This is an amazing life-saving technology, with an interesting psychological back story.

I fly one of these airplanes. Cirrus was the first (and I believe is still the only) manufacturer who equips all of their aircraft with a whole-airfame parachute system like this. Since these are single-engine aircraft, engine failure is a concern – even though these engines are highly reliable.

Single-engine pilots are normally trained to glide to a safe landing site in the event of engine failure. However, there is often not a suitable landing site within gliding distance. Flying at night, over mountains, or over heavily-wooded terrain don’t leave a lot of options. Furthermore, many types of in-flight emergencies don’t lend themselves to a successful dead-stick landing. Limited visibility, pilot incapacitation, smoke in the cockpit, damage to control surfaces and many other situations that can arise, make it difficult or impossible to glide to a safe landing. Also, unless the emergency landing site is actually an airport runway, many potentially fatal hazards exist that could not be spotted until too late – stumps, ditches, fences, power lines – all can turn an emergency off-airport landing into a fatal crash.

Ironically, there have been a large number of deaths in Cirrus aircraft where the pilot simply did not choose to deploy the chute. Post-crash analysis revealed that the chute would probably have saved all passengers in the plane. When the chute has been used, (over 30 times in the past decade or so) it has a stellar performance record. There have been zero fatalities when the chute was used within its operational parameters.

This problem turns out to be one of pilot psychology. Many of the people who fly airplanes are personality types who thrive on being in control, and don’t relish the idea of “giving up” and pulling the red handle – turning control over to the chute. This fatal decision-making flaw has led to dozens of deaths over the past decade – deaths that could easily have been prevented by simply using a piece of technology already in the plane.

Engineers share many of these same personality traits with pilots. It is important in our engineering work that we do not fall victim to the same faulty decision making that prevents Cirrus accident pilots from choosing the chute. We should lose our not-invented-here (NIH) control tendencies and embrace the experience and innovation of others whenever we can.