What to Tell Passengers About Parachutes

Cirrus CAPS, that is. And the answer is everything. At least in the charter business, they can handle it just fine.

This much we can all agree on: Pilots are supposed to give their passengers a detailed, pre-takeoff safety briefing. But I have sleepwalked through more of these than I care to remember. I know, I'm a terrible person, but I've gotten used to myself. I urge others to do better.

The pre-takeoff briefing topic caught my eye the other day when I was reading a Vanity Fair article by Michael Lewis.It was a long-form piece about Tom Wolfe and the evolution of new journalism during the 1970s. Lewis was about to embark upon a short charter flight from Martha's Vineyard to Long Island to meet Wolfe and he was describing walking past the bespoke jets of the 1 percent to the little "toy" airplane that would cross over to the Hamptons. I used to be annoyed by popular writers who demean little airplanes like that, but, as with tolerating my own pre-takeoff slovenliness, I've learned to live with it. Now, I'm just curious about what airplane is being dissed. When Lewis got to the part where the pilot explains the parachute, the light went on: Ah, obviously a Cirrus.

Lewis got a little spun up about the parachute and the passengers' role in deploying it—understandably—and that got me thinking about passenger reaction to that sort of thing in general. And by passenger, I meanpaying passenger, the sum of someone's effort in holding out to the public, not your brother-in-law and his kids who always wanted a ride. Wouldn't the freckled neck masses kinda freak out behind this parachute thing? More on that in a moment, but first a digression.

In another life, I flew passengers for hire in piston twins so I have some experience with pax briefings. For a charter pilot, the briefing is a more intimate thing than it is for airline crews. The people are right there in a small cabin and the fear or lack thereof is palpable. One thing I noticed is that people wealthy enough to charter even piston twins have a more realistic view of risk and tend not to be nervous fliers. But that's not all of them. Some percentage—maybe it's 10 or 20—are both nervous and unsophisticated about little airplanes and briefing them requires a level of patience and canniness that mostly eluded me.

"Young man, these life jackets, we're not flying over water are we, in this little puddle jumper?"

"Yes ma'am, that's the Atlantic over there and we'll be over it for 30 minutes."

As pearls were clutched and sphincters tightened, I learned two things: one, to not be offended by "puddle jumper" and two, to tailor the words I used to carry out the briefing. Our ops specs dictated that the briefing be done and what had to be covered, but it didn't say how.

And I didn't have to deal with the word "parachute" or instruct people to shut down the engines with this red knob before yanking this handle as hard as you can. I'm kinda glad of it, too. But really, what reactions are charter pilots flying the Cirrus getting from nervous passengers when they brief CAPS?

"It's everything from wow, that's really cool, to ‘I really don't want to know anything about it.' You get A to Z with them," Michael Kline of Open Air told me. Open Air has been using Cirrus aircraft for charter work for 10 years from Gaithersburg, Maryland, and has a loyal clientele.

Every passenger gets briefed on every single flight, whether a seasoned customer or just on a Part 91 excursion. Kline says nervous fliers may appreciate the CAPS because it gives them a second option. "But then a lot of people ask, ‘Why does it have a parachute? Is something going to happen?'" he adds. Passengers have been asking that since Orville explained goggles.

"Every pilot has a different way of briefing it. I usually say that in the unlikely event that something happens to me, you have a fail-safe method up here, a parachute for the entire aircraft," Kline says. Many people can't wrap their head around the notion that the parachute is for the entire airplane.

And I suspect they never will. The day after I spoke with Kline, a CAPS deployment put an SR22 onto a busy street in Fayetteville, Arkansas, where it bounced off a truck. Only minor injuries. NBC gave it 10 seconds on the evening news probably because someone provided video. But the tone of the story was, "Hey, how about this, airplanes now have their own parachutes!" Yup, for going on 17 years now. A newswriter with the time and smarts could have backgrounded it a little, but really, who cares? See rolling over on puddle jumpers, above. For as hard as Cirrus has tried and continues to try, I suspect the general public will never understand that entire airplanes can have parachutes.

All that really matters is that the airplane has the parachute and everyone aboard knows how to use it. Anything else is but a curiosity. But our story has irony, too. Lewis' pilot for his flight to Long Island was named Yeager. No relation to that Yeager. While the pilot knew of his famous namesake, he didn't realize the reason he knew was because of an author he had never heard of: Tom Wolfe.

Belated Note to Veterans

I've been traveling this week and didn't get a chance to tip AVweb's editorial hat to all the veterans in our audience. And I know there are many. It's never enough to simply say thank you for your service but it's even less desireable to forget noting it. The entire week should be for veterans, not just one day. With the powers vested in me as editorial director, I am hereby making it so.