> > There are very few emergencies (in my opinion) in which parachute deployment would be the appropriate response unless there was an extremely unfortunate set of circumstances which led to the airplane being unable to fly or glide (like a wing snapping off)
> I've been a Cirrus instructor for 15 years. This attitude is completely wrong and is exactly what has led more people to be killed than needed to be, especially when Cirruses first came to the market and the chute was a new thing in production aircraft. We TEACH, intentionally, people to ask FIRST, "do I need to use the chute," and the answer is never "no." It's either, "Yes," or "not yet."
> There have been pilots - plenty of them - that had every opportunity to use the chute but kept gliding, or spinning, or whatever, and now they and their passengers are dead.
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> Lose the engine - most of the time, pull the chute. Yes, even better than landing in a nice open field. The chute works. If I screw up the landing, or the field has ditches, furrows, irrigation, cows, power lines, fences, rocks, or who knows what else, I might just be screwed setting a plane down at 65-70kts. But not if I float down into it protected by my roll cage, high-g seats, air bags, etc.
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Well of course they do.
CAPS does a pretty good job putting an upper bound on the worst case result. They don't care if you screw your plane up because that's a known cost and you'll pay it back through premiums if you keep flying.
Dead sticking it has a very good chance of being no more expensive than a normal landing if you find a runway and not all that expensive if you find a good field or empty highway (i.e. a big towing bill) so of course most pilots would prefer to dead stick. But this comes with a small chance of you crashing into a daycare and maxing out your policy. The insurers do not want this.
Most decent pilots with good situational will be able to make the correct call between CAPs and dead sticking it. They're telling you to go CAPS all the time because they have to deal with idiot pilots too. It's the same reason every drivers ed program emphasizes brakes, brakes, brakes, despite the steering wheel being a far better way to avoid many problems. They don't trust you to make the call.
[citation needed]I know of a skydive place that does or at least used to regularly (like once or twice a week) dead stick it in a C182 because they would fly with the bare minimum of fuel (when you're flying up and down all day even a little extra weight costs a lot of money).
At least a non-pilot co-passenger might want to try their luck gliding to open area and then pulling it.
A fall of 10 feet puts you at ~17 mph when you hit. 20mph is a good approximation.
You’ll go wherever the wind pulls you. And might hit the side of something faster than 20mph before hitting the ground.
And hitting a crowd at 20mph.
Chute pulls are almost 100% survivable. Landing in a field is a much lower percentage. Just hitting nearly invisible power lines can slice a plane in half. You also have a fire danger when landing off airport. And many dead engine landings result in landing short of the field.
You aren’t going to get ridicule from the Cirrus community for pulling the chute and even if you did, it’s less ridicule than crash landing into a field that looked suitable from 2000 feet up.
It's almost impossible to tell what the situation is on the ground until it's too late--an unnoticed ditch can kill you.