly or so), it is possible that
the membranes behind the leading edge mesh will dry out, reducing or
eliminating the flow rate. Running a Glycol-soaked rag over the mesh as
the system is running will "re-energize" the membranes, should the pilot
discover this problem.

Was all of this done on that ill-fated flight? We will probably never
know.

I was thinking of getting the TKS system on my 182 once it is
certificated, but this has pretty much put me off.

You should really think again. I have the TKS system on my Bonanza V35.
While it is not certified for known ice, the system does an *incredible*
job in unexpected icing encounters, exactly for the reasons Mike R. pointed
out. As long as the system is maintained and the Glycol reservoir filled,
a pilot of a low-wing, retractable gear aircraft won't even know if the
aircraft is picking up ice when the system is on.

BTW, the TKS reservoir in my aircraft is 7.5 gallons, or around 4 hours
when set to the ANTI-ICE setting.


--
Peter













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