Posted on 12/23/2004 6:21:20 AM PST by MississippiMasterpiece
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Albert Kolk's small plane banked uncontrollably in darkness over the Monashee mountains, then began spiraling. "Seat belts!" he barked to his teenage grandson and two young friends. Then he reached for a red lever in the cockpit. Suddenly, an orange-and-white parachute as big as a house opened above the plane and gently landed his stricken aircraft in a rocky clearing.
If the maker of the parachute that saved Kolk's life this past spring succeeds, one day commercial aircraft like regional commuter jets may have similar safety systems. First, though, there's the challenge of creating a parachute robust enough to rescue bigger, faster planes.
"Weight and speed are always the challenge," acknowledged Robert Nelson, chairman of Ballistic Recovery Systems Inc., which sold about 500 of its $16,000 parachute systems this year for use by small private planes and pilots like Kolk.
The company's most advanced parachute right now can accommodate nearly 4,000 pounds. While small planes can weigh up to 2,000 pounds and cruise about 175 miles per hour, regional jets weigh 80,000 pounds and fly at more than 600 miles per hour.
That's why Ballistic Recovery Systems is working with NASA -- which gave it $670,000 for research -- to design a new generation of emergency parachutes that would work on small jets and could be steered by pilots as they drift to the ground.
Kolk, a rancher who was piloting his private plane April 8 from Seattle to his ranch in British Columbia, remembered reaching for the parachute handle as his plane slipped into a dangerous flat spin over the mountains in British Columbia, "like how a dog chases its tail."
A seasoned pilot, Kolk said he had never experienced such a disaster in over a decade of private flying.
"I knew I was in trouble. I couldn't straighten out," Kolk said. "When that chute opened, it was a peaceful, wonderful feeling."
Kolk's experience is one of four cases where parachute-equipped planes landed safely beneath a canopy since U.S. regulators approved the system six years ago. Ballistic Recovery Systems, based in St. Paul, Minn., says eight lives were saved in those four incidents, plus dozens of other people in accidents involving smaller parachute-equipped ultralight planes that resemble motorized gliders.
The parachute, stored behind the rear seats in small planes, is fired with a rocket through the rear windshield; it's attached with high-strength lines to the plane's wings, nose and tail.
They are increasingly popular among private pilots, and for good reason: The government said 626 people died in general aviation crashes in 2003, compared with 81 people aboard commercial airlines.
Aviation experts question whether parachutes will ever be attached to the largest passenger jets, such as the Boeing 747, which weighs more than 900,000 pounds. "The speed and weight of those planes would seem to preclude a system like that," said James Hall, former chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board.
Most of the estimated 500 parachute systems Ballistic Recovery Systems sold in 2004 went to aircraft manufacturer Cirrus Design Corp. of Duluth, Minn., which includes them as standard equipment on its line of small private planes. U.S. regulations allow owners of some Cessna small planes to install parachutes, but only about a dozen have bought the add-on equipment so far.
Brent Brown, a lawyer in Roanoke, Va., was having one added to his plane. Brown, who often flies twice a week over the mountains in western Virginia, said he couldn't imagine choosing to save money by not adding the new safety equipment. "I would feel awful silly on that terrible, terrible ride down," Brown said.
The emergency parachutes aren't flawless. Two families in Syracuse, N.Y., are suing Cirrus, Ballistic Recovery Systems and others for a combined $67.5 million over a fatal crash in April 2002. The case is pending in federal court.
The families said the pilot, a plastic surgeon who bought the plane six days earlier, tried to open the parachute but it failed. Defense lawyers have denied the system malfunctioned, and federal investigators concluded the parachute never opened "for undetermined reasons."
In another accident, one month before the Syracuse crash, pilot Paul Heflin of Lexington, Ky., repeatedly pulled hard on the parachute handle when his plane began a steep, uncontrolled dive from 3,000 feet. "He was pulling for his life," recalled Heflin's passenger, Benjamin Ditty. Both suffered minor injuries but walked away from the wreckage.
The parachute popped open just after the plane crashed, "which was not too convenient for us," Ditty said. Months after Heflin's crash, Cirrus ordered all its customers to immediately replace a vital cable in the parachute system.
Heflin said he still has faith in the parachute, but Ditty -- who also flies -- said he would never rely on one again. "It was supposed to work," he said.
Some pilots insist they'll never fly without a parachute.
"People are crazy not to fly with them," said William Graham of San Diego, an instructor pilot whose plane landed beneath a parachute this spring near Stockton, Calif., after it unexpectedly flipped upside down at 16,000 feet. Graham, who was flying with his wife, Barbara, said they drifted onto a farm field so gently the landing didn't break fragile Christmas ornaments and glass bottles aboard the plane.
Video of the parachute is available at:
http://wid.ap.org/video/video/airplanechute.rm
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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