But hearsay.

Seriously, I don't understand several attempts at the runways. What was broken in the logic?

Not worthless, experience can make a pilot safer, but not always.

The video showed the impact at the end of a spin. The cause of a spin in an airplane is well known and better explanations than I can provide are out there. An uncoordinated turn at a speed near stall can do it. One wing stalls. It tends to happen in the pattern for landing more than other places, because planes are low and slow and making turns to approach alignment with the runway. Distractions, wake turbulence, other traffic, controller communications and other factors can come into play. Why this particular pilot let it happen is not yet known. I won't speculate, but I will say I will be extra vigilant of my turn coordination and speed when maneuvering.

No kids here...by design. In your analogy, to get their driver's license, the kids would need professional training and recurrent training from certified instructors (not parents). Hell, I spend half the time in LA. Talk about ****ty drivers.

The SR20 aircraft in that accident is not that high powered. I don't think it is considered by strict FAA definition a high performance or complex aircraft. It has 200 HP - about the same as a mid-range single engine Cessna or Piper. That size engine is pretty common in private aircraft probably representing a majority of the small planes out there.

The SR22, on the other hand, has a more powerful engine (310HP). That really is added safety in my mind (based on my typical mission).

Less power in an airplane isn't always safer. I owned a plane called an Mooney M10 Cadet once which was a variant of an Ercoupe. It had 90HP. It took forever to take off, barely climbed on a warm day (300fpm), and hardly went anywhere against a wind. It was fun though.

My understanding is that the safest planes statistically are typically the ones flown by professional pilots - jets.

I gotta stop posting on this, my opinion doesn't matter. Bye.

Appears even the author is skeptical of the stats?

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1465961765.jpg

Steve Wilson Blog - The Cirrus Airplane Has Serious Problems

I did see the recreation in this link where they showed turn angle too steep (60 degrees) and stall resulted(?) approaching landing with a Cirrus. See vid about 3:30 in. They indicate "snap roll entry".

I don't know what that means.:) (I'll shut up)

Okay my last post, the stats don't show important factors like the distribution of pilot hours in the pilot pool. It could just be that 90% of the population has 800 hours, for example. Not enough info given to be a useful chart in my opinion.

The video can give you a good idea of how these accidents can happen. In a high bank angle turn, like that shown at 60 degrees, the wing will stall at a higher airspeed. A 60 degree bank is not usual in the traffic pattern at an airport.

Okay, the blogger has another chart showing the Cirrus safer than many other common aircraft (fatalities/100k fleet hours). This is 6 year old data. It has improved since then. Don't you just love statistics?

Steve Wilson Blog - According to NASA: Small Planes Are Very Safe

She must have surely not been concentrating hard enough on her first approach to be way too high to land on those very long for GA 2000 or 2500 yard long runways, even in a plane with high for GA approach speed. Many runways at GA fields in the UK aren't as long as that in feet, never mind yards. We were always taught that every landing is a missed approach unless you get it right.

a turn to the west w/ winds 090 gusts to 18 while trying to burn off altitude may have led to the spin?

A Cirrus Engineer talks about spins in the SR20/SR22. Where he mentions cuffs, he is talking about the wing design, which incorporates drooped cuffs on the outboard portion of the wing.

Enjoy.



Question: Has any spin testing been conducted in the CIRRUS airplanes?

CIRRUS Engineer: Yes, CIRRUS has done spin testing in both the SR20 and the SR22, and we’ve done a variety of spins in both models. But, that’s different than saying we’ve completed the entire spin matrix in each plane in every conceivable condition and configuration – because we haven’t. Eventually we decided to take the logical stand that spin prevention is the key to preventing needless fatalities, and attempts to make the airplane spin-certified would just muddy the waters.
Spin recovery requirements are very stringent. The upside of the cuffs – that they give greater control in the slow flight regime – also have, like every aircraft feature, a compromise, and that is that they can cause an aircraft to take more than the required one-turn recovery rotation to be eligible to be spin-certified. But people should understand that even though an airplane may be spin certified, certain ‘cliffs,’ as we call them, can still exist in spin aerodynamics making recovery uncertain.


Question: Can you give us an example?

CIRRUS Engineer: Sure. There was a plane that was being developed and certified for spins that was demonstrating fairly straight-forward recoveries. Then one day a condition occurred where it took two full turns to recover from the spin, but certification standards clearly say you need to do it in one turn. The test pilot conducted spin after spin in that condition trying to improve the technique to get the recovery down to that one turn.


Question: What happened?

CIRRUS Engineer: He made some progress. He got it down to one-and-a-half turns. Then on the 30th attempt, the spin was entered into with a greater yaw rate and it entered an unrecoverable spin. Fortunately the test pilot was wearing a parachute and he successfully bailed out. What this means is that even test pilots will find the condition that a plane will not recover from – the cliff – and sometimes it comes down to how fast the plane initially slices into the rotation with the yaw rate.


Question: What role does the parachute or CAPS (CIRRUS Airplane Parachute System) play in all of this?

CIRRUS Engineer: Since at CIRRUS we made the judgment call to not certify the airplane in the spin category, we still recognized that even with the added safety of the drooped wings, the possibility still existed that a pilot could find himself in a situation where he has gotten the airplane into a spin. In that case, the CAPS can be deployed for a quick recovery, slightly less than 1,000 feet if immediately activated.

The parachute has a connection to spins in that if you get into one, it is the means of recovery you should use. In tests we conducted, in a one-turn spin the chute will recover you faster than will the standard pilot control input. But, the parachute’s purpose is not limited to spin recovery, it’s there to give the pilot an option in a number of emergency scenarios such as total engine failure, mid-air, control failure, etc.

We want pilots to keep in mind that they should be ‘primed to pull.’ In the early phases of the military ejection seats it was found that pilots would stay with a broken or spinning aircraft all the way until impact, rather than pull the ejection handles. Why? Because the decision to eject was not yet firmly planted in their minds. Initially the seats were not a success because there was not the collective recognition by the pilot group to eject, and the military had to conduct a lot of additional training to overcome the mindset to ‘save the plane.’

All reports say she was a low-hour pilot.
As I was approaching 100 hrs the guys in the FBO lounge were warning me about the "100 hr mistake." They claimed that's the time a lot of people get cocky about their abilities and get themselves in over their heads. True? I wouldn't know, as I ran out of money before I got to 100 hrs. :(

I used to do spin training in a 152 with my students. In that airplane, even in a fully developed spin, you could recover by simply 'letting go' of the controls. Of course, that wasn't the recovery that we were training but that aircraft is just so stable and forgiving. I would imagine a 172 would be pretty similar. I'm sure a Cirrus is perfectly safe for a competent, low time pilot, when flown within a certain envelope. For a low time, possibly rusty, possibly marginal pilot, finding themselves in an unusual attitude, it would be very different. Oh, and if you need 60 degrees of bank in the pattern, you're doing it wrong.

Ya think? Yeah. Low, slow, turning and then a gusting tailwind which she didn't account for because of management overload/stress.

It was a pilot error accident. Maybe the aircraft wasn't as forgiving as some. But the a/c isn't to blame.

Cirrus's target market may be a problem, but that's not the airframe.

She had been told to turn right on all other missed approaches and it was just after ATC told her to turn left to the downwind for runway 4 "in a nice low tight pattern" that the plane went down.


Live ATC start around 25:00: http://archive-server.liveatc.net/khou/KHOU-Jun-09-2016-1730Z.mp3

Continues: http://archive-server.liveatc.net/khou/KHOU-Jun-09-2016-1800Z.mp3

Everything explained. My bet is she skipped these lessons.

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rick- I meant that in agreement with your statement.

No worries!...didn't mean anything snarky with my response, just to add to it after listening to the live ATC.

The interwebs can be hard to discern meaning sometimesSmileWavy

Kindof wish I hadn't listened to that, just brutal.

Yeah, that was one thing that caught my eye in the first link I posted earlier...

"Canadian pilot Albert Kolk forgot to switch fuel tanks while flying along on autopilot. Eventually the autopilot couldn't hold enough aileron trim to keep the plane level and kicked off. The plane went into a steep spiral. Most pilots have trouble initially determining whether they are in a steep spiral or a spin (the airspeed indicator is key here; low airspeed = spin, high airspeed = spiral). Because the only demonstrated way to recover a Cirrus from a spin is to pull the parachute, Kolk pulled the parachute. In a Cessna 172 or 182, by contrast, Kolk would have never suffered the fuel imbalance in the first place. The fuel selector would have been on "Both". Had Kolk been flying a Cessna, he would have not have had the option of the parachute and he would have been secure in the knowledge that a Cessna will generally come out of a spin if you simply take your hands off the controls. With no parachute at his disposal, he would have had nothing better to do than study the instruments, level the wings with the yoke, pull the power back, sweat quite a bit, and say to himself 'man, I'd better take this flying stuff more seriously.'"

I am a low time VFR pilot. I wouldn't recommend flying into a commercial airport like Hobby. My base airport is White Plains NY HPN and I am very familiar with that airport and the NYC airspace. There is a lot going on, a lot to listen from Tower and Approach and having jets riding up your butt is a little nerving when trying to land there...While I feel comfortable at HPN now, I wouldn't fly into Hobby.

It is a horrible tragic accident and I really feel for her, however, I wished she would have picked another airport with less traffic.

Ouch, who wrote that? It it's so wrong. The fuel selector is right near the right arm in the center console. There is a timer in the avionics that reminds you to check fuel imbalance at set intervals. You have to manually address the visual timer reminder. There are two gas gauges (one for each wing) in clear view in the center console near the selector. This pilot guy was asleep at the yoke it seems. He shouldn't be flying. Managing fuel is an important part of flying - also fuel mismanagement is a major cause of accidents.

The Cirrus has been demonstrated to be spin recoverable.

The author should have spent a little time researching.

Just my opinion.