LMAO!

Call me a luddite, but I'm not too wild about small aircraft. I mean, I know the field of aircraft was started by a small plane but as it exists today, the whole scene is kind of a PITA. Damn things are loud as hell, and the maintenance and flying skills are often not as good as larger commercial aircraft.

Every one of those little planes, or big ones for that matter, take the lives of people down below in their hands when they fly. I don't fly my gas filled bomb over their heads...

Sounds like he screwed up somehow, strange though it was pretty clear today.

Not in NYC. It has been pretty hazy all day with drizzling here and there. It's actually pouring here as hell right now.

Didn't rain here at all until the last couple of hours. It was hazy and cloudy here but visability wasn't to bad. I could see at least 5 miles across the water.

Lidle was a N Korean operative, carrying out yet another failed mission by the nutty idiot running N Korea.

First missiles that fail.

Then a N Bomb that probably failed based on an estimate yield of 550 tons.

And now he tries to take down a small skyscraper with a light aircraft.


Or how about this - Bush was behind it, but the demolition team that set up the rest of the destruction failed to make the explosives work. Did anybody find wreckage of any type of aircraft?

Yeah visibilty was 9 miles. It was cloudy but incredibly clear and no wind. It didn't start raining until 4pm. Its either mechanical or fuel related.

Licensed Pilot here.

The plane he bought, which he crashed in, was a Cirrus SR20.
There are only a few hundred of those planes registered with the FAA.

As a new pilot, I would only consider something really, I mean really proven as my first owned airplane. Not just something approved.

The Cirrus SR20 uses the less reliable Continental engines, as opposed to Lycoming engines favored by Cessna and Piper, the leading manufacturers of small general aviation aircraft, who have been making the same model planes for close to 50 years, with minor changes.

The Cirruses also have what I would consider a very non-traditional cockpit, with 'joysticks', if you will, on opposite sides of the aircraft, facing each other, which is wierd.
The usual set of controls for most aircraft are identical wheels or yokes.
There's nothing wrong with 'stick' controls, but I think they should be identical from both positions, not facing each other, and in the middle of each person, so two hands can be used.
How effective do you think you'd be just steering a car from your outstretched hand on one side? An airplane has much more going on.
Those on the Cirrus are pointing toward each other. See attached picture.


Get this:
Lidle, 34, who had earned his pilot's license in February, said during interviews that he was eager to complete his training. He also said he was confident that flying was safe.

"The whole plane has a parachute on it," Lidle told The New York Times during an interview last month. "Ninety-nine percent of pilots that go up never have engine failure, and the 1 percent that do usually land it. But if you're up in the air and something goes wrong, you pull that parachute, and the whole plain goes down slowly."

Uh huh. Sounds like just the thing I'd say if I wanted you to write me a check for the shiny plane I want to sell you, and I wasn't a pilot.

For starters, a pilot's training is never complete, as any pilot who really understands the risks will tell you.

This looks like a clear case of there are no old, bold pilots.

I think this guy was wowed by the nifty corvette looking cockpit, had plenty of new money to buy one, and did.
Nothing wrong with owning a new plane, but there are risks.

In the realm of what is a calculated risk, you're looking at a pilot who is a novice, flying with an instructor in likely the busiest airspace in the country, with practically no place to land in an emergency at low altitude, in an airplane that isn't conventional by most standards, with an engine not known as the most reliable.

I'd be curious to see the logbooks of the two pilots as well as the logbook for the aircraft maintenance.

I fly single engine Piper Archers and Cessna Skyhawks that are much more proven.
When I do go up with an instructor, I make sure the instructor has at least 15 hours logged as Pilot In Command in the aircraft we're going in. 15 hours in a particular aircraft on top of being an instructor is enough in my book that I would be comfortable.

Do a quick google image search of a cessna, piper, beechcraft, mooney, or practically any other type of cockpit and you'll see the controls on each side are identical with throttle/mixture controls in the middle.

It wasn't what I would call a prudent risk in that particular airspace. Granted, he was with an instructor, but I wonder of the experience of that instructor in that plane.

http://philip.greenspun.com/flying/cirrus-sr20
I read this after my previous post.
As one excerpt.
In terms of avoiding an accident, one problem with the Cirrus is its unforgiving handling compared to other basic four-seaters. The plane is harder to keep level with rudders in a stall than a Cessna or Diamond; if in a deep uncoordinated stall, the Cirrus wants to drop a wing and go into a spin. Thanks to a "split-airfoil" wing design, in which the inner portion of the wing has a higher angle of attack than the outer portion, the Cirrus gives more of a stall buffet warning than many airplanes. The outer portion of the wings, which are in front of the ailerons, are still flying and permitting the pilot to control roll with the yoke, even as the inner sections of the wings may be stalled and creating a warning buffet. This illustrates one of the advantages of composite construction; you could build a metal wing like this, but it would be very costly. For pilots accustomed to learning about an impending stall by feeling reduced airloads on the flight controls, the Cirrus provides much less stall warning. This is due to spring cartridges that continue to resist flight control movement even when the airplane is not moving. In other words, the flight controls feel similar whether you're flying or stalled.

A pilot with 800 hours in the SR22 noted that in his experience it is not nearly as docile as the Cessna 172 and Piper Arrow that he had trained on. A CFI ("certificated flight instructor") who now flies the $3 million Pilatus PC-12 says "The Cirrus is a plane designed to go fast. You shouldn't be flying it slow. It is trickier to handle in a stall than a 172 or the Pilatus."

It's really a worthwhile read, if you're at all interested in the hows and whys of this particular plane

Wow, you're right that cockpit looks like the interior of a concept car you would see at a car show:eek: Unconventional indeed, it doesn't look like a plane at all.

Real shame....

For reference:
 

A cursory search of the NTSB database back to 1999 and using the name "Cirrus" shows around 60 incidents involving the SR20 & 22 with about 40 fatalities.

You can read a good debate on the merits of an aircraft with a chute in the forums at http://www.airdisaster.com

In this case, I think it had nothing to do with a parachute, in that it most likely wasn't deployed.
That sort of thing is most effective, assuming it works, if it is deployed on purpose and you are over terrain you don't want to land on at the speed of a landing, or if there is a cataclysmic failure with no possibility of recovery such as a wing or the tail coming off from a mid-air collision.