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Comment by olympus | Hacker News Reader

There is a common opinion in the aviation community that several of the "saves" from the recovery chute in a Cirrus shouldn't really count. In an aircraft that wasn't equipped with a parachute, (anecdotally) many of the "departures of controlled flight" could have been fixed without a chute before crashing. Undoubtedly some of them are actual saves, but opinion is that people pull the handle too early just because it is there and they get scared. Again, this is just an opinion and not shared by everyone.

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That may be the case, but I don't think it is an argument against the chute. As pilots, we look at past accidents and it is easy to say 'I wouldn't have done that' but once placed in that situation, the reality is often different. The COPA motto for use of the chute is 'Pull early, Pull often' and I think this represents the fact that training can only go so far (this is seen to be the case both with professional and amateur pilots) and pilots should not 'deserve' to crash due to poor decision making.

I don't think anyone takes the decision of pulling the parachute lightly, but in many cases it is statistically the best path to take (there have been no fatalities through proper use of the parachute). If pilots had been using the parachute in cases where it is not necessary, insurance premiums etc. would reflect this but this has not been the case. I think the main debate is to the risk of injuring someone on the ground. Thankfully this has not happened yet, but it should be the duty of pilots to put the safety of others ahead of themselves.

Although it is no doubt true that some of the pulls could have ended safely with no injury without pulling, that doesn't mean they were incorrect pulls. I think parachutes are great safety devices. At the risk of definitively putting myself on the wrong side of other pilots' opinion, I think it's great when flying can and is safely opened to lower skilled individuals. The more pilots flying means more support for airports and aviation services.

In other words, maybe you could have recovered from their "departure from controlled flight", but maybe they can't; and since there is a safety mechanism to recover them, that becomes OK (instead of a fatality statistic).

There is also a common opinion among Cirrus owners that a number of fatal Cirrus accidents could have been avoided had the pilot deployed the chute, i.e. people don't pull the handle early enough.

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