If Only They Could
Rig a Big Parachute
To a Jumbo Jet's Tail
---
A Safety Device to Prevent
Small-Plane Crashes Hits
A Wall With Some Pilots
By Susan Carey
Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal
1163 Words
7866 Characters
12/08/98
The Wall Street Journal
A1
(Copyright (c) 1998, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.)
Ron Kline was facing death. At 1,200 feet the rudder jammed on his
ultralight plane, sending it spiraling toward the ground at 80 miles an
hour. "God, my life is over," he thought.
But wait. His plane had a parachute. In his terror, he had almost
forgotten about it. Now he yanked a lever, heard the chute open and felt
it break the plane's dive. He woke up on the ground. "I cracked two
ribs," the Nicholasville, Ky., machine-shop owner says of the July,
1997, accident. "That literally was it."
A parachute on a plane? The idea isn't complex. Or new. A 1947
Seagram's V.O. advertisement shows a small plane suspended from a
parachute; military fighter pilots bail out of planes in ejection seats
rigged with parachutes; and chutes have been used to slow the descent of
many a spacecraft returning to Earth. Yet until now, only hang-gliders,
experimental light aircraft and home-built kit planes such as Mr.
Kline's offered parachutes as an option.
* But this October, a company called Cirrus Design Corp. of Duluth,
Minn., received Federal Aviation Administration design approval for a
single-engine four-seat airplane equipped with a 55-feet-in-diameter
parachute. A cockpit lever sends the parachute shooting out the back of
the plane on a solid-fuel rocket. More than 200 people have plunked down
nonrefundable deposits of $15,000 for the $168,000 aircraft. The first
deliveries are scheduled for early 1999.
But here's the unexpected part: The product is controversial. Even
though 600 to 800 Americans die every year in small-plane accidents, the
parachute maker has received angry letters and calls from pilots
concerned that the FAA will make parachutes mandatory on all small
planes, the same way that seatbelts are required in all cars.
Experienced pilots also worry that novices will pull the lever at the
first sign of trouble. "One of the dangers is that somebody's going to
rely on that safety feature instead of practicing and staying proficient
in emergency procedures," says Dean Ellis, owner of Windy City Flyers, a
flight school and flying club in Wheeling, Ill.
Even with a parachute, a falling plane is dangerous. Once the
parachute is deployed, the pilot can't control the plane's direction,
and it still descends at 17 miles an hour, smashing whatever it lands
on. A reinforced cage around the passengers is supposed to protect them
from injury, but the plane itself is almost always destroyed in the
process. That has some insurers fretting about liability for passengers
hurt in those "soft" landings, and others worried they will have to pay
more in claims for damaged aircraft.
Certainly, the GM of small-aircraft, Textron Inc.'s Cessna Aircraft
Co., isn't considering equipping its planes with parachutes. (An
after-market parachute for an older Cessna model was produced a few
years ago by the maker of the Cirrus chute, but was roundly ignored by
general-aviation pilots.) "This is not the way we will take our
company," says a Cessna spokeswoman. "Airplanes do not fall out of the
sky. A well-trained pilot who manages his or her aircraft accordingly is
sufficient for safety."
But Cirrus calls such thinking idealistic. "The industry counts on
well-trained pilots and they're not always," says Alan Klapmeier,
president of Cirrus. "People run out of gas in airplanes and get
killed."
Other critics simply wonder whether parachutes will work. Richard
Collins, editor at large of Flying, a popular aviation magazine, says
bad-weather winds sometimes make planes go so fast that a parachute
would be torn to shreds if deployed. He also contends that many
accidents occur when planes stall out and go into spins below 500 feet
-- an altitude he says is too low for any chute to be effective.
Cirrus doesn't claim its parachute will work in all conditions or at
all altitudes, just as seat-belt makers don't guarantee their products
will ensure survival. Moreover, the system has never been tested in a
real life-and-death situation. But to obtain FAA certification, Cirrus
and parachute maker Ballistic Recovery Systems Inc. were required to
conduct numerous demonstrations, and during those trials the chute never
failed to deploy and the airframe withstood the impact of a crash
landing.
The Cirrus parachute plane is rooted in two near-death experiences.
In 1977, Boris Popov was 500 feet in the air being towed by a boat when
the crossbar on his hang-glider broke. "I was going down like a lawn
dart and I was mad at myself for not having a parachute to deploy," he
recalls.
Mr. Popov didn't meet his maker that day, thanks to a helmet. But the
lake landing knocked the fillings out of his teeth and got him thinking.
Before long he founded Ballistic Recovery of South St. Paul, Minn. The
company markets rocket-fired parachute systems to users of hang-gliders,
experimental light aircraft and home-built plane kits. Among the 14,000
chutes it has sold, BRS counts 121 known "saves," including Mr. Kline.
(The parachutes have been a tough sell, however: Mr. Kline showed a
video of his accident, which somebody happened to catch on camera, to
members of his ultralight-flying club, where three people have died in
accidents in the past three years and a fourth was left paraplegic. Only
one person popped for a chute.)
The use of parachutes on factory-made general-aviation planes is
coming about because of another lucky survivor. Cirrus's Mr. Klapmeier
was flying in Wisconsin in 1984 when his plane collided in midair with
another. He managed to land but watched the other pilot, a man it turned
out he knew, "go all the way down," crash and die.
Around that time, Mr. Klapmeier and his brother Dale started a
company that produced kit planes for hobbyists. When the Klapmeiers
decided to build a production aircraft, they envisioned a chute as
standard equipment. Somehow, their paths crossed with Mr. Popov, and in
1994, the three started experimenting with a chute large enough for a
heavy plane.
Considering that this will be Cirrus's first general-aviation plane,
the parachute, which adds about $10,000 to the aircraft's price tag, is
an effective marketing tool. With it, "we'll walk away" from a crash,
says Dave Humphreys, head of the Recreation Vehicle Industry Association
in Reston, Va., who is eagerly awaiting delivery of his model. "Those
other people will go splat."
Sam Johnson Jr., a car dealer in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, has been flying
for nearly 20 years and says his wife Pamela liked their six-seater 1973
Bonanza "just fine." But when she learned of the parachute on the
Cirrus, "she figured she could save her own life and the kids' lives" if
he had a heart attack in-flight or was otherwise unable to keep flying.
Mr. Johnson says he has encouraged his wife to take flying lessons. "But
she likes this parachute idea better: You just hang on and float to the
ground."
"I'm sure pilots with attitude would think this is wimpy," says David
Katz, a Santa Cruz, Calif., software engineer who is awaiting a Cirrus.
"But I don't really care."
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