Cost Reduction Thought

[Scott_D]

Hi all. My name is Scott, and about 11 years ago I started on my PPL (about 5 hrs) but didn't finish for various reasons. I'm starting up again, and ultimately want to get my certificate in a Cirrus Perspective SR20 (mostly because my wife likes the safety features.) Now I'm looking at finishing up at Wing's Field... they have a Cirrus package for about $7600 (pre-pay discount) which includes 40 flight hrs, but I know that 40hrs is the minimum and it's not practical to assume I'll be ready for my test at that point. I was thinking of putting in some hrs on a Grumman Trainer at PNE before transferring to the Cirrus, just to build up some flight time before I switch to the Cirrus to complete everything. There is almost a $100 dollar difference per hour on the rental of the two aircraft. I was thinking it would be cheaper to put in say 10 hrs on the Grumman trainer, then switch to the Cirrus for hopefully the last 40 hrs, instead of paying for 40hrs up-front on the Cirrus then needing 10 more hours on the back end to feel comfortable at almost $100 dollars more an hr for rental. Am I way off base here, or is this a good idea? This could save me about $1000. Maybe I should just do everything in the Cirrus and just suck it up and deal with the cost.

I flew a 172 before, but that's almost the same price as the Cirrus and not a huge cost savings.

Thanks for your thoughts!!

 

[Jim Logajan]

Unfortunately, the paper about their spin test results written by the Cirrus official responsible for the certification flight testing was removed from the internet. However, it basically said that the airplane passed every Normal Category (Intentional Spins Prohibited) spin test that was attempted before the testing program was stopped when the FAA bought their "equivalent level of safety" argument and substituted the BRS for completion of the testing. Despite the fact that the FAA required Cirrus to make "Chute-Deploy" the spin recovery procedure in the POH as a condition of that "equivalent level of safety" finding, I've seen no evidence of any sort that there is any problem recovering a Cirrus from an incipient (less than 1 turn/3 seconds) spin using classic anti-spin control inputs.

Thanks to some archival systems, things don't always vanish from the Internet. I found this on archive.org:

http://web.archive.org/web/20060203...ign.com/pilotsworld/safety/article_06_03.aspx

I'm not going to quote from it because it is worth reading the whole thing because it contains some interesting observations from a Cirrus design engineer on the decisions and compromises they had to make.

And at the bottom of this next page which hasn't vanished,
http://www.whycirrus.com/engineering/stall-spin.aspx
it states "The European authorities (initially JAA, later EASA) when first evaluating the Cirrus SR20 agreed with the principles of the FAA/ELOS approach but had some further questions. A series of spins was performed on their initiative. While not a complete formal program they reported no unusual characteristics."

They go on to say "The fact remains that a generation of pilots has not received spin training - and from the record of prior generations it wouldn't matter if they had. Cirrus continues to go forward with aircraft designs that meet these higher "passive safety" standards regardless of the implication for spin recovery; and is committed to CAPS as a means to recover from all "loss of control" situations – including spins."

The historical evidence would seem to support their view and approach, though I know a lot of people here and elsewhere would strongly disagree.

 

[Jim Logajan]

Those aren't the one to which I was referring, which talked about the spin testing program in a lot more detail.

This is the only other thing I could find:

http://www.peter2000.co.uk/aviation/misc/3-105960-Cirrusstall-spinreport.pdf

It goes into more detail - but appears to itself contain a summary of what is in Cirrus Design reports "12419" and "15568" which may be what you had in mind?