Excellent article.
Something not addressed in the article is the evolution of training and pilot attitudes over the years. One must remember the SR22 has only been in production for 12 years. That's not very long in the whole scheme of things. Consequently, I think the pilots who bought in early oftentimes came in to the cockpit with an "I'm not gonna pull the chute unless a wing falls off," attitude. They were too hesitant to deploy because they had an old school mentality. There was also more of a stigma among pilots, which thankfully is fading away, that someone is somehow a lesser pilot if they pull the big red handle. Nobody had ever flown with an airframe parachute before and they didn't know what to make of it. I read an account from one Cirrus pilot who successfully made a dead stick landing and literally forgot he even *had* a parachute on the plane until after getting on the ground.
To make matters worse, average instructors did not know the quirks of the plane or how to teach effectively in the plane. Remember, this was a clean sheet design and doesn't quite match up with the performance characteristics of Bonanzas, Mooneys, and so on. One of the fatal accidents was a stall/spin in the traffic patten by a pilot undergoing a flight review from an instructor with little to no time in Cirrus aircraft. Thankfully the pool of experienced Cirrus instructors has steadily increased over time and pilots now have more access to instructors who can give better transition and recurrent training.
Additionally, the Cirrus factory training department did not emphasize the chute the same way in the early years as they do today. It's always been an important part of training, but I'm pretty sure they've become more and more liberal with deployment scenarios over time. It's now to the point where they basically say, if you're not going to be landing on a runway, deploy the chute. There has been a big push to get pilots deploying the system under a broader range of scenarios. I completely agree with this philosophy.
As a result of these shifts, I think we'll see significantly better statistics in the next ten years compared to the previous ten years.
I don't think it's unlike the early jet age. There was a spike in accidents in what should have been, and ultimately proved to be, safer airplanes. It took time for pilot attitudes and training departments to catch up.
My question for the Cirrus drivers on here is how much instruction are you given with each airplane from the factory? Also what are usual insurance requirements?
I was given one full day of ground training, a little over an hour in their sim (extremely realistic, BTW), and about 3 hours of flying to become a CSIP. I already had about 100 hours in SR22s, and 1000+ in G1000 cockpits, so most of the training was in depth systems knowledge, how to teach emergency/abnormal scenarios, and general standardization training, like what airspeeds and power settings they recommend for various situations.
Insurance requirements vary greatly based on the pilot and underwriters.
