Notice the engine oil visible under the tail. That was deposited before it hit the ground.
Allegedly, the two managed to get out of the plane on their own, but shortly thereafter the parachute was lifted by a gust of wind and the plane tumbled over the nose.
Then they got lucky, you don’t want to be stuck upside down in a low-wing aircraft, and even worse if you are hurt. I did not know this could happen, and makes you wonder if it’s a good idea to pull the chute in high winds, especially if you have the option to do an emergency landing into the wind.
Guess AvWeb Paul’s vid still is valid… How Effective Is The Cirrus Parachute System?
172driver wrote:
I’ve landed on worse grass strips…Looking at these videos – why on earth did they not attempt a normal landing? The area looks perfect for an off-airport touchdown.
Is that a door on near the upper margin, on a field over (Edit: At 21 seconds in)? Do the doors get ejected when using the parachute?
172driver wrote:
Looking at these videos – why on earth did they not attempt a normal landing? The area looks perfect for an off-airport touchdown.
“Pull soon, pull often”?
If I recall this is what Cirrus does tell it’s pilots. So all they did is follow SOP. With the result that they are both alive.
If I get it right, the airplane got blown over once they had evacuated. But since a parashute pull almost always results into a hull loss, not much difference.
With the result that they are both alive.
We have done this many times… the above implies that all Cirrus pilots will not be alive unless they pull the chute, which is obviously nonsense, both logically and actually.
That is also the bizzare position of the US Cirrus marketing machine (the famous “pull early, pull often” speech by their chief evangelist Rich Beach, who has a fanatical following in COPA circles, with members ensuring that they leave en-masse any forum where this edict is questioned 
)
In this accident, their injuries may have been caused by damaged seats – the honeycomb damaged by people kneeling on it on previous occassions. Some previous threads on this… Or the chute was deployed too late.
I´m still a glider pilot at heart, and I did many, many outlandings in all kind of gliders and in all kind of fields. Over the last two years I´ve flown and instructed a lot in the SR20 and CAPS is an important part of the briefings. The Cirrus is not much of a glider with the engine out, you´ll get about 1200fpm at 95kts and no flaps. Lower the flaps and you´ll drop like a stone. It takes some training to safely land on a 3000ft runway in a pre-arranged scenario, it will be way harder if you have to do it for real into an unknown field with obstacles and the heart pounding. And we don´t rise to the occasion in such a scenario but rather revert to what we know. And that might very well have been to pull that handle. Somewhat successfully by the way.
The Cirrus transition training emphasizes that CAPS is to be deployed immediately in certain situations, especially down low. With problems that develop further up you should consider all options, but keep CAPS in mind anyway. Below 2000ft, if you haven´t come up with a safe solution (long enough runway in gliding range), I would consider CAPS as the way to go for most pilots and situations. Maybe not if you´re overhead a bone-dry Australian paddock that would serve as an airport elsewhere, but over the very wet, muddy, short fields of Central Europe I would probably pull the chute as well unless you have a really strong headwind on a suitable field. With a fully loaded SR22 I would definitely do it. The statistics look better for parachute letdowns than deadstick landings I would guess, but flying still has its dangers, even in a Cirrus.
I agree with you Caba; I just don’t buy the absolute certainty that this accident will tomorrow appear in the Cirrus marketing stats as “two lives saved”.
And we don´t rise to the occasion in such a scenario but rather revert to what we know.
When the engine fails, you don’t raise to the occasion, you will sink to your level of competence +/- some luck 
While I have flown gliders into all sort of places and I have safely landed SEP dead-stick (twice), I would have just pulled the CAPS in this scenario: it’s not the best glider on earth, the thing will be clocking 80kts on flare if it’s not windy and once back above land it should have been OK to pick the best spot and pull it?
Ater all I am paying for repacks every 10 years and leaving an aircraft in a flat field fully unscathed without an engine is very expensive (unless it’s a glider that you can de-rig it and put in trailer, it’s will be a financial disaster, if you ever have to ask: no damage = nothing is covered by insurance)
I agree with you Caba; I just don’t buy the absolute certainty that this accident will tomorrow appear in the Cirrus marketing stats as “two lives saved”.
I don´t buy that either, and I´m not interested in Cirrus marketing, I only want to walk away and have a good story to tell if the engine should quit on me. Since I´m not a 2022-clone of Chuck Yeager (as Paul Bartorelli puts it) the parachute can put me at better odds than my piloting skills in an emergency, even if there were other options. What a comfortable situation that is, unlike Chuck´s, who simply had to land the X-1A because it lacked a hot seat.
