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Cyrus wrote:
> . . . But I won't stop practicing off airport
landings as you don't
> always want to pull the chute.
Cyrus,
The word in the
ultralight/fat-ultralight/now-Sport world is that you don’t pull the chute
handle unless you’ve lost control of the plane such as structural failure or
losing it in IMC
or
if you have no place to
land such as water, trees or a field of boulders or it’s pitch black and the
fan’s not working.
Virtually all the time,
you’ll be as safe (and the plane’ll be a lot more likely to be reusable) if you
fly down to a controlled landing.
Countering that,
- Coupes don’t tend to fall apart unless you play
with aerobatics.
- If you don’t fly into clouds, you don’t have to
worry about losing control in the clouds.
- If you ALWAYS have a land-able field within
gliding distance, you just land.
(People in the forested regions like Connecticut may want to get
chutes – on my one visit there, I was more nervous than flying over the
ocean.)
- If you do your night flying on moonlit nights,
the safety record is close to day VFR.
Still, I think you’re
right, virtually all new Sport planes will have chutes and they’ll prove
themselves as long as too many idiots don’t pull the handle when they should
have just landed the thing in the field.
Coming down by chute
gives you NO control over the soft crash – you can just expect it’ll be less
bumpy than an uncontrolled high-speed crash. It’s not a landing. Don’t expect the plane will be flyable –
sometimes they are totaled, sometimes they are undamaged, other times can be
anything in between.
Bottom line: don’t pull the handle if you have the
option of an emergency landing.
Ed
Burkhead
http://edburkhead.com/
ed -at- edburkheadQQQ.com (change -at- and remove the QQQ)
-----Original Message-----
From: Dr. Cyrus Wood-Thomas
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Thursday, December 02, 2004
10:08 AM
To: Ercoupe Hangar Flying
Subject: [COUPERS-FLYIN] Cyrus w/
rabbits foot
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