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11 lessons from a fatal Cirrus crash

Rick Beach has written an extensive and must read article for the Cirrus Owners & Pilots Association (COPA) website listing eleven lessons from a Cirrus crash last May 25, 2010, that led to two fatalities (The crash was also covered extensively in two COPA forum threads: Cirrus Fatal #61 in SR20 C-GYPJ near Buttonville Airport, Toronto, Canada and Transport Canada report on Buttonville SR20 accident). To quickly summarize the incident: The SR20 had departed the Buttonville Aiport in Canada after avionics maintenance with two pilots aboard. However, a cylinder fractured causing a loss of engine power and the pilots attempted to return to the airport. Instead, they lost control, attempted to perform a recovery and ended up impacting the roof of a commercial building.

Rick wrote extensively about eleven lessons that can be learned from the crash but here is a quick summary of his key points:

Lesson #1: Diligently maintain your aircraft but remember that there are some failures that are extremely rare events. Nevertheless, you should still plan for them.
Lesson #2: Mechanical things will fail and you must both plan for this as well as practice your emergency procedures.
Lesson #3: Two (or more) pilots in an aircraft may create both confusion and different responses. Hence, be sure to do a briefing on the ground to determine who is the PIC, who will make the key decisions in the event of an emergency and how the other pilot(s) will contribute in such a situation.
Lesson #4: If your aircraft does not have any power, you must act immediately.
Lesson #5: Practice the emergency procedures. In particular, prepare for a situation where there is partial engine power loss and be ready to correct such a situation within seconds.
Lesson #6: When preparing to land at an unfamiliar airport, be sure to look at the terrain and land use off the ends of the runways as you come in so that you can see what will be underneath you when you depart.
Lesson #7: Be sure to prepare a departure briefing for each and every airport and departure. In addition, note the CAPS altitude of 500 feet AGL.
Lesson #8: Think about your decision criteria for using CAPS in an emergency during both takeoffs and departures. Remember, no one has died when CAPS was activated below 133 knots and above 1000′ AGL.
Lesson #9: Pull early – especially if you have altitude and are faced with a risky off-airport landing. You need just 8 seconds and a few hundred feet of altitude above ground.
Lesson #10: Remember, CAPS can be used to reduce your impact energy.
Lesson #11: Do everything you possibly can to avoid stalling your aircraft and then losing control.

Rick’s entire article is a must read – especially if you fly a Cirrus aircraft.

Why aerobatics in a GA aircraft is a bad idea

In case the thought of performing an aerobatic maneuver with your aircraft has ever crossed your mind, a recent post by Ron for his House of Rapp blog will have you thinking otherwise. Besides the the fact that there are regulations against such activities, Ron noted the practical considerations and assumed that a pilot would be flying a Cirrus SR-22.

For starters, he pointed out that non-acro planes like the Cirrus SR-22 will tend to have non-symmetrical airfoils that are not designed to fly aerobatics. They will also tend to have slower roll rates as well as lower structural integrity under high G loads and less control authority. However, Ron also noted three well known aerobatic pilots who perform or performed aerobatics in non-acro planes but he also quickly added that:

Sean Tucker will tell you that the Columbia may not recover from spins of more than one or 2 turns. Duane Cole said the Bonanza (in which he did inverted ribbon cuts) had barely enough elevator authority for the maneuver, and it required incredible strength to hold the nose up far enough for inverted level flight. Bob Hoover tailored his performance to maneuvers the Shrike could do — he’ll tell you he avoided many aerobatic maneuvers because of the airplane’s limitations.

Ron then noted that negative Gs will send stuff flying about the cabin – including the pilot if he or she is not tightly secured by the seatbelt. Moreover, the engine of a general aviation aircraft is not set up for fuel and oil flow under negative Gs which could also move the entire engine/prop on the engine mount.

Ron ended his post by noting that:

I could go on, but suffice it to say that the more I learn about aerobatics, the less I would want to do them in a non-aerobatic aircraft. Sure, if performed perfectly, you might be just fine. But any unusual attitude is going to be far more difficult — if not outright impossible — to recover from.

In other words, leave the aerobatic stunts to professional aerobatic pilots flying the right type of aircraft.

Cirrus Airframe Parachute System (CAPS) usage

Rick Beach has recently written two interesting posts about about Cirrus Airframe Parachute System (CAPS) pulls and fatal accidents that are well worth reading by any pilot who flies a Cirrus aircraft that is equipped with this last-resort and lifesaving parachute device. In the first post, Rick included the following chart showing CAPS saves along with fatal accidents in both summer and winter:

Rick then made the following two important points: 1) There have been too many fatal accidents and 2) The pattern of CAPS pulls has increased over time. Rick had also made the hypothesis that there would be more fatal Cirrus accidents in the dark months of winter but statistics for the summer of 2010 showed that this trend has reversed since the fall of 2009. Hence, he suspects that this might be due to the economic slowdown easing – meaning that more people are now flying during warmer and sunnier months. He also noted that as of January 2011, no one in a Cirrus aircraft has died when a CAPS system was properly activated according to its design criteria.

For the second post, Rick talked to James Turpen who reflected on his parachute pull (which is also further detailed in another blog post: Tales of CAPS Pulls — The Decision). Rick wrote that James:

…recalls thinking about the 15-turn spin in the Meadview, AZ, crash that took the lives of a family of four. He determined that if in a bad situation, then he was never going to crash without attempting to use CAPS. His instructor gave him the opportunity to practice that determination.

After his CAPS pull, James says he now flies with more attention paid to when he would pull the CAPS handle again.
He encourages any Cirrus pilot to not hesitate to pull. It’s not a bad outcome.

James’s advice is definitely worth listening to if you fly a CAPS equipped Cirrus.

Flying the Avidyne R9

I just did my conversion to the new Avidyne R9 avionics on the Cirrus I fly regularly at Denham (EGLD). I trained with the excellent John Page from TAA.

John Page at RGV, Gloucershire

The system is a big improvement on the regular Avidyne system that I normally use; like going from Windows XP to Windows 7. It’s not quite as good as the Garmin Perspective system that I flew in January with Max Trescott in San Francisco. I suspect that the Garmin system benefits from a few years’ headstart and that the R9 will continue to improve with future releases. I hope so because it’s already very nice.

Avidyne R9 in N147LD

Things I like about the R9:

Keypad and Geofill makes it easier to enter flight plans.
Feels very intuitive; it feels like it was designed by pilots. The press-rocker switches are especially elegant.
Good response rate and higher resolution – this is important and will make accurate instrument flying easier with a glass screen.
Vectors mode in GPS is a smart idea especially when you use it intercept mode so you can fly headings into your flight plan segments and have the autopilot automatically transition from one to the other
Duplication and redundancy
You can split the screens in lots of different and flexible ways.

There are some defects which may be fixed in future releases:

Autopilot integration with the S/Tec isn’t as good as with the promised integrated digital autopilot
It’s great when everything is GPS but it slightly fails with radio navigation – DMEs and VORs. For example, it doesn’t autodetect every VOR or ILS because the ident transmissions are slightly different in Europe than the US, which means that it can throw up an error message at the last minute rather than auto-sequencing from the enroute GPS navigation onto an ILS.
Geofill isn’t so good if you have duplicate waypoint idents. For example, BNN is a VOR near Denham but there’s another one in Norway or something. This confuses the system even though it should be ‘obvious’ which one I’m going to.
The go-around from a missed instrument approach is hideous. Not like the one-button TOGA button on the Perspective Cirrus. Here’s the sequence you have to follow at 200’ if you want the autopilot to fly the missed approach: press VS on the autopilot, dial up 800 FPM on the climb bug, throttle up, disarm the approach on the PFD, change the nav input on the PFD from the ILS to FMS, go back to the autopilot and press NAV twice to re-engage GPS steering. Ouch.
I got caught out by the intercept mode on the vectors mode. After going missed, I forgot to disarm it and it takes quite a few key strokes to delete the approach from the flight plan, so the plane decided to go off and try to reintercept the approach. If I had been in IMC and not quite on the ball, the plane would have flown right back over the airport or something. Ouch. I think the default for vectors mode should be not to intecept – I’d rather be asking myself ‘what do I do next’ than asking the plane ‘what the hell are you doing?’
I wish we had satellite weather in the UK. One of the planes I fly has a satphone in it that downloads weather and I would say that it is a huge safety benefit.

After a long day of flying, we did some night circuits for currency and to get on the night list at Denham. A friend of mine used to be a US Navy pilot and he said that landing on a carrier at night was the scariest thing he ever did. Denham’s a bit like that, but at least the runway isn’t moving. But all you see is runway lights in a black hole. But flying at night on a clear evening is one of the great joys of flying – still, smooth, different and familiar at the same time.

When and where should you use the Cirrus Airframe Parachute System (CAPS)?

John Fiscus, the Chief Pilot of The Flight Academy, has written a great article for the Cirrus Owners & Pilots Association (COPA) blog about when and where you should pull the red handle and use of the Cirrus Airframe Parachute System (CAPS) instead of just troubleshooting. John began his article by noting that there have been a number of accidents involving Cirrus Aircraft that occurred while the aircraft was low. Hence, the majority of pilots in such incidents had little time to react. However and in the cases where they did act fast enough to deploy their CAPS system, they did so with great success.

John then noted that unless a pilot has a very specific and well-trained set of tolerances for using CAPS, it’s a strong possibility that the pilot will not go for the chute until after its to late. In other words, pilots often:

Don’t have an established procedure (or don’t know it).
Don’t practice the established procedures very often.

So when and where should you use or consider using CAPS? John noted the following three situations:

In some takeoff zones where using CAPS isn’t a particularly good option, it should be used quickly and in lieu of troubleshooting – especially below 2,000 AGL.
In some situations when not necessarily close to the ground. John mentioned situations where there is loss of control in flight or a loss of an engine.
In any emergency situation, a pilot should first ask himself whether CAPS should be used. If the answer is no, then a pilot should proceed with the appropriate emergency checklist and then reconsider CAPS if all else fails.

John ended his article by noting that after 23 deployments, it is clear that CAPS will save lives if pilots are both trained and willing to use it.

CAPS-POH-deployment

Avoiding Cirrus accidents caused by excessive landing speeds

If you own or fly a Cirrus, a recent post about accidents caused by excessive landing speeds written by Rick Beach on the Cirrus Owners & Pilots Association (COPA) blog is a must read. Beach noted that there have been at least 30 aircraft to have suffered from substantial damage due to landing accidents. Moreover, a common factor but not necessarily the cause of the accident has been excessive landing speed.

Hence, Beach set out with his camera to photograph two CPPP instructors while they flew Cirrus SR22 and landed in front of him. He then used the photos and reviewed each one of them in accordance with the Flight Operations Manual and the POH.

Beach also wrote that he would encourage pilots to fly with a safety pilot or an instructor to review at what airspeeds they are flying at when landing because not all pilots have developed good landing habits. Beach then mentioned the following four things that could go wrong when a pilot has poor landing habits:

float forever: if the speed over the threshold is too great, it may take a long, long, long time for the plane to slow down.
nose wheel lands first: flying the plane onto the runway risks touching the nose wheel first, and that may cause a rebound into the air and starting a pilot induced oscillation
planting the main gear onto the runway: forcing the plane to touch down before it has stopped flying means it may start flying again before you are slowed down enough; why? a gust of wind may provide lift, or a bump in the runway surface may provide upward thrust, or the main gear spring into action and provide upward thrust on their own
brake lockup: with a free castering nose wheel, you may have directional control problems if the brakes lock up unevenly

Beach concluded by saying that pilots need to become proficient themselves. Moreover, they need to watch out for other Cirrus pilots who might be landing at excessive speeds and to tactfully intercede to help them become more proficient and to avoid an accident.