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PT6A
Jan 5, 2006

Public school teachers are callous dictators who won't lift a finger to stop children from peeing in my plane

Radbot posted:

I'm interested in how you think helmets make riders better, though, while BRS systems don't make pilots better. I'll say I don't feel more skilled when I don my lid, but maybe it really does beam skill into my brain.

I specifically didn't say better, I said "safer."

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Main Paineframe
Oct 27, 2010

tsa posted:


e: like GA is already much more dangerous than other forms of flying. Why aren't people arguing to mandate this system arguing to massively increase the requirements to become a GA pilot? Doing so would undoubtedly save lives at the cost of making flying unaffordable to nearly everyone but the 1% (and would save far more lives than AP's).

Training must not be the sole safety system, though, because plenty of other fields with far more stringent training requirements than GA have demonstrated that there is no level of training or experience that completely eliminates mistakes and errors, to say nothing of mechanical failures, incapacitated pilots, and freak accidents. More training is fine, but there needs to be a safety system to fall back on in case poo poo goes wrong anyway.

Commercial pilots make mistakes, doctors make mistakes, engineers make mistakes, and hell, loving astronauts make mistakes - and even when they don't, their vehicles which were meticulously examined by ground crews before liftoff still sometimes had issues. Their vehicles (except for the shuttle, gently caress that thing) also hauled around much heavier and more expensive safety systems despite the fact that they had very slim weight margins and that some of those safety systems were usable only during brief portions of the flights and would have done nothing to help in most of the actual problems the space program had.

PT6A
Jan 5, 2006

Public school teachers are callous dictators who won't lift a finger to stop children from peeing in my plane

Main Paineframe posted:

Training must not be the sole safety system, though, because plenty of other fields with far more stringent training requirements than GA have demonstrated that there is no level of training or experience that completely eliminates mistakes and errors, to say nothing of mechanical failures, incapacitated pilots, and freak accidents. More training is fine, but there needs to be a safety system to fall back on in case poo poo goes wrong anyway.

There are safety systems, though. That's what some people fail to understand. The BRS is merely an additional safety system, which can only be installed on some planes, and only used in certain situations to prevent certain sorts of crashes. It should be an option, as I've said all along, but I would like to see an additional rating required to fly a plane with a BRS installed, so pilots can be trained on how they can affect decision-making, the circumstances under which they can be safely deployed, etc., etc. We should trust pilots, as properly trained individuals capable of using their own judgement, to determine if a BRS is a good, cost-effective option to install on their own aircraft with reference to the sorts of flights they'll be flying in that aircraft. We don't need to go hog-wild and conceive of, install and mandate every possible piece of safety equipment ever.

Radbot
Aug 12, 2009
Probation
Can't post for 4 years!

PT6A posted:

I specifically didn't say better, I said "safer."

So... is there any data to indicate that these systems make flight less safe? Because if they do anything between doing nothing to saving lives, what's your issue?

hobbesmaster
Jan 28, 2008

Radbot posted:

So... is there any data to indicate that these systems make flight less safe? Because if they do anything between doing nothing to saving lives, what's your issue?

They increase the weight of the aircraft. I'm sure you could come up with all sorts of safety systems for aircraft that might help in some edge cases ( remember this particular one is for spins ) but you couldn't put them in because the plane wouldn't fly anymore.

I mean if these things help so much why don't we insist on their installation in airliners?

Inferior Third Season
Jan 15, 2005

The big difference between BRSs and helmets/seatbelts is that BRSs are an active safety system, and helmets/seatbelts are passive.

When you have an active system, things can go wrong. You can have inadvertent deployments, partial deployments, or failed deployments. Each of these very well may take a non-situation or survivable situation, and turn it into an inescapable fatal situation. It's also possible that a pilot has much better odds of landing without injury from an engine-out or other non-structural-failure problem using good old-fashioned gliding techniques compared to a BRS deployment. It's a non-obvious problem which system is safer, and can depend on the plane itself. The fact that pilots are humans, and humans have been shown to take more risks when they think they have safety systems to back them up when things go wrong, is just one of the many things to consider; it is certainly not the only thing to consider, as many posters seem to think.

For example, the last company that I worked for was a small aircraft manufacturer. During prototype flight testing, chutes were installed, but were not included in final production planes. Why? Not because we valued the lives of our test pilots more than our customers', or as a cost-reduction measure, but because prototypes are much more likely to experience structural failures or unrecoverable spins than production aircraft. The safety equation was different, and what was the safe option for one kind of flying was not the safe option for the other kind.

Bates
Jun 15, 2006

PT6A posted:

and it removes most/all control the pilot has over the aircraft, which can increase the risk to people on the ground.

I don't really get this. If you do an emergency landing on say a busy street or beach you can kill everything between the spot where you touch down to where you stop. If you deploy a chute you will kill things only where it touches down. The potential area of death seems to be smaller. If you have a nice open road with no traffic to land on that's great but what if there just isn't any such place? Can we rely on pilots to crash their planes into whatever obstacles may be in their way in order to avoid killing people on open ground?

Kaal
May 22, 2002

through thousands of posts in D&D over a decade, I now believe I know what I'm talking about. if I post forcefully and confidently, I can convince others that is true. no one sees through my facade.
Yeah it doesn't really make any sense, and it comes entirely from the "all pilots are Chuck Yeager/my trigger is my safety" perspective. A hard, fast crash landing is definitely going to be more threatening to public safety than a parachute. Basically the only hypothetical problem that has been proposed is that the parachute might be so quiet that it wouldn't be noticed - as if it is easier to react to a plane tearing in at you at 100 mph. And if that really was such an issue, which seems unlikely, then it'd be easy to just install a siren.

Kaal fucked around with this message at 18:15 on Sep 11, 2014

hobbesmaster
Jan 28, 2008

Kaal posted:

Yeah it doesn't really make any sense, and it comes entirely from the "all pilots are Chuck Yeager/my trigger is my safety" perspective. A hard, fast crash landing is definitely going to be more threatening to public safety than a parachute. Basically the only hypothetical problem that has been proposed is that the parachute might be so quiet that it wouldn't be noticed - as if it is easier to react to a plane tearing in at you at 100 mph. And if that really was such an issue, which seems unlikely, then it'd be easy to just install a siren.

But the parachute is also a "hard, fast crash landing"

Kaal
May 22, 2002

through thousands of posts in D&D over a decade, I now believe I know what I'm talking about. if I post forcefully and confidently, I can convince others that is true. no one sees through my facade.

hobbesmaster posted:

But the parachute is also a "hard, fast crash landing"

According to company specifications, a Cessna under CAPS/BRS parachute comes in at about 27.5 ft/sec or 19 mph. Crashing without the parachute is going to be at least 50 mph, which is about 75 ft/sec. Any slower than that and the aircraft will stall out and simply fall out of the sky. But since we're talking about an emergency situation, and not just a controlled landing, it seems much more likely that the aircraft would be travelling nearer the average airspeed of 110 mph. If control is lost entirely, then the terminal velocity would be something like 150 mph, or 220 ft/sec. In any situation, a parachute is going to make for a much softer and slower landing.

Kaal fucked around with this message at 18:49 on Sep 11, 2014

hobbesmaster
Jan 28, 2008

Kaal posted:

According to company specifications, a Cessna under CAPS/BRS parachute comes in at about 27.5 ft/sec or 19 mph. Crashing without the parachute is going to be at least 50 mph, which is about 75 ft/sec. Any slower than that and the aircraft will stall out and simply fall out of the sky. But since we're talking about an emergency situation, and not just a controlled landing, it seems much more likely that the aircraft would be travelling nearer the average airspeed of 110 mph. If control is lost entirely, then the terminal velocity would be something like 150 mph, or 220 ft/sec. In any situation, a parachute is going to make for a much softer and slower landing.

27.5ft/sec vertical speed is 1650 ft/min which is an extraordinarily high vertical speed for this type of aircraft would only be seen in a completely uncontrollable light aircraft. 50mph is 43 knots which is indeed about Vsi for a cessna 172, however you neglect to consider the velocity vector there.

Dead Reckoning
Sep 13, 2011

Kaal posted:

Yeah it doesn't really make any sense, and it comes entirely from the "all pilots are Chuck Yeager/my trigger is my safety" perspective. A hard, fast crash landing is definitely going to be more threatening to public safety than a parachute. Basically the only hypothetical problem that has been proposed is that the parachute might be so quiet that it wouldn't be noticed - as if it is easier to react to a plane tearing in at you at 100 mph. And if that really was such an issue, which seems unlikely, then it'd be easy to just install a siren.

A pilot maintaining aircraft control is not going to put the aircraft down on an occupied surface. A pilot under canopy is no longer in control of the aircraft.

Kaal
May 22, 2002

through thousands of posts in D&D over a decade, I now believe I know what I'm talking about. if I post forcefully and confidently, I can convince others that is true. no one sees through my facade.

hobbesmaster posted:

27.5ft/sec vertical speed is 1650 ft/min which is an extraordinarily high vertical speed for this type of aircraft would only be seen in a completely uncontrollable light aircraft. 50mph is 43 knots which is indeed about Vsi for a cessna 172, however you neglect to consider the velocity vector there.

Hopefully the person on the ground who gets slammed into at 100 mph rather than 19 mph will appreciate those facts. They'll have one-fifth the time to react to it, so presumably they'll need to be quick thinkers. Also, the collision will have quite a bit more energy and violence involved, but at least they'll know that a parachute would have caused the aircraft to move in an atypical fashion. :munch:

Dead Reckoning posted:

A pilot maintaining aircraft control is not going to put the aircraft down on an occupied surface. A pilot under canopy is no longer in control of the aircraft.

A pilot who can maintain perfect control of their aircraft doesn't need to use the parachute in the first place. If they have imperfect control of their aircraft then they can guide their airplane to a safe area and then engage the parachute equally safely. If they have no control of the aircraft then they can pull the parachute and minimize the impact risk. All of those options sound better than "hope for the best".

theres a will theres moe
Jan 10, 2007


Hair Elf

Kaal posted:

Hopefully the person on the ground who gets slammed into at 100 mph rather than 19 mph will appreciate those facts. They'll have one-fifth the time to react to it, so presumably they'll need to be quick thinkers. Also, the collision will have quite a bit more energy and violence involved, but at least they'll know that a parachute would have caused the aircraft to move in an atypical fashion. :munch:

:munch: indeed. This is dumb. Are you really arguing that it's alright to have a plane land on you, as long as it's going slow?

Kaal
May 22, 2002

through thousands of posts in D&D over a decade, I now believe I know what I'm talking about. if I post forcefully and confidently, I can convince others that is true. no one sees through my facade.

Juche Box Hero posted:

:munch: indeed. This is dumb. Are you really arguing that it's alright to have a plane land on you, as long as it's going slow?

Are you seriously suggesting that speed is not a factor in a crash landing/collision? As in physics just stop working when you get into a winged aircraft? Or that a person having a minute to react rather than 12 seconds wouldn't give them a better chance to find cover? Never mind, please don't put a parachute on your plane.

Kaal fucked around with this message at 22:24 on Sep 11, 2014

theres a will theres moe
Jan 10, 2007


Hair Elf

Kaal posted:

Are you seriously suggesting that speed is not a factor in a crash landing/collision? As in physics just stop working when you get into a winged aircraft? Never mind, please don't put a parachute on your plane.

I would suggest that if you are in a position where you are about to be hit by a plane in flight, whether that plane is going relatively fast or relatively slow will probably not significantly affect your prognosis. Factor in the rarity of this type of event, and the fact that the parachute leaves the "death zone" to chance in an otherwise possibly controllable situation, and I would argue that the parachute doesn't really help the people on the ground in any meaningful way.

Kaal
May 22, 2002

through thousands of posts in D&D over a decade, I now believe I know what I'm talking about. if I post forcefully and confidently, I can convince others that is true. no one sees through my facade.

Juche Box Hero posted:

I would suggest that if you are in a position where you are about to be hit by a plane in flight, whether that plane is going relatively fast or relatively slow will probably not significantly affect your prognosis. Factor in the rarity of this type of event, and the fact that the parachute leaves the "death zone" to chance in an otherwise possibly controllable situation, and I would argue that the parachute doesn't really help the people on the ground in any meaningful way.

:laffo: This is just the Chuck Yeager argument all over again. Any pilot can turn a flight emergency into a safe landing with nothing more than a quip and Southern drawl, but using a parachute turns the aircraft into a death trap that kills at random. Also, a Cessna is lighter than any car, and I think we're all pretty aware of the difference between a vehicular collision at 20 mph versus one at 75 mph. You're a lot more likely to survive the former - particularly if you have time to find cover in a car or a structure.

Kaal fucked around with this message at 22:38 on Sep 11, 2014

theres a will theres moe
Jan 10, 2007


Hair Elf

Kaal posted:

:laffo: This is just the Chuck Yeager argument all over again. Any pilot can turn a flight emergency into a safe landing with nothing more than a quip and Southern drawl, but using a parachute turns the aircraft into a death trap that kills at random.

This is called a strawman.

Kaal posted:

Also, a Cessna is lighter than any car, and I think we're all pretty aware of the difference between a vehicular collision at 20 mph versus one at 75 mph.

In a vehicle on vehicle collision, yes.

Kaal
May 22, 2002

through thousands of posts in D&D over a decade, I now believe I know what I'm talking about. if I post forcefully and confidently, I can convince others that is true. no one sees through my facade.

Juche Box Hero posted:

In a vehicle on vehicle collision, yes.

I think that you're pretty aware of how collisions work even for other things, like vehicle on bicycle collisions, or vehicle on pedestrian collisions, or vehicle on building collisions. Indeed I'm sure that if you did a random sampling of Americans, you'd find that nearly 100% of them would prefer to be hit at the lower speed regardless of their circumstance. Frankly I don't really see this pedantic debate as having any legs at all. Basically the only time that having a parachute wouldn't be better, would be if it came straight down and hit some poor fellow reading a book and listening to his headphones on a park bench. In that specific situation, there would be equivalency. In all other situations, like when there was another park bench across the way from him and then the aircraft plowed through both of them on its way to the children on the merry-go-round, the parachute is better.

Now I'm sure that you're about to tell me that, oh well Chuckie Y. would never allow their aircraft to land in the park. So let me please stop you there. poo poo happens, and people make mistakes, and sometimes it seems like landing in the park is the best option and it sends innocent people to the hospital or worse. That's why we have safety equipment. Not all of these would have necessarily been avoidable by using a parachute, but the entire point is to give pilots options when they need them rather than hoping for a best-case result out of a worst-case scenario:

http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865608499/Small-plane-crashes-in-West-Jordan-park-3-injured.html?pg=all
http://www.click2houston.com/news/plane-crashlands-at-baytown-park/26837104
http://www.tampabay.com/news/publicsafety/accidents/small-plane-plummets-into-water-near-albert-whitted-airport/2195541
http://abc13.com/news/police-plane-makes-crash-landing-at-baytown-park/166721/
http://www.news.com.au/world/north-america/one-dead-in-plane-crash-in-costco-car-park-san-diego/story-fnh81jut-1227008670693
http://fox4kc.com/2014/04/06/plane-crashes-near-baseball-field-in-lees-summit-park/
http://www.wbaltv.com/news/maryland/anne-arundel-county/plane-down-in-maryland-city-area/21031450
http://www.wmbfnews.com/story/13862524/plane-crashes-at-rv-park-in-north-myrtle-beach

Kaal fucked around with this message at 23:03 on Sep 11, 2014

theres a will theres moe
Jan 10, 2007


Hair Elf

Kaal posted:

I think that you're pretty aware of how collisions work even for other things, like vehicle on bicycle collisions, or vehicle on pedestrian collisions, or vehicle on building collisions. Indeed I'm sure that if you did a random sampling of Americans, you'd find that nearly 100% of them would prefer to be hit at the lower speed regardless of their circumstance. Frankly I don't really see this pedantic debate as having any legs at all. Basically the only time that having a parachute wouldn't be better, would be if it came straight down and hit some poor fellow reading a book and listening to his headphones on a park bench. In that specific situation, there would be equivalency. In all other situations, like when there was another park bench across the way from him and then the aircraft plowed through both of them on its way to the children on the merry-go-round, the parachute is better.

Yeah, I understand what you are saying. The fact remains, though, that the parachute leaves which bench is smashed to a coin-flip, and an aircraft in a glide could be steered toward either bench, the park, or (in the case of the crash that started this leg of the debate) the open ocean instead of an occupied beach.

If the choice were:
1) to be alone and unaware beneath a parachuting Cessna
2) to be alone and unaware a quarter mile off the nose of a Cessna gliding to a crash

I would personally choose option 2, because the pilot in option 2 can steer. In any case, it is unlikely you or I will die of planestrike, and BRSs aren't the reason it's an uncommon way to die.

Paul MaudDib
May 3, 2006

TEAM NVIDIA:
FORUM POLICE

Kaal posted:

Are you seriously suggesting that speed is not a factor in a crash landing/collision? As in physics just stop working when you get into a winged aircraft? Or that a person having a minute to react rather than 12 seconds wouldn't give them a better chance to find cover? Never mind, please don't put a parachute on your plane.

It's not enough of a factor to let a bystander walk away from the crash, which is literally all that matters. A 2-ton aircraft falling on your head at :rolleyes: only :rolleyes: 20mph is still going to squish you like an insect. And neither a deadstick aircraft nor a parachuting aircraft makes a single sound that would induce bystanders to seek cover, there, genius. Do you think air-horns go off when the parachute deploys?

Past that, an aircraft that has air moving over its wings is an aircraft that the pilot has a chance to steer away from bystanders and potentially occupied buildings and into something that'll slow you down, like some trees or something. I don't quite remember the magic distance over which you need to decelerate the aircraft to survive the process, but it's not very far for small aircraft. Something like 30 feet? Parking an aircraft in a hedgerow is a very practical way to keep people safe.

Velocity doesn't matter if you're not also considering what direction that velocity is going and what's in the way. You can whiz over the head of a bystander just fine at 100mph and then park it in some trees downrange, but traveling straight down at 20mph will kill them. Velocity and physics actually matter a great deal, you just have an elementary understanding of how those concepts work in aviation. See also: how you think people a half mile away are going to hear you deploy a parachute.

Paul MaudDib fucked around with this message at 02:35 on Sep 12, 2014

ErIog
Jul 11, 2001

:nsacloud:
Why would the pilot pull the chute if they felt like they had enough control to glide down?

Once again, it's a false dichotomy. A plane with a chute is still a plane capable of gliding to the ground. It just also has a chute for the cases where it can't. There's nothing preventing a plane with a chute from gliding down, but you guys are sure talking like there is for some reason...

I also enjoy the continued slippery slope safety arguments. We're on a course to a hellscape where planes become cars because they're too heavy to lift off the ground due to all the safety! This is a reasonable thing that has happened before elsewhere. I'm sure of it!

ErIog fucked around with this message at 05:29 on Sep 12, 2014

Paul MaudDib
May 3, 2006

TEAM NVIDIA:
FORUM POLICE

ErIog posted:

We're on a course to a hellscape where planes become cars because they're too heavy to lift off the ground due to all the safety! This is a reasonable thing that has happened before elsewhere. I'm sure of it!

Aircraft don't have very much freeboard in terms of payload. For example, a parachute capable of supporting a very light aircraft (Cessna 150) weighs 45 pounds, which is roughly 15% of that aircraft's total usable payload.

So yeah that actually is a reasonable concern for an aircraft that is expected to lift 2 adults. 45 pounds at a time adds up when you can only lift 344 pounds total. That reduces the total payload from 172 lbs per person to 150 lbs per person. That reduces the payload from 2 average Americans (say, pilot + instructor) to like 2 skinny Americans, with no baggage in either case.

The more powerful the aircraft, the easier it is for inexperienced pilots to lose control of (eg Mooneys, etc). So just throwing more power at the problem also has risks. You go up faster, you come down much faster.

Again, someone who doesn't understand how physics works and thinks you can just throw poo poo on an airplane and have it still work. It's like a rocket, not a car, lifting dumb poo poo in the air is expensive.

Paul MaudDib fucked around with this message at 05:24 on Sep 12, 2014

Dead Reckoning
Sep 13, 2011
I just like how everyone who actually possesses an aeronautical rating is on one side, but the pro-parachute side continues to believe that Google makes them utterly qualified experts on aircraft safety.

PT6A
Jan 5, 2006

Public school teachers are callous dictators who won't lift a finger to stop children from peeing in my plane

Paul MaudDib posted:

The more powerful the aircraft, the easier it is for inexperienced pilots to lose control of (eg Mooneys, etc). So just throwing more power at the problem also has risks. You go up faster, you come down much faster.

Again, someone who doesn't understand how physics works and thinks you can just throw poo poo on an airplane and have it still work. It's like a rocket, not a car, lifting dumb poo poo in the air is expensive.

A high-performance aircraft like the Mooney will also likely be going faster than the maximum speed for BRS deployment in a loss-of-control situation that would justify its use, so that's a problem too.

It's not that I don't think BRSs are a good idea, and I would almost certainly equip my plane with such equipment if I had the money to spend on buying a plane, but that doesn't mean they ought to be mandated. Everything is a cost-benefit analysis, and I think although BRSs should be an option, I don't think they should be mandatory. I think a full racing harness and roll cage should be an option for my car, too, but that doesn't mean I think it should come as a factory-standard item.

PT6A
Jan 5, 2006

Public school teachers are callous dictators who won't lift a finger to stop children from peeing in my plane

Dead Reckoning posted:

I just like how everyone who actually possesses an aeronautical rating is on one side, but the pro-parachute side continues to believe that Google makes them utterly qualified experts on aircraft safety.

I will admit that the "it makes pilots do risky poo poo," was a poor argument, and I was using it for a time. That being said, I think flying a BRS-equipped aircraft should require additional training, and part of that training should include being made aware of the effects it can have on pilot decision-making (in other words, the fact that you might be more inclined to take risks with a BRS-equipped aircraft).

Bates
Jun 15, 2006

Dead Reckoning posted:

A pilot maintaining aircraft control is not going to put the aircraft down on an occupied surface. A pilot under canopy is no longer in control of the aircraft.

That's quite a bold statement to make about a fairly large group of people. The pilot that did an emergency landing on that beach did do exactly that though and he killed two people there. He didn't ditch in the ocean or take his chances in a less suitable place. He chose a beach with children on it.

However, looking around it doesn't seem like light aircraft are frequently killing random bystanders. The victims are by and large the pilots themselves which I don't really care about. You guys are adults and have been adequately informed of the dangers of what you are doing. Allowing informed people to do dangerous things is after all pretty common - cave diving, free diving, free climbing, base jumping, MMA etc.

Kaal
May 22, 2002

through thousands of posts in D&D over a decade, I now believe I know what I'm talking about. if I post forcefully and confidently, I can convince others that is true. no one sees through my facade.

Dead Reckoning posted:

I just like how everyone who actually possesses an aeronautical rating is on one side, but the pro-parachute side continues to believe that Google makes them utterly qualified experts on aircraft safety.

:laffo: If all pilots were anti-parachute then the BRS company would have been bankrupted years ago rather than being a nearly 30 year-old company with $10 million annual revenues. Try again Chuck.

Anosmoman posted:

However, looking around it doesn't seem like light aircraft are frequently killing random bystanders. The victims are by and large the pilots themselves which I don't really care about. You guys are adults and have been adequately informed of the dangers of what you are doing. Allowing informed people to do dangerous things is after all pretty common - cave diving, free diving, free climbing, base jumping, MMA etc.

I'm agreeing with this more and more. I think that it's a pity to see people dying for no reason other than ego, particularly innocent victims on the ground, but there are certainly more dangerous activities out there.

My Q-Face
Jul 8, 2002

A dumb racist who need to kill themselves

ErIog posted:

Why would the pilot pull the chute if they felt like they had enough control to glide down?

Ask the pilot from the article in the OP.

ErIog posted:

Once again, it's a false dichotomy. A plane with a chute is still a plane capable of gliding to the ground. It just also has a chute for the cases where it can't. There's nothing preventing a plane with a chute from gliding down, but you guys are sure talking like there is for some reason...

Actually, the increased weight of the parachute is going to affect the plane's ability to glide. The Increased wing-load is going to increase the descent rate, reducing the distance over the ground that the plane can travel and reducing the pilot's options for finding a safe landing spot.



Passengers injured, nobody on the ground.


Passengers injured, nobody on the ground.


Pilot drowned.


This is the same incident as the two links above. Still only the people in the plane who were hurt.


Only the people in the aircraft were killed (not by the crash but by the resulting fire, something else a parachute does nothing to stop) in a situation where a lot more people could have died: "So what probably happened is that in a loss of power and finding a place to put it down, she stalled it out pretty much perfectly in the only spot she possibly could have"


Only the Passenger is "seriously" injured, nobody outside the plane is.


Only the pilot was injured, and also the incident occurred at take off so it's a terrible example of where the parachute might have done anything.


This is the only one where somebody on the ground was hurt or killed from the aircraft crashing through a mobile home. It could just as easily have crashed through the mobile home under a parachute.

There's not one incident here where a parachute might have made any difference, and at least one where it definitely would have made things worse.

The problem I see in your argument is not that hypothetically this could help, but rather you can't produce a single non-hypothetical incident where it would have. It's almost like the people who are involved in aviation know what actual aviation mishaps look like because we don't just watch them on TV news, and so therefore we know that your hypothetical situations are very very far fetched and therefore the system is not worth the cost. "If it could save even one life, no matter the cost" is an absurd position to take. What's your upper limit? a Billion dollars to save one life? A Trillion? That life you save is eventually going to die anyway.


You make the argument that it's like Smart Guns and Gun Safes and Trigger locks, and that it's just a case of the Aviators being stubborn and stupid like the NRA.

Do you know when the NRA went off the rails? It was right around the time that Ted Kennedy introduced legislation to ban any and all ammunition that could penetrate police body armor. Because people who know gently caress-all about a thing should be the ones legislating it. :rolleyes:

My Q-Face fucked around with this message at 10:50 on Sep 12, 2014

ErIog
Jul 11, 2001

:nsacloud:

My Q-Face posted:

Actually, the increased weight of the parachute is going to affect the plane's ability to glide. The Increased wing-load is going to increase the descent rate, reducing the distance over the ground that the plane can travel and reducing the pilot's options for finding a safe landing spot.

This is not what other aviators in this thread have been saying. The entire weight argument has always come down to, "I can't fit heavier passengers, overnight gear, or other cargo." So the weight argument in nearly every case in this thread has relied on the extra weight being used by the parachute being used by other cargo. Not a single person has suggested keeping that portion of payload empty to improve glide performance. I think you may have been one of those people who made this very argument with regard to cargo.

My Q-Face posted:

The problem I see in your argument is not that hypothetically this could help, but rather you can't produce a single non-hypothetical incident where it would have. It's almost like the people who are involved in aviation know what actual aviation mishaps look like because we don't just watch them on TV news, and so therefore we know that your hypothetical situations are very very far fetched and therefore the system is not worth the cost. "If it could save even one life, no matter the cost" is an absurd position to take. What's your upper limit? a Billion dollars to save one life? A Trillion? That life you save is eventually going to die anyway.

Also, this right here is incredibly specious. We're not talking about some nebulous trillion dollar cost. We know what these parachutes cost. Whether or not you think that cost is worth it is an argument that could be made, but making a slippery slope argument out of it is just a way to dodge the question. Nobody here has argued for "no matter the cost." No data has been posted yet that shows the cost to be unreasonable. An attempt was made, but it failed pretty hilariously when that data also showed the average income for GA pilots was a significant multiple of the US median income.

The parts of this that aren't specious are just insulting. You're demonstrating a tremendous amount of arrogance in assuming that there's no pilots here arguing against you, and you're falling back on argument from authority fallacies.

No matter who you actually are, you have to actually make your case with data beyond, "my gut says..." People with experience in a field are not necessarily experts about their field on a macro level. A great example is how hard it is to get doctors to use checklists. It's a real simple thing that improves patient outcomes when you actually study it being used. Yet there's big pushback from doctors who have "gut feelings" about it. How do I know this isn't the same kind of issue? You haven't backed any of your anecdotes or gut feelings up with anything tangible.

Sylink
Apr 17, 2004

Hypothetically, would some kind of auto-pilot system that would take over in an emergency and auto-land be safer than a parachute and lighter?

I can imagine a scenario where a computer can do the aerodynamic calculations to land in a situation where human error makes this impossible.

PT6A
Jan 5, 2006

Public school teachers are callous dictators who won't lift a finger to stop children from peeing in my plane

Sylink posted:

Hypothetically, would some kind of auto-pilot system that would take over in an emergency and auto-land be safer than a parachute and lighter?

I can imagine a scenario where a computer can do the aerodynamic calculations to land in a situation where human error makes this impossible.

It might be lighter, but the necessary sensors would make it more expensive, and hooking up physical flight controls to computerized actuation would be quite expensive, not to mention the possible technical challenges. Why do we need to look for some solution to the safety problem? We know the solution already, and can implement it whenever there's a will to do so: more training, additional oversight of things like maintenance. Pilots can choose to do either of these things on their own, although I would like to see more training mandated. It's a really great solution, because we already know it works! The other great part, which isn't shared in BRS, is that it applies equally to all aircraft. High-performance aircraft? More experience will still make you a better pilot, as opposed to "oh, guess we can't install a BRS on this, you're on your own." It will save more lives in more situations, too. A BRS ain't going to do poo poo to prevent CFIT, and it may or may not be pulled in time to save a crash if you inadvertently fly into IMC on a VFR flight plan.

GulMadred
Oct 20, 2005

I don't understand how you can be so mistaken.

Sylink posted:

Hypothetically, would some kind of auto-pilot system that would take over in an emergency and auto-land be safer than a parachute and lighter?
You're overestimating the avionics included in a light airplane. You need to account for the fact that "emergency" encompasses scenarios such as "engine failure" or "fuel depleted" - the onboard battery may not last long enough to land safely, and the ram-air turbine (assuming that the plane even has one) won't be able to power all of the systems simultaneously. And how does the computer even know whether a potential landing site is "safe"? Your average Cessna doesn't carry a look-down radar. If your plane is small enough then you aren't even required to carry a collision-avoidance transponder.

And this is still ignoring a key point (from the OP) - the Cirrus cannot reliably recover from a spin using standard aerodynamic techniques. Not even if you put the cyborg love-child of Chuck Yeager and Deep Blue behind the stick.

A hypothetical 10-kg autolanding computer might be a cost-effective safety upgrade, but only if your plane already carries several hundred kilograms of auxiliary batteries, emergency radios, radar transponders, machine-vision cameras, fly-by-wire rigging, foghorns, a computerized topo map of the entire world, etc... And you'd still face distrust from pilots - there's a fine line between "take over in an emergency" and "seize control after ten seconds of turbulent-but-controllable flight and force-land the plane in the nearest turnip patch, thereby destroying the plane's undercarriage and injuring the passengers."

Dead Reckoning
Sep 13, 2011

Anosmoman posted:

That's quite a bold statement to make about a fairly large group of people. The pilot that did an emergency landing on that beach did do exactly that though and he killed two people there. He didn't ditch in the ocean or take his chances in a less suitable place. He chose a beach with children on it.

However, looking around it doesn't seem like light aircraft are frequently killing random bystanders. The victims are by and large the pilots themselves which I don't really care about. You guys are adults and have been adequately informed of the dangers of what you are doing. Allowing informed people to do dangerous things is after all pretty common - cave diving, free diving, free climbing, base jumping, MMA etc.
Given that you've only been able to provide one example after actively searching, I'd say it's pretty safe to apply my statement as a universal. "People on the ground killed by controlled landing of an aircraft on an unprepared surface" is such an unbelievably rare event that it is simply not worth discussing or worrying about.

Kaal posted:

:laffo: If all pilots were anti-parachute then the BRS company would have been bankrupted years ago rather than being a nearly 30 year-old company with $10 million annual revenues. Try again Chuck.
And yet, the system has utterly failed to see widespread adoption, and people with aviation experience not trying to sell the system are nearly unanimous in opposing making it mandatory. Why do you think this is?

My Lil Parachute
Jul 30, 2014

by XyloJW

My Q-Face posted:

Actually, the increased weight of the parachute is going to affect the plane's ability to glide. The Increased wing-load is going to increase the descent rate, reducing the distance over the ground that the plane can travel and reducing the pilot's options for finding a safe landing spot.

Hi! Glider pilot here. The descent rate goes up, but so does your best glide speed. It all works out in the wash. FYI gliders are known to deliberately increase weight (with water ballast) on days with good lift because it lets them travel faster. If it reduced glide ratio you can bet they wouldn't do it.

e: To me the main argument against mandatory parachutes is - there are a huge number of aircraft already out there and their design simply never allowed for such a modification. In many cases the retrofit would be prohibitively expensive - how would you add a chute to a Piper Cub?

Making them mandatory in new aircraft will not save that many lives, given the existing fleet would be grandfathered in. Instead of hiding behind BS laws introduced for our own safety, I wish the wowsers would just come out and say they hate all fun (planes, jet skis, muscle cars etc) that doesn't involve hugging trees or other pissant activities.

My Lil Parachute fucked around with this message at 16:08 on Sep 12, 2014

Dead Reckoning
Sep 13, 2011

Sylink posted:

Hypothetically, would some kind of auto-pilot system that would take over in an emergency and auto-land be safer than a parachute and lighter? 

I can imagine a scenario where a computer can do the aerodynamic calculations to land in a situation where human error makes this impossible.
An aircraft making an emergency landing is by definition operating outside the parameters it is designed for. Barring CFIT and other gross pilot errors, properly working airplanes don't crash. It is impossible to design a computer that takes in to account every possible variable in an emergency: judging situations like this is the reason pilots undergo extensive training. Just as an example, if an aircraft is no longer able to maintain altitude due to severe icing, the pitot-static system may be iced over as well, causing unreliable instrument readings. Since the computer has no way of knowing this, it will crash the aircraft as surely as a spatially disoriented pilot would.

My Q-Face
Jul 8, 2002

A dumb racist who need to kill themselves

ErIog posted:

This is not what other aviators in this thread have been saying. The entire weight argument has always come down to, "I can't fit heavier passengers, overnight gear, or other cargo." So the weight argument in nearly every case in this thread has relied on the extra weight being used by the parachute being used by other cargo. Not a single person has suggested keeping that portion of payload empty to improve glide performance. I think you may have been one of those people who made this very argument with regard to cargo.

You made the assumption that a plane equipped with the parachute would still be able to glide and the parachute wouldn't affect that ability. I was simply pointing out that yes, in fact it would. Of course if you have heavier passengers or cargo that would also affect the plane's ability to glide but that is not what you stated or what I was addressing.

quote:

Also, this right here is incredibly specious. We're not talking about some nebulous trillion dollar cost. We know what these parachutes cost. Whether or not you think that cost is worth it is an argument that could be made, but making a slippery slope argument out of it is just a way to dodge the question. Nobody here has argued for "no matter the cost." No data has been posted yet that shows the cost to be unreasonable. An attempt was made, but it failed pretty hilariously when that data also showed the average income for GA pilots was a significant multiple of the US median income.

One particularly selective piece of data which ignored other data that was also presented.

quote:

The parts of this that aren't specious are just insulting. You're demonstrating a tremendous amount of arrogance in assuming that there's no pilots here arguing against you, and you're falling back on argument from authority fallacies.


An Argument from authority would be "I am a Pilot therefore I just know", not "I am a person who reads professional journals and incident reports and they say X". I even said outright "We get our information from the official incident reports and not from the news".

Perhaps the NTSB would be authority enough for you: http://www.ntsb.gov/aviationquery/month.aspx

You'll find that 30% of accidents occur on take-off and initial climb, and 46% occur during approach and landing. That means that this system is useless for more than 75% of all accidents.

Miss-Bomarc
Aug 1, 2009

ErIog posted:

Why would the pilot pull the chute if they felt like they had enough control to glide down?
The assumption is that the badass superpilot who can keep the aircraft under absolute control with one wing and no engine will, if given an airframe chute, turn into a complete retard who'll pop the chute the first time a passenger farts sideways.

That said...

My Lil Parachute posted:

To me the main argument against mandatory parachutes is - there are a huge number of aircraft already out there and their design simply never allowed for such a modification. In many cases the retrofit would be prohibitively expensive - how would you add a chute to a Piper Cub?
Exactly. And it's not "hate all fun", it's "regulatory capture". Companies that make airframe parachutes think that mandatory parachutes are a swell idea.

Smudgie Buggler
Feb 27, 2005

SET PHASERS TO "GRINDING TEDIUM"

Juche Box Hero posted:

I don't know the guy, and I wasn't there, but it really surprises me he dumped his plane over that. He must be rich.

Yeah, I mean, why would anybody who owns their own aircraft be rich? It doesn't add up.

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My Lil Parachute
Jul 30, 2014

by XyloJW
Because it's impossible to save up 60 grand or so for an aircraft (that you can later resell) unless you are rich, right? No way could you buy a shitter house & save (possibly pooling your cash with a few friends) for something that you're passionate about.

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