Pilot Unhurt After Plane's Parachute Cushions Crash Landing

+1 for Cirrus Design Corp. "Any landing you walk away from is a good landing" even if the airframe is a total loss.

ongoing stories about cirrus accidents like this make me wonder why the thing really needs the parachute in the first place. i wouldn't call this a landing. i'd call it giving up instead of doing what you should've been trained to do. i don't know the specifics about this accident, but based on a lot of other CAPS deployments, i'd say too many pilots are using it as a crutch.

I very much agree with Jason on this one. I personally know a couple of Cirrus drivers that always seem to be flying with one hand on the handle. I also have about 300 hours in SR-22's and I never pull the safety pin out of the handle.

the story i heard was that the chute deployed without any input from the pilot. there is an investigation as usual. i think that it is a crutch, and a bad reason for unsafe flying. i have heard that from a few pilots, that it makes some pilots cocky, and make bad decisions.

if that is in fact the case then the pilot is lucky to come through unhurt. a lot of them don't turn out well when the pilot wants to pull the chute. it's all a false sense of safety if you ask me that leads to overconfidence and not flying the airplane. reminds me of the auto-gear extension systems on older piper arrows...and how many accidental gear-up landings it actually caused. they don't have them anymore...

For the number of Cirrus crashes vs. the total number of registered SEL aircraft, it seems to me that there is a fairly high rate of accidents in this aircraft. Am I correct? Does anyone have the stats on this? The better comparison may be flying hours in the Cirrus vs. other aircraft. Seems like they fall out of the sky on a regular basis. Having said that, I must admit that I've never flown one and hope that I'm not being unfair with my opinion...

I don't fly an SR22 but I have. It's a great ride. As for the 'landing', the article I read had the pilot landing in a creek bed shorly after 6:00 AM and directing fire crews to his location at 6:45 AM. Both would imply to me night flying conditions. Perhaps the smart decision was to pull the parachute rather than attempting a wheels down landing onto uncertain terrain. I personally think the pilot made the right call, he walked away!

Surely all you great pilots aren't saying that you'd rather NOT have an airplane with a 'chute, than one WITH one are you? Pilot skill, decision making, and accident rate statistics aside. This guy is alive today for his family and friends where he might very well not be had he been flying ANY other plane on the market. That's my main point here. I have a friend who commutes daily about 125 miles to work everyday in an SR-22 - good weather and bad - he's a good pilot, and he swears by his Cirrus. His family business owns three of them. Personally I'm glad he flies one and has the option of puling the chord if something happens.