Is there a list of all the Cirrus parachute deployments, both succesfull and less than that?
John: Welcome!!! Rick Beach in San Diego has been keeping an exhaustive list of all Cirrus incidents and has anything you need!
If you are thinking of a single piston aircraft—buy a Cirrus—they are fantastic modes of personal transportation!!!
Thanks Ed,
I did join.
Regards,
John
Welcome!
In reply to:
John: Welcome!!! Rick Beach in San Diego has been keeping an exhaustive list of all Cirrus incidents and has anything you need!
Indeed true, but since this is posted on the public side of the COPA forum, let me elaborate.
COPA considers safety as a priority. It is part of the motto, although in Latin, “volatus et salus”
Several COPA members started tracking accident reports and I’ve compiled an extensive information base about both fatal accidents and parachute deployments. Much of this information is kept up-to-date on the COPApedia web site for COPA members. Since COPApedia is a wiki, additional information is welcome and can be included by any member.
Discussions about Cirrus parachute activations and fatal accidents are legend. Several key figures in the general aviation world have participated in our discussions, our fly-ins, and our annual migration and seen the passion, the dedication, and the results of the COPA commitment to safety. Occasionally, they share their impressions of COPA to others in their world. These include people from the Air Safety Foundation, Aero-News.Net, aviation journalists and bloggers, GA manufacturers, major flight operations groups, members of other airplane type clubs, etc.
As an example, the recent Cirrus accident in Faribault, MN, has generated a discussion thread with 245 replies and 18,500 views in 4 days. It contains a wealth of insight about the accident, discussion of accident factors as we learn about them, and suggestions and actions that each of us can take to break our own accident chains.
COPA just published a special safety issue of our Cirrus Pilot magazine in Nov/Dec 2007, which I helped to edit. A huge amount of safety-related information appears there. While Cirrus Pilot primarily serves the COPA member community, this issue was distributed to the non-member Cirrus owner community also.
If someone is interested in joining COPA, then this safety issue may return more value than the membership fee.
Oh, by the way, the accident rate of COPA members is astounding: 14% of fatal accidents involved COPA members (4 of 31) yet about 50% of Cirrus pilots are COPA members.
We welcome your curiosity.
Cheers
Rick
In reply to:
yet about 50% of Cirrus pilots are COPA members.
Rick
How do we know that Rick?
In reply to:
yet about 50% of Cirrus pilots are COPA members.
In reply to:
How do we know that Rick?
By guessing!
Actually, we’ve done some work with Cirrus Design and the COPA membership database to come us with an estimate. We know that there are 2700+ paid members of COPA. We know that about 90% report various pilot qualifications in the member database. So, we expect about 2400+ Cirrus pilots are members of COPA.
So how many Cirrus pilots are there?
We know that about 2000 distinct Cirrus SR2X airplanes are reported in the database from the population of 3500 airplanes produced. That’s 2400 Cirrus pilots for 2000 airplanes.
Of the remaining 1500 airplanes, we know most are owner/operated with some are in the hands of flight schools, flying clubs, and rental operations. From earlier CD marketing work, we believe that there are about 40 flights schools and about 70 operations with planes for rent. Some of the flying clubs have 50 to 100 members checked out in a Cirrus, although they report only a small fraction fly regularly. And we know that several flight schools are in operation with multiple airplanes.
Now take a guess how many pilots that represents. Most of the non-COPA 1500 planes are owner flown with perhaps 200 to 300 in use with multiple pilots. Seems easy to justify another 2,500 but hard to stretch that to much more.
If there are 5,000 Cirrus pilots, then COPA represents about 50%.
Anyone got a better SWAG?
Cheers
Rick
In reply to:
If there are 5,000 Cirrus pilots, then COPA represents about 50%.
Anyone got a better SWAG?
Not better, but just different. We pulled all the Cirrus registrations in the FAA database, and compared them to the planes listed by current COPA members. About half were hits.
That sounds like reasonable math … I was just curious.