Posted on 12/23/2004 6:21:20 AM PST by MississippiMasterpiece
If you aren't aware of these yet, you should be.
Do doctors have a high crash rate?
It's reserved for 'hired guns' to protect the company from lawyers who don't care how much they stifle innovation or who they hurt in their quest for the combination to the company bank account. Much like bank robbers of old, we ought to start killing them as they ride into town.
Parachute(s) could come in handy for larger planes that have crash, horizontal landings.
Somebody invents a parachute system that saves a certain percentage of lives that would otherwise be lost, but because it can't save EVERYONE it's unfair, flawed, and therefore useless. It's like the arguments against missile defense: you can't stop EVERY missile, so it's useless. If a drug helps 1,000,000 people and kills 1, it's too dangerous. Using this logic, eventually trial lawyers will end vaccinations in this country.
It's a shame there is no mechanism where this company can be paid the big bucks for everyone they save, to offset the big bucks they will lose for everyone they fail to save...
How about this. A company installs parachutes on airplanes for free. But if you pull the handle and it saves you, you owe that company a million bucks. Naaaah, that's too much thinking to do on the way down.
I remember the story about the man who first discovered how to recover from a flat spin. During WWI, a pilot went into a flat spin at altitude which was thought to be unrecoverable. He got tired of waiting for death, so he nosed the plane down to hurry the process along, and discovered how to recover from the spin by accident.
Actually, he didn't have a parachute then, but thought about it on the way down and sure wished he did. Saw him interviewed on "Wings" or some such show.
A preemptive defense of a product that may not be that safe?
Do you think that maybe the reason Cirrus includes a parachute is because the plane is unrecoverable from a spin?
If a plane is capable of recovering from a spin, why would anyone want to pull a chute and crash land with the resulting damage?
The reason you so frequently hear of professionals like doctors and lawyers crashing is that they have the money to get themselves into an airplane, usually a higher performance airplane. But all the money in the world will not buy talent, experience or judgement.
Excellent thought.
I would guess that it's rare that commercial jets have "fall out of the sky" accidents where a paracute would need to return the jet gently to earth. I would guess that most jet accidents are on take-off and landing, in which case a drag chute would offer the pilot an option to minimize loss of life.
"Do doctors have a high crash rate?"
It seems they do. They can afford a plane but fly it so little that most never see 30 hours a year. Their arrogance towards learning to fly shows as well. Being doctors, they think flying is such a trivial matter that they fail to pay attention to the details that will kill them.
Spins no longer taught? or Required to get the PPL? Tell you what, come out to Utah and I will teach you how to recover from a spin. Your license is just a permit to continue to learn : )
The Cirrus has too small of a rudder to recover from a serious spin. So they put the parachute in to compensate, then they try to promote it as a safety feature. The parachute exempts the plane from the FAA requirements that the plane be demonstrated to be able to recover from a spin.
I don't have a beef with Cirrus or parachutes (I have used a few). It is just that I think it only helps in a very narrow range of possibilities. If you stall close to the ground - say turning on final, where most stalls occur the parachute won't do you any good. If you have a fire the parachute will actually help roast you. About the only scenario that I think the parachute is good for is a structural failure and those are very rare.
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