The rocket motor trigger is not “armed.” You arm it only when you pull the handle. It cannot go off without a deliberate pull on the handle. Firing the rocket requires a 35-40 pound tug. This can be done by just about any adult, but hardly qualifies as a “hair trigger.”
CAN IT DETONATE ON A HARD LANDING?
No. Short of pulling the handle, the rocket cannot ignite. You can’t fire it by hitting it, dropping it, heating it (within reason), or any other action. Only pulling the handle will fire it. The unit cannot “just go off.” It is dormant until the pilot exerts a deliberate two-step action.
Last April, the Cirrus that hit the mountain, didn’t that chute go off upon impact? Thought I heard that. (from Cirrus)
Perhaps, as it appears to have happened in this recent crash, the pilot might have attempted to pull the chute, and the “slack” was pulled out and then the rocket detonated upon impact.
Last April, the Cirrus that hit the mountain, didn’t that chute go off upon impact? Thought I heard that. (from Cirrus)
Perhaps, as it appears to have happened in this recent crash, the pilot might have attempted to pull the chute, and the “slack” was pulled out and then the rocket detonated upon impact.
Just curious.
John “JT” Helms
John,
Oddly enough, YOU’RE one of the people I would go to if I wanted to find out the “inside story” of an accident!
I also heard that the BRS rocket was detonated at the scene, but not that it had gone off on impact. There’s an important distinction: That accident scene showed evidence of a significant fire. BRS says that “You can’t fire it by hitting it, dropping it, heating it (within reason)…”; but the fuel-fed fire of an aircraft wreck scene might easily exceed “reason” for detonation.
In addition, nothing I’ve personally heard or read about that accident indicates anything other than that the airplane flew straight into the mountain in cruise configuration.
Anything’s possible – but absent data, all else is speculation. How long before we can expect a final report from the NTSB?
Well, to be honest, I do get the inside skinny often times, but some of the info is relayed to me with the stipulation that it will be held in confidence. So I am not always at liberty to tell everything that has been told to me.
Not so in this case, but in discussions about the recent accident with Cirrus, the chute deployment post-impact in the accident last April was mentioned. I do not know if that was upon impact, or several minutes later (i.e. during a fire).
Thus, my post. Just thought someone else out there might know.
I had a conversation with a “reliable source” not long after the accident, and it sounded like the pieces were all pretty small. Between fire and impact damage, it is unsurprising that the rocket motor discharged. I don’t know if there was any forensic attempt to determine when the rocket fired. Perhaps when the NTSB report narrative is posted we may know more.
After having read all too many NTSB reports on general aviation accidents I’d be willing to bet that in essence the report will say something profound and worthless like 1) pilot continued VFR into IFR conditions and 2) flew into terrain.
The NTSB in general spends very little time with most GA accidents. It usually takes them about a year to reach their conclusions.
I hope that with the BRS system being relatively new they do include their findings regarding its deployment but don’t hold your breath.
I’ve tried to extract useful data from NTSB reports on mid air collisions and often they don’t even say if either aircraft had an operating transponder at the time of the collision. They just failed to see and avoid each other. The quality of NTSB reports in GA is the reason that in order to learn anything useful we have to speculate about all the possible underlying reasons for the accident. Even if our speculations are false just thinking about the many reasons things could have gone wrong is a valuable exercise.
Even for GA accidents, there is often a significant amount of detail in the narrative section when fatalities are involved. Things like control position, cable continuity, etc., are pretty standard (be sure to read the narrative section, not just the conclusion.) Given the mention of the parachute in the preliminary report, I would expect at least some verbiage about it.
Things like “witness marks” (a truly wonderful and chilling euphemism) on the face of instruments, and light bulb filament stretching, do turn up in the “interesting” (to the NTSB) GA accidents. Hopefully the parachute system is interesting enough for them to have done at least a bit of forensic investigation.
If you want to see a whole lot of verbiage in a GA accident, take a look at Scott Anderson’s accident (3/23/98) for the opposite extreme. This was obviously of great interest to both the NTSB and the FAA due to the fact that it was a control failure on the very first production article of a new design, but it shows that they will go to great lengths when there is the possibility of a fundamental problem.
Of course, even if they did look closely at it, it’s entirely possible that nothing conclusive could be drawn from the data. We’ll just have to wait and see.
Dave, I really do read the entire reports and have consistently been unimpressed with the detail they go into with GA accidents. The exceptions are celebrity accidents (e.g. Kennedy) and truly unusual accidents that call design integrity into question (e.g. Scott Anderson’s accident). This is in marked contrast to the NTSB’s reports on air carrier accidents that go into incredible detail and deal with crew interactions, weather, mechanical factors, specific decisions that are made etc. In fact, many GA investigations are delegated to the FAA for investigation and while reported by the NTSB represent only a statement of what the FAA concluded. I understand that while the NTSB has limited resources and a full investigation of all GA accidents is probably not possible, the lack of in depth investigations truly minimizes the value of the final report.
Continued VFR into IFR conditions or collision with terrain may tell you what happened, but it does not tell you why it happened and that’s what’s important in accident prevention.
I think we’re in violent agreement. I don’t know how the process works, just what I see in the reports. It appears that whenever there is a fatality involved (and no surviving occupants) that the investigation at least attempts to determine whether it was more than the obvious by trying to establish whether the engine was developing power, the controls were working, etc.Clearly the level of detail is usually much less than in the case of air carrier accidents, for fairly obvious reasons, not the least of which is that there are fatal GA accidents on a daily basis, never mind the nonfatals, and there’s no way to do much other than the standard investigation checklist on most of them. And even with more thorough investigations, clear causes are less likely than with air carrier crashs, primarily because a combination of training and technology has been pretty successful in eliminating the Just Plain Stupid category for air carrier ops. GA pilots, on the other hand, are much more likely to be inscrutable in their accidents.I’ve found, however, that oftentimes the preliminary report foreshadows the direction the investigation is going. The fact that the chute was mentioned in the prelim gives at least some hope that it has been scrutinized in the subsequent analysis.Perhaps, in its own ironic way, the lack of detail may make us all safer. If a report tells us exactly what went wrong, it may be easier to say “I’d never do that” and go on, whereas a certain level of nagging doubt may spur us to take a broader look at how we operate our aircraft.
“Continued VFR into IFR conditions or collision with terrain may tell you what happened, but it does not tell you why it happened and that’s what’s important in accident prevention”
And I understand that is the sole function of the NTSB investigations: to determine how to avoid the accidents in the future.
I think we are indeed in agreement. The interesting question in most GA accidents is why did the pilot do something that in retrospect was really stupid. What we all need to do is think about all the possible reasons the pilot did what he did. What matters isn’t whether we’re right (we’re not there to establish blame), but that we seriously consider the variety of thought processes, acts of omission and acts of commission that can get us personally into trouble. Once we’ve identified what could have been a problem we are better able to avoid that problem in our own flying.
Also, I don’t fault the NTSB for its GA reporting. I understand that they have limited resources. All I’m saying is that it is OK for us to speculate about multiple scenarios - not to point the blame, but to learn and think about all that can go wrong.
True enough. In fairness they do tell us not to continue VFR into IMC. They do tell us it’s a bad thing to fly into terrain. They make a point of showing the danger in low flying and “buzz” jobs. They remind us that we need to compensate for crosswinds etc. etc. etc.
Where they fall down is in explaining why pilots who presumably already know all the above keep doing the same things over and over again.