In the year 2000 the world of small aviation saw a revolutionary airplane come to market - designed by two brothers who dreamed (foolishly, they were told) of a better airplane than the existing "spam cans" with designs decades old. 16 years later the Cirrus SR22 is the best selling single engine piston plane in the world. It has one revolutionary, still-unique safety device - a parachute which can safely lower to the ground the entire airplane and all its passengers in the event of an emergency. In addition to this parachute, back in the year 2000 Cirrus added other features which seemed guaranteed to reduce fatality rates - including a giant moving map which made it almost impossible for a small airplane pilot to "get lost."
However a curious thing happened - Cirrus pilots began dying in huge numbers despite the fact that they were flying around in an airplane which seemed to have a huge safety advantage on its competition. Many theories have been put forth as to why this is - from deficits in the airframe design to overconfidence in the pilots due to the presence of a revolutionary safety device. My point is not to dissect that here - you can easily find detailed discussion elsewhere.
I want only to point out one thing - with a concerted effort the Cirrus owner community was able to wrestle down that fatality rate dramatically, as seen in the graph below. [CAPS saves means pilots who pulled the parachute lever for one reason or another and lived to tell about it rather than crash their airplane and die in it while trying to fly it to the ground despite bad weather, engine trouble, catastrophic airframe failure, etc.]
Now, I believe, the Cirrus accident rate sits well below the general aviation average.
What it took was education of the pilot base - training them to pull the damn chute and not to take additional risks they would not take when flying an airplane which did not have a parachute.
And frankly - it took a lot of deaths as well - to get people to sit up and take the problem seriously. But things did eventually get better.
What did not happen was the U.S. government deciding to tell Cirrus how to engineer its airplanes - the pilot community solved the problem over time on its own.
I hope we will be able to do the same with the Tesla driver community. Maybe we need our own organized effort - trying to keep the government out of our automobiles and educating our owners to pay attention when they drive.
Klapmeier brothers - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
However a curious thing happened - Cirrus pilots began dying in huge numbers despite the fact that they were flying around in an airplane which seemed to have a huge safety advantage on its competition. Many theories have been put forth as to why this is - from deficits in the airframe design to overconfidence in the pilots due to the presence of a revolutionary safety device. My point is not to dissect that here - you can easily find detailed discussion elsewhere.
I want only to point out one thing - with a concerted effort the Cirrus owner community was able to wrestle down that fatality rate dramatically, as seen in the graph below. [CAPS saves means pilots who pulled the parachute lever for one reason or another and lived to tell about it rather than crash their airplane and die in it while trying to fly it to the ground despite bad weather, engine trouble, catastrophic airframe failure, etc.]
Now, I believe, the Cirrus accident rate sits well below the general aviation average.
What it took was education of the pilot base - training them to pull the damn chute and not to take additional risks they would not take when flying an airplane which did not have a parachute.
And frankly - it took a lot of deaths as well - to get people to sit up and take the problem seriously. But things did eventually get better.
What did not happen was the U.S. government deciding to tell Cirrus how to engineer its airplanes - the pilot community solved the problem over time on its own.
I hope we will be able to do the same with the Tesla driver community. Maybe we need our own organized effort - trying to keep the government out of our automobiles and educating our owners to pay attention when they drive.
Klapmeier brothers - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
