Yesterday afternoon a small Cirrus SR-22 airplane—yes, the same kind of airplane my wife and I have been flying around the country for our reporting—was being ferried across the Pacific to a customer in Australia.
This is obviously a very long journey. The first leg of this trip, from the SF Bay area to a refueling stop in Hawaii, would have taken about 14 hours. Since the Cirrus can normally fly at most five-plus hours on a full load of fuel, ferry planes are rigged with temporary extra gas tanks inside the cockpit and allowed to take off (because of the added fuel) at much more than the usual "maximum gross weight" limit.
On yesterday's flight, the pilot discovered that a valve from the extra fuel tanks was jammed or broken. So he was fated to run out of gas before reaching Hawaii. After several hours of debugging and discussion with his flight-managers by radio, as the fuel level dwindled he decided to fly as close as possible to a cruise ship (which was alerted) and then pull the Cirrus's unique whole-airplane parachute and come down to the sea for rescue by the ship.
This incredible video, shot from a Coast Guard C-130 that was monitoring the whole process, shows what happened next. Further notes after the video.
The video compresses a long stretch of action into four-plus minutes. There's a time counter in the upper left corner of the video. Some points to note:
- At around time 02:40.25 on the counter, you'll see that the pilot has pulled the parachute handle. A rocket blasts out of the back of the cockpit and the parachute begins to deploy. In previous tests (and experience) the chute fully deploys, and holds the plane level, in well under ten seconds. This time takes nearly 20 seconds, for reasons I assume the company will look into.
- Although you can't really see it from this film, apparently the Pacific seas at the time were very high and rough, with winds above 25 knots and swells of 9 to 12 feet. Thus not very long after the plane hits the water, the plane starts taking on water. Within a minute it has turned over. That requires the pilot to get out promptly. Still, it's a lot better crash-into-the-sea option than otherwise.
- Even though the plane was aiming for the cruise ship, and the cruise ship knew it was coming, the pilot is in the water for much more than 20 minutes before the ship's launch can get to him. This is why pilots are required to take water-survival gear, including rafts like the one you see this pilot using, on overwater flights. (If this had not been the warmish mid-Pacific but the frigid North Atlantic ... )
Main point: When the Klapmeier brothers, Alan and Dale, made the parachute mandatory equipment in the first Cirrus SR-20 airplanes they brought to market in the late 1990s, many grizzled veterans in the aviation world scoffed at them. ("A good pilot doesn't need these training wheels" etc.) [This is part of the story I told in my book Free Flight.] Now the Klapmeiers are in the Aviation Hall of Fame, and the Cirrus SR-22 is the most popular small plane of its kind in the world, because of the step they took. Plus, this ferry pilot is alive.
Here are the Klapmeier brothers when they were mere kids starting the company—Alan on the left, Dale on the right—in a photo I saw at Cirrus's Duluth headquarters in the 1990s when I was writing about them.
Update: A few months ago I reported on a similar parachute "save" after a mid-air collision at a small airport near Washington DC.