Ballistic Chutes revisited

[grosvenor]

I have just read through this entire thread and the following are some thoughts that came to mind, in no particular order!

Whether to fit a chute or not is a personal preference. Consider this scenario. Would you wear a helmet when riding a motorbike? You don’t plan on having an accident on your bike, but it could happen. Is your helmet going to save you…maybe, maybe not? I’m sure there are helmet manufacturers who can give you plenty of reports of how a helmet saved someone’s life. But what about the guy who had his gizzards spread all over the road, the only thing remaining being his helmet and perfectly in tact head! Do you now not wear a helmet because in some situations it might not be of use?

So if you feel better with a chute fitted, go ahead. If you don’t believe they are worth the money, it’s your choice. Like someone said, there are very few disadvantages to fitting a chute.

As for the price, we would all like them to be cheaper. But lets look at it over the life of the chute. The GRS has a total life of 30 years, with a repack and new rocket required every 6 years. At a purchase price of R28k, flying 100hrs a year, the cost works out at R9 per hour. The repack will cost an additional R10 per hour. Is R19 per hour worth the extra margin of safety…you decide?

There is no guarantee that having a chute fitted will save your life. Scenarios where it could help are engine failure over water or hostile terrain, loss of control in turbulence, loss of control in cloud, incapacitation of pilot, structural failure and so on. Also remember that if you go down in a remote or forested area, the 100m2 of brightly coloured canopy will make you much more visible for S&R.

An interesting bit if trivia. In a lecture delivered in 2000 to the German Glider Pilot Symposium, DG Flugzeugbau, one of the worlds largest sailplane manufacturers, ponders the idea that “safety does NOT sell”. One example they give is a situation when a pilot needs to parachute out of an uncontrollable glider. Only 50% survive. Of those that don’t survive, many get knocked out by the canopy leaving the glider as it is ejected, leaving the pilot unable to escape. So DG brought out a device that could be retrofitted to their gliders very easily that made sure the canopy peeled away without hitting the pilot. The device sold for EUR 50.00. Of the 1,400 possible aircraft concerned, only 28 of these safety devices were sold over a 2-year period, just 2% of owners.

I think that it’s human nature to believe that accidents only happen to other people. The other possibility is that fitting a safety device such as a ballistic chute means you must admit that flying is dangerous. Rather than put yourself into an internal conflict over your own conviction and reality, you simply ignore the issue. Any psychologists out there?

Some mention was made of the older spring type chutes. Remember that the origins of rescue chutes stem from hang gliders where the first chutes were hand deployed. Later, as they moved on to being used on microlights, the spring-deployed chute was developed. All the more recent chutes are rocket deployed. Sounds to me like an evolutionary process, so I don’t see why anyone would want to revert to an older technology. A spring-deployed chute will work from a stable platform, but is likely to get tangled in the structure if the aircraft is out of control. In a rocket propelled chute like the GRS, the rocket drags the parachute to a distance of 17m from the aircraft in 0.7 seconds, leaving little chance of it getting tangled in the structure.

Dave

[gertcoetzee]

Dave,

I thought that if the GRS/BRS was dirt cheap, we would all have them (and it seems that 1 out of every 2 trikers feel this way - see votes).

But when Alex (Safety Alex!) and Danie Wahl (the 2nd hand chute guy in these posts) tells me that trikes don't need chutes I am starting to wonder.

Selling anything (be it chutes, insurance or eternal life) based on insecurities is the wrong way to go about it. Rather show the evidence, then the informed decision will follow easily (albeit expensively). The jehovian lists of "lifes saved" on the BRS/GRS web sites do go some way, but the details are anecdotal and not entirely convincing.

If I fall with DVE and use my chute to survive, and fall with WUO (no chute) the next week and am not here to tell the story, I will call that evidence. Randomised. Double blind and (splat!) controlled.

Gert

[grosvenor]

Maybe the chute manufacturers charge what they believe the market will pay, although I'm not sure this is necessarily the case. I know of 6 manufacturers and you would think that at least one of them would have gone with the idea of selling thousands of chutes for a very low price rather than hundereds at a high price. Dunno.

It's difficult to produce the facts you are after. Save stories are bound to be anecdotal as they are not witnessed by the manufacturer, and are seldom caught on camera. As to those that don't survive, how do we know if the chute could have saved them or not? Maybe they couldn't get to the firing handle, maybe they didn't fire the chute for another reason, how do we know? I'm sure you know of the Cirrus 4-seater that comes fitted with a BRS as standard. There have been a few that have crashed, killing the occupants, and Cirrus can't answer why they didn't use the chute. On other Cirrus accidents, the chute was used successfully. In some of these cases the occupants could possibly have survived even if no chute was fitted. So it's very difficult to produce black and white evidence that a chute is a necessity. Take another example closer to home. Would Alan Honeyborne have survived if his trike had a chute? We'll never know. What about Martin Walker, he had a chute but is couldn't help him.

I'm not interested in selling anything based on insecurities. Each of us has an opinion. If you believe a chute is a necessity, go for it and fit one, if like Alex you do not, I respect that as well.

Dave