 Our next presenter is a veteran of the U.S. Navy. He holds a bachelor's degree of science from Emory Riddle Aeronautical University. He is a commercial pilot as well as an A&P. He is an aircraft safety investigator and currently teaches in the NTSB Academy and the Transportation Safety Institute and also numerous fire departments. He's currently building an F-1 rocket. His topic today is accident investigation for technically advanced aircraft. Let's welcome Mr. Mike Bush. Thank you, Walt. Good morning. Thank you for tuning in today. We want to talk a little bit about technically advanced aircraft and the accident investigations that we do around them. And before we go much further, I have to remind you that if you're involved with any aircraft accident investigation that it's a federal jurisdiction under the NTSB. We have a lot of good folks out there who do rescues and first response and so forth and they don't always know some of the rules and they don't realize that this is a federal jurisdiction and that the wreckage should not be removed or moved because it is federal evidence without permission from the NTSB. So that's something I wanted to pass along right up front. So what's a technically advanced aircraft? Well, a technically advanced aircraft looks pretty complex when you first look in the cockpit but basically it's one which would contain a GPS navigator with a moving map plus any additional systems such as advanced engine management systems such as Fedek and so forth, glass avionics, multifunction displays and so forth. It looks pretty complicated and can be fairly intimidating but I will say that these aircraft are enabling fairly inexperienced pilots to fly very complex missions today. And in our own customer base, we're finding that they fly these aircraft a lot so they're getting utility from these aircraft. We're flying two and three hours a day per aircraft. Cirrus has now passed a million mile, excuse me, the million hour flight mark of our fleet and we only have 3,700 airplanes out there but the technically advanced aircraft can't keep us from some of the basic accidents. We're still running out of gas, we're still bumping into things and we're still flying VFR into IMC. So those are things that these new avionics and so forth can't help us. We are learning that although the accident rate seems to be fairly consistent, flat, hasn't decreased much, we are seeing fewer fatal accidents which is always good. Now some of this technology isn't exactly helpful. For example, you can go out and buy a pilot handheld GPS unit, fly around with it and so forth and fairly inexpensively I might add and you'll find that it will provide what we call a breadcrumb trail or in other words a path that the aircraft had followed in flight and that can be very useful to accident investigators. We want to know what circumstances the pilot was in before the accident and these are fairly inexpensive things. I think the same features are involved on some of these very inexpensive GPS that hikers use and boaters can use but these very expensive panel mount GPS units don't have that feature. Even though the technology is there and some of the same manufacturers make these various units, we don't have breadcrumb trails on the panel mount GPS's which can be kind of frustrating for us when we're trying to figure out what happened at the site. So we have to do it other ways. Now you'll find that accident investigators, I don't want to use the word sneaky but we do have to get innovative and think about how we're going to go about solving this mystery and there are a lot of mysteries to solve and that's why we call it probable cause because sometimes we just don't get all the information that we need but the TAA's have helped us a lot and it goes without saying, gee, if you're looking at all this stuff on the screen in the aircraft it would make sense that at some point all these sensors pick this stuff up it had to be processed somehow electronically and made into some sort of digital format so that we could put it on a screen for the pilot to view. How do we capture that stuff? And you know, we learned quite by accident that some of these new screens were not really designed for accident investigation purposes obviously but the data is there. I mean there's a immense amount of data on these new glass panels and so we learned quite by accident that the people who designed these things had put in a little, a card, an electronic circuit board in the back for troubleshooting purposes when the thing came back to the shop they could use this little card for helping them figure out why the box wasn't working right and we learned that it had a bit of a memory to it and the first thing we figured out was that say, you know, there's engine parameters on this maybe we can figure out what the RPM was or the temperatures was from this troubleshooting device it was not designed to hold a lot of memory somewhat like the flight data recorders have on the airliners with, you know, 1,000 channels of information. Now GA airplanes simply don't have black boxes or even orange ones for that matter and so we have to go out and solve accidents the old fashioned way. We look at the angles with the tree branches that are broken and have to actually do a lot of sleuthing without electronics. So the fact that we can sort of tap into some of these things that are being displayed to the pilot is really good news for us and it's very exciting. So like I say, we've now got access to a lot of things were simply not available to accident investigators previously. So things like engine run data. Now, if you're flying one of these new airplanes with a FedEx system you can actually get 2,000 hours worth of data from this thing. You can see what the temperatures were on a given time and date and the RPMs and so forth. This is very helpful and also we have primary flight data that we can get and also some pilot inputs. That's really key. When you can see what switches the pilot selected and when, when he turned them on and off which ones they were. This is really helpful in accident investigation. Mind you, this is sort of experimental if you will and we kind of happened upon this quite by chance and so it's taking a lot of innovation a lot of hard work to try to glean some of the knowledge from this vast amount of electronic stuff. You have to really do some sorting. It's not to the state of the art where we can just take a chip out of the airplane and plug it in and see a video of what the airplane was doing prior to the accident. We're not there by a long shot. We have made some strides in it though. So the process of recovering this information and then analyzing it is fairly extensive and it's a lot of hard work long hours to do it. So it's not easy. So we're going to talk about that and I'm going to show you actually some of the data that we can get and how it can help us in accidents. I'll review actually three accidents here in just a minute. But I keep hearing the phrase throughout the industry that there are no new accidents. I've heard agencies and representatives from all corners of the globe talk about the fact that there are no new accidents. We know all about human factors. We know about weather. We know about icing. We know what causes these things. There aren't very many mechanical things that can go wrong and so forth. And I just don't think that's quite true anymore. In fact, with the electronic data we're starting to get from GA accidents now, we're finding out that there might be some new twists on some old things. To the point where in the old days we used to go to what was euphemistically called a smoking hole accident where gee, there was just this big brick and nothing was left. We didn't know anything about anything. We couldn't find any parts to analyze because it would all burned up or whatever. You know, you had to make some assumptions and those assumptions probably weren't always correct and unfortunately a lot of times the pilot was blamed for this unhappy occurrence. I think we've come across to the point now where we're getting enough information where we can actually tell what maybe was going on what sort of led the pilot to certain decisions or what was going on in the aircraft just prior to the accident. And we may even want to think about some of those old smoking hole accidents and say, you know, did we really understand everything that happened that day? And the answer, of course, is no, we did not. So today we have a much better idea of what's going on out there. Couple things that are interesting today, at least on the Cirrus and many other aircraft out there, these aircraft are equipped with ballistic parachute systems. What a boon, we can, you know, get into trouble out there. The pilot can activate the system and now we've got a live pilot to talk to and we've got a whole airplane to look at. No smoking hole. Gee, that's pretty cool and, you know, we can also now verify some of these things with the electronic data that we can get. Witness statements sometimes are confusing. Sometimes the pilot statements are a little confusing. And so we can now back this up and compare it to other electronic data directly from the airplane. So some of the new accidents that we've discovered is that something like an autopilot stall was something that I think we speculated about but nobody really knew and I don't think we could prove. But we're pretty sure now that, you know, the autopilots are wonderful today. They're marvelous machines. You can put them in, you can program them for the rate of climb that you want and the altitude you want to achieve and so forth. Very reliable, very good instruments. And in fact, the autopilot people will tell you that they have never caused an accident, been the cause to one. The fact is, though, it is a machine and the pilot has to manage that machine just like everything else in the airplane. And if you set it to do something that the airplane can't do, then, you know, things could go unraveled on you very quickly. So we have this new data, again, not easy to get to, but we can certainly use it very positively in what we're doing here. The other new thing that I want to talk about is not really new, you're going to say, well, gee, distractions have been around forever and that's true. You've probably experienced some of these yourself and we've talked in safety circles for a long time about keeping a sterile environment in the cockpit during critical phases of flight, such as takeoff and approach and so forth. We want to keep the pilot focused on what he's doing and not be distracted by things that are going on in the cabin or the kids getting nervous or whatever. And so the avionics people have provided a little button on the audio panel that allows the pilot to be isolated from that distraction so he can work directly with ATC without being interrupted. So distractions are certainly always an accident factor and you've seen some of these new ones today yourself probably even on the way in this morning. There was probably somebody in front of you talking on a cell phone and I can tell you that that is absolutely a new cause for accidents. We've recently, in our own fleet this year, we know for a fact that the pilot was in a very busy environment. He was multitasking as pilots do and he was actually talking on the cell phone during that time and was distracted by it to the point where he did lose control of the airplane and was not able to regain it. Now, we know this because number one, we recovered the cell phone and number two, we talked to the person who was on the other end of that conversation and so we know that people are out there talking on their cell phones in airplanes as well as in their cars and it can certainly be a distraction. I think we take the safety of aircraft for granted and we feel like we may be bored and have to call somebody and talk about the whole thing. That's not necessarily a good thing to do but it's happening out there and so it's something we have to really watch these days. So a couple of the accidents we're going to talk about. We've talked about these GPS units that you can buy that leave a breadcrumb trail but do not in the airplane and we can glean some of this data now from the glass panels which can show us all this information which is really good. I hope in the future that we will be able to extract it much more easily and from this we've actually started doing some research on very simple data loggers and services in the middle of this as well. A data logger is simply a hardened chip that's placed some place strategically in the aircraft for example in the tail where it won't get damaged and it plugs directly into this data bus and will record vast amounts of information so we don't have to go through all these stepping stones I'm going to show you about. And again it's really important to see what the pilot did and when he did it. So we've talked about no new accidents and I'm going to give you some thoughts here. The second distraction that it's been around for a long time but we haven't really considered it much our cameras. New digital cameras are really great they can do a lot of good things and people have taken a new interest in photography and we find a lot of people out flying around trying to take pictures of their house and stuff and we find that they're getting distracted by the mission rather than paying attention to what they're doing and this has been a situation that we had for example down in Bull Bay, Jamaica in September of last year and this is an accident of one of the three I'm going to talk to you about. You can see from this data that here we have the runway and the sort of breadcrumb trail if you will we were able to extract you can see that the aircraft climbs and eventually descends rather rapidly from this picture and the next one will show you that this aircraft flew across the bay and then actually had an accident. Let me tell you what happened real briefly and if you'll forgive me I'm going to read some of this so I can get it right but we had four occupants in an SR-22 and we all know that just because you have four seats in an airplane doesn't necessarily mean you can fill them all up especially if you have full fuel which we did on this particular day. Down in Jamaica the temperature is always about 90 degrees give or take two or three degrees year round so these people certainly were used to flying in these conditions but it was still hot and the pilot had programmed the autopilot on this particular day to climb at a thousand feet a minute. Now the service will certainly climb at a thousand feet a minute but if it's all loaded up it may not perform at a thousand feet a minute to the intended climb to altitude which he had set at 9,500 feet. Okay, so he takes off and they climbed to 4,300 feet over a two and a half minute period of time and basically from the data that we recovered later we could see that the airspeed was declining during the whole time he was climbing. Mind you a steady rate of climb but the airspeed was just coming down. Got all the way down to 72 knots at 4,300 feet the aircraft pitch attitude we could read went from 20 degrees nose up to 78 degrees nose down rather suddenly and followed by as you might imagine a rapid descent. There were large variations in pitch and roll during that period of time and for the next 15 to 20 seconds the pilot's altitude decayed by 2,000 feet which is a significant drop in altitude. The pilot realized that he was over his head he reached over and pulled the handle for the caps the Cirrus Airframe Parachute System and all four people came down safely and you can see in this data here that we did just that it came down straight down under parachute which was really great. Now it turns out after we talked to the pilot who was still pretty shaken up by this that we could clearly see that the people were on a photo mission these are the pictures that we retrieved from their cameras. Now that's not exactly TAA stuff but we could see that yep they were up there taking pictures and they were not paying attention to what they were doing they mismanaged the autopilot had he set it for 500 feet a minute on this particular day probably would have worked out all right but these are the pictures we got from this particular one. So not paying attention to managing your systems and the autopilot can be a problem and we can read this data now which is pretty good. So this might have been an accident that would have been ruled loss of mechanical loss of control excuse me for mechanical reasons because all we would have had again is a smoke and hole. Nope this time we had a parachute available and we saved four people and we were able to talk to them and we were also able to look at the airplane. So that was really good. This is up in Massachusetts in August of last year of 2007. Now I don't expect you to be able to see this read it exactly but we get pages and pages and pages of stuff that looks just like this. It's hardly easy to read and you have to just pour through this it's kind of like reading a dictionary. It doesn't make sense until you start comparing and analyzing. So this data while it is available isn't necessarily in a user friendly form and what we can do is on this particular case we have a VFR pilot flying into an IMC condition and what we can do here in the white letters on this particular slide you can see that these are the transcripts that we got from ATC. The red letters are the pilots replies to ATC. Along this pink breadcrumb trail which we extracted from the aircraft are times and places of when he was actually communicating with ATC and we could also now kind of overlay this with radar data. Radar data is really good if you can get it. Sometimes you can't and sometimes radar can be fairly inaccurate in that some of these radars turn at different speeds and so you get a hit every four seconds or every seven or eleven seconds or something so you get this sort of dotted line but you don't necessarily get the whole picture of where the airplane was because at cruise speed certainly in a Cirrus you can cover a lot of real estate. With this kind of information we can now see a complete picture with no holes in it and know exactly what was being communicated where was being communicated and so forth. This particular occasion the pilot was flying into the instrument conditions. He asked to shoot an instrument approach the tower asked if he was instrument qualified he replied that he was in fact he was not and he then proceeded to try to fly an approach to this thing. We know from our data exactly when he switched over to the ILS frequency. You can see this. Now this may be a little hard to see also but we were also able to track his entire path from this and furthermore the NTSB was able to work with this and I'm going to enlarge this a little bit for you. You can see the actual attitudes of the aircraft during this period of time. Clearly the pilot did lose control in IMC conditions and eventually they pulled the caps again and the two occupants although were injured they did survive. The problem is that as they came down the parachute canopy hit a guy wire for radio tower and it kind of came out down a little differently than we would have liked but basically they walked away from the accident even though they were injured. So we can get this kind of clarity and this kind of data but we have to work at it. It's tough. One last one I'll talk about is a situation down in Luna, New Mexico we had back in April of last year. Again this is what the data looks like and there were pages and pages of it. It looked like a whole ream of paper with these printouts on it. So it's very time consuming as you can imagine to go through this and find the right stuff. We hope to improve on this with the data loggers. But basically this gentleman had a flight that was going see if I can figure it out here. He was going from Tucson to Denver. He had an IFR flight plan. He was a low time instrument pilot. Late afternoon departure took off and filed an IFR flight plan. In fact did take off IFR and was climbing up into the clouds when the aircraft started accumulating ice. He asked for a higher altitude which he received and started climbing a little higher. Was not able to get up to 17,000 where he had been cleared and realized that he had to come down. He asked for lower. He got that from ATC and then he said I'm descending right now because he realized that he was losing control. At about that time we were able to detect that the static port had iced over and in fact the stall warning went off in the airplane. Now he was in the clouds and so he assumed immediately that he had stalled the aircraft. Okay and so during that time the airspeed indication went to zero. Altitude went to kind of goofy as he said all the numbers on the PFD were in red which would be a bad sign. And so he kind of forgot that he'd been on autopilot this time and just sort of stuffed the nose down to get it down and he was doing okay. He may have actually had time to sort of recover the aircraft but just below 8,000 feet the TAS warning went off. This would be the terrain warning which is also part of the TAA. It's saved a lot of folks by the way. So the TAA goes off and he says you know that's it I'm out of here. He pulled the handle on the cap system and it takes a few seconds for this thing to deploy and the accident site was in fact at 8,000 feet and we figured that he had something like a half a second between the time the chute fully deployed and the time he impacted the ground. So there you go. Probably not mining manors here but we have a little depiction of not only where he was but also what altitudes he was at during that period of time. So we can overlay this data. We can get a pretty good idea now of what's going on. It's a lot easier for us to do these kinds of things. Now I go out and talk a lot of places around the country and to a lot of investigation outfits the NTSB FAA and also some first responders such as the civil air patrol and a lot of fire companies around the country because a lot of these folks don't really understand that in some of these new airplanes not just limited to TAA we have new recovery systems. I've mentioned the caps for the Cirrus the Cirrus airframe parachute system. It's a ballistic parachute system which can be deployed. There's something like 26,000 of these installed in various aircraft around the country and to give you some perspective of how many that is we only have about 23,000 privately registered business jets if you will. So there's more parachutes flying around than we have business jets right now and we expect that number to double within the next two years. We also have airbags on board these aircraft and the problem is that if the pilot doesn't use some of these systems especially the BRS in the course of the accident now we have a live rocket charge at the accident site and so a lot of people don't realize that there's some hazards involved and I'd like to kind of address those really quickly if we can go through this. By the way, the fellow going from to Denver we noticed that the P.DOT heat was never turned on which is why he lost all his numbers. He did figure that out and when he did turn on the P.DOT heat he immediately got some airspeed indication of 159 knots and so forth but it was too late and when he got the TAAs warning that's when he punched out. So this is very clear what happened on this one. So the new technology does present some challenges to read and analyze and there are some rewards and that we can get good meaningful data and then we're going to talk about some hazards with these new safety pieces which means that we have to think differently when we go out to an accident site for investigation purposes, rescue purposes, what have you and realize that these things can be on board and it's not necessarily very easy to tell that they are on board because there are no external signs on them particularly we have a little small one on the Cirrus but by the time you get on top it can actually read the sign you're probably too close. By the same token on cars today we don't have external warnings about airbags inside of cars that's on the visor as you know and so I think that we may not ever be able to get legislated big signs on the airplane and maybe that's not necessary. So I'm telling you that some of these devices can be in airplanes and if you go out to a GA accident certainly a single engine accident your chances are better than 50% that we're going to have either airbags or a ballistic parachute system on board that aircraft and you need to just be aware that it's there. It's better to know that it's there and find it than to be surprised by your discovery. That can be hazardous. So we're going to say that you just have to change how you think just assume it's like a loaded gun always loaded and just beware. So that's the ballistic parachute system we have the AAIR which is the airbag system made by AMSAFE AMSAFE aircraft inflatable restraints they're doing a great job NTSB is doing a study on those now today they're finding that these devices work really well as long as you plug them back in after you've taken the seat out. That's the only failure we've had by the way. Composites a lot of these new aircraft have a lot of composites in them the service certainly is an all composite airplane we're not alone in that respect and there's some hazards you have to recognize and respect at the accident site and a little thing that I learned a couple months ago when I was up in Seattle this is maybe a little hard to see but in the on the Sears doors and many other aircraft out there we have these pneumatic and or you know gas struts that will actually hold a door open or assist you to open a lid you probably have some on your car on the trunk lid or something. I was talking to a fireman who said that his people were working a truck fire one day they had an engine on fire and of course the hood was open and eventually the fire was able to melt the ends that retained this particular device and the device because it was pressurized shot across the accident site about 30 feet into one of his men's leg now had he struck a vital area on this on this fellow he probably wouldn't have made it but as it turns out it kind of passed right through so it's these little things that you don't think about really when you're on an accident site that can get you it's just something I talk about all the time because I didn't know about it I'm thinking gee we've got 3700 airplanes out there they've all got two of these struts composites are a wonderful thing and as you can see from this picture they're very crash worthy okay this is a deer hit on an SR-22 and we've actually had one guy that hit five geese in flight with an SR-22 and managed to land safely and the aircraft was repaired and returned to service fiberglass and composites as we call it now today do change the equation as far as safety is concerned they fail differently they fail incrementally they absorb energy very well and accidents that happen out in the field with composite airplanes typically have people walking away from them in which would have been fatal otherwise and that's why I'm saying although TAA hasn't maybe yet changed the equation exactly we're finding that people are walking away from accidents still having accidents but they're not fatal that's really a good thing so this is very crash worthy stuff and when you go out to the site this will break up and be in pieces and like anything else out there you know we can have fires and we can have smoke and so forth this is a typical sight as you can see the aircrafts off to the left there but the smoke right in front of you is from the forest fire and this stuff is no good for you either it's got carcinogens in it some of the airplanes today even the experimentals out here my long easy for example had had urethane foam in the nose and when urethane foam burns it certainly gives off toxic chemicals so that's something you have to be aware of when you're out on these sites not just with composite airplanes but we're starting to bring it up when we're talking about composites so we encourage people to approach the site from upwind a lot of splinters can occur if the for example unidirectional glass carbon pieces still have some resin around them they can be almost like nitty-nils that are very sharp and you can be severely injured if you happen to step on one now when you're out on the site you know you're being aware all the time your head's on a swivel as they say you're looking everywhere it's rare that you're actually looking at your feet and looking at what you're walking on and that's where you're going to get hurt with these things and it can be a very painful thing and of course you can get pretty injured a lot of these sites are in the middle of nowhere and so if you're injured on a site it can be a more serious situation than if you're in town for example so these are some things that we caution people about out on site these are pictures of some of these shards some of these pieces that you might step on I know it's kind of hard to discern exactly what they are but they can be everywhere and anywhere on a site so you just have to be aware of what's going on now the airbags are automatically deployed unlike the cap system which the pilot has to activate these are working very well as I said they're protecting the occupants from head and upper body injuries and they are available in a whole spectrum of aircraft in fact when I first started talking about them I had a little list of who had them and who didn't and that list is so long and we're getting approvals every day for retrofits on these to the point where I don't even have an idea who has them it's being very popularly approved and they're going in a lot of airplanes as standard equipment and you can retrofit them to just about anything out there now and I think it's going to be just like the cars at some point you're going to find airplanes that have you know airbags on board as standard equipment right across the board here's a here's what a session of three-point harness looks like and of course the airbags in the lap belt portion of it and on the Cirrus we have double shoulder harnesses and the bag is actually in the outboard side I'm just going to quickly show you a movie of how these things deploy it's just a short shot here and you'll see that the bag actually deploys initially away from the occupant if the movie will run some days it does, some days it doesn't what this movie would show you when it gets caught up is that it will deploy initially away from the occupant and then actually vent at the same time and that's to allow the occupant to get out of the cockpit ten minutes after deployment I'm sorry the movie isn't working, well here it goes okay well we'll just kind of watch it in steps here notice that there's a kind of a white powder coming out of it that's actually helium and we want that bag to deflate within ten seconds of deployment so it's easier to get make your way out of the cockpit well it's not going to cooperate so we'll just keep going here these are what the components look like we have a helium bottle and also the brains for this thing and they're better than a car system they have a much better trigger on them they're safer for the EMTs to work with and you know the car system was not very well touted by the automotive industry and a lot of first responders actually got hurt because they didn't know they were there that's something we want to avoid okay so I'm going to just kind of zoom through this rather quickly these things are powered independently we can actually put them on the floor right here and make them work you don't shut them off by taking the battery out of the aircraft or cutting the cables they're absolutely independently powered so they work all the time to disarm them on a Cessna for example it's got a little magnetic switch in the three point harness and you just simply unbuckle there and it will disarm the system the Cirrus well before I go to the Cirrus we'll just say on these Cessna and Mooney three pointers and so forth you want to not connect these when the airplane is not being used because that does arm the system in the old days we clean up the airplane hook all the harnesses up and then we'd say well okay looks nice for the customer we don't want to do that anymore because it does arm the system on the Cirrus it's a little different we have these little four point cannon plugs that we have to disconnect disarm them each at each seat you have to pull them apart and they can well they're designed to stay together and so it's kind of hard to get them apart but you do have to do that to disarm them and you can also if you're an investigator you can cut the cable right here if you're in a hurry we've also learned that if you take the seat out in a hurry that it'll break right there also and let's go very quickly to the parachute systems basically these are very safe and reliable systems we've saved over 208 lives with them worldwide and our job here is to try to tell you that they're in there and just to be cautious with them working around them you can find them in a lot of different airplanes as I said there's 26,000 of these things out there only 3700 Cirruses and so we're less than 10% of the total here you see a Cessna standard looking Cessna this one is equipped with a system you can't tell by looking at it so that's why I said earlier you have to assume that these things are in there and be safe and be disappointed if you don't find one and I'm going to say that these are approved of course for the Cessna 150s, 152s, 172s, 182s I'm going to show you right now a test on one of these systems if we can get the movie to run and right now it doesn't seem to want to do that here we go this is a test we did for certification on 182 and it's just not coming up I'm sorry what it shows is the actual rocket pulling the parachute out of the back end of the airplane through the rear window that's a place that a lot of people don't expect the parachute to come out so if you're on an accident site and trying to figure out if there's a parachute in there not look around you'll see a red T-handle such as this one this is on a flight designs aircraft CT you'll find these handles all over the place you'll find them on the floor in the Cessnas you'll find them in the ceiling on the 150s you'll find them overhead on the Cereses sometimes the whole thing is exposed to the outside here you see a canister that contains the parachute and also right next to it is the actual rocket this rocket simply pulls the parachute out of the canister in this case gets it away from the airplane so it can open automatically and the key is that all these are connected with a cable it's not an electrical cable this is a housed cable like you might have on your bicycle for handbrakes or clutch on a motorcycle perhaps and there's lots and lots of little airplanes that have these things you'll probably find a lot of them right out here at Sun and Fun so what's the rocket look like? well typically they're cylindrical they'll have a cable attached to them something like that you see that thing you need to call somebody they come all sizes but typically they're cylinders and you wouldn't necessarily identify them as a rocket by looking at them these are some of the components that we look for at the accident sites if you see these things then you need to call somebody and that somebody would be Ceres and we have an 800 number which I'll show you in a second these are the cables that activate these things and the pilot has to work these things we do not have automated parachutes and we want to give the pilot some latitude on what to do he may simply have lost an engine he may simply be able to make an emergency landing which of course all pilots are trained to do and he may want to do that instead of pulling the parachute so we can't shut these things off they're always on and the Ceres we pull a handle like this and I'll go through this cartoon relatively quickly because it shows a cross section of the rocket and the igniter and how this works we'll pull the handle the cable will pull on this igniter at the bottom of it and if you look at the bottom of the picture here you'll see the spring collapsing which is part of the igniter coxon fires all at the same time it's almost instantaneous and that's how we get the rocket to go it again just pulls the package out of the airplane and it's very successful works fine and my slides won't go forward now okay so we can do it manually here we go oh dear okay this other hazard that we're concerned with is the parachute can't be detached from the aircraft and in this particular case we had a gentleman lose control of the airplane and he decided to pull the handle and three people landed safely and they walked away from the airplane well it was in a part of the country where it's very flat and very windy and the parachute which is huge got inflated and pulled the airplane over backwards and actually dragged it several hundred feet and so thanks to the FAA they were able to clip the cables on this thing before it got to Texas and we were very happy about that but it is a hazard you have to be aware of if you're out there working on the site but these things can drag the airplane some distance so again we want you to work from the upwind side and if you have a fireman handy and they have a hose and truck available wet the parachute down so it'll collapse it's the best way to do it and then once you've got it collapsed you can park your G-car or some other vehicle on it so it won't inflate on you again we also recommend that people approach the aircraft from the front of the sides as you can see here try to stay away from the back that would be the barrel of this thing if it is a were so you want to stay away from the back in case it might deploy and we also want you not to cut into the top of the airplane because that's where the deployment cable is located so if you were to for example snag that it might actually deploy the rocket if it was still in the airplane when you go to one of these things please never pull the handle to try to deactivate or deactivate it so well if I pull the handle you know on my terms we know that it went don't do that because if during the course of the accident the propellant got mangled or broken up inside there it will burn at a different rate than was designed and the nozzle is only designed to take so much thrust so you could have yourself a well you know a really big road flare on your hands or worse so we don't want that the FAA in fact said look we don't want our people to be bomb disposal experts so if you see these things identify that you have them notify somebody and that's somebody to notify a service and in fact I get calls from people who aren't even involved with services the FAA has called me on five occasions as late as last year on aircraft that weren't ours they say hey you're the rocket man I heard you talk down in Oklahoma City tell us what to do so we'd walk them through it here's the number it's an 800 number you're going to be met by a live person not a robot so when you call 800-279-4322 you're going to be able to say look I want to report an accident and we need to talk to somebody in air safety and that's the number you're going to get and that's the person you're going to get one of our people please do not call the bomb disposal squad excuse me bomb disposal squads only have one mission in life and that's to blow stuff up we have to remember this is federal evidence and we want to look at this piece of the aircraft along with everything else that we do to see if it worked, how it worked, how well it worked this is evidence and it's all part of the investigation so we don't want them removing things first of all and then destroying stuff which is what they do I've been out many times to disarm these things and this is an old slide but it seems to work pretty well and our guys are very serious about this I mean they're very good at doing this we've got the right tools and the right training and so when they're doing their job out there we'd recommend that you kind of treat the situation seriously and not do any pranks you know the firemen love to pull pranks on each other so I put this picture in for them I usually like that how's the best way to get the word out to people Sirius has actually got a DVD that we offer it's free, looks like this inside it's got a short-pocket guide in the pocket as well as a DVD and my card and the 800 number I talked about the guide talks about what to do if you encounter a rocket or a ballistic parachute system and or the airbag system what to do, who to call it's all right there it's only about 15 minutes long it's great initial training and it's really good for recurrent training too we've shipped out thousands of these things thousands of these things worldwide to fire departments everywhere and a lot to the FAA so if we have a few minutes we would open a thing for questions if you have them, if we have time multiple questions in one comment sure one, I used to fly the ATR for American Eagle and we weren't allowed by our ops either by our procedures or ops spec to use the vertical speed mode we could only use indicated air speed mode specifically for the instance you were talking about I don't know if that's being considered in the training we I can't answer your question directly we're getting better at training people to deal with these new airplanes the new nobology if you will and a lot of flight schools have actually bought services so that their people can train on our aircraft so they can get into commuters at some point that are pretty well equipped today we also are doing scenario based training because we have a sim and we actually put them into situations where we make them reach for the make them reach for the handle and that's turning out to be a very very valuable tool for us we can also use the sim when we take this data out of the airplane if we we can reconstruct a lot of the path as I said the speed and so forth we can actually plug that whole scenario into our our flight simulator and fly it again and see maybe what the pilot was seeing so that helps I can't answer your question directly about the airspeed so I'm sorry it didn't do the airplane wouldn't perform the indicated airspeed mode was real real lifesaver for distractions okay thank you uh... I have a question regarding the accident which they went for photo uh... that my understanding uh... from your narration that they went up to four thousand feet and then they start either stole or spend whatever they have did that when you were talking investigating with the pilot did he realize that he was installed and did he know how to recover or just lift it well sometimes uh... it's difficult to to understand uh... the pilot because they you know they've just survived a life threatening event and sometimes they're they're very clear on what was happening and they they know exactly to the second what it was they can talk to you as if it was a slow motion movie and others can't tell you the name at that point and so so we get all kinds of you know replies back to our questions in this particular case the gentleman was pretty disoriented and uh... didn't really understand much and we weren't able to get a lot from this particular pilot but it's very clear that they were more focused on shooting pictures than they were on flying the aircraft and although the settings on the autopilot initially were okay they weren't managed very well because you reach a point on the settings that he had that the airplanes not going to be able to fly and the autopilot was doing what it was told to do this is it was a heavy hot day and uh... you know the airplane just couldn't perform so it eventually just pitched down uh... i think it's fair to say that the pilot and the occupants were distracted and uh... i don't think there's any argument about that and uh... you know it's always sorry that these things happen but we're very grateful that they were able to survive thanks to the thanks to parachute and the data showed us what was going on we did see the airspeed decreasing to a point where where he should have picked that up and readjusted the autopilot or started flying manually uh... he had those options didn't see it happening and all of a sudden it just pitched down that's when he first became aware of it we have a lady over here yes Mike I'd like to know how you have um... developed your training to include management of the autopilot it seems as though autopilots are very important in a in a t a a aircraft autopilots are indeed very important uh... they're a critical piece to the puzzle uh... because these airplanes first of all can are very capable they can go long distances and uh... it's kind of tiring to hand fly the whole time so people tend to use the autopilot a lot the autopilots today right across the border very very reliable they're great pieces of equipment and they have a lot of capacity we've learned now that when we do a delivery to one of our customers we have a transit what we call a transition training course at the uh... at the factory where the pilot comes to pick up his airplane we actually put him in his airplane and after he has accepted it then we'll go out and train him for up to three to four to five days to make sure he understands as we say all the nobology where everything is located and more important how to use it and uh... we teach them the autopilot very very carefully because we know they're going to use it a lot uh... again we do a lot of scenario-based training in the sim as well and uh... we want to make sure they understand how to disconnect it how to manage it what the capabilities of it are what the capabilities and limitations of the airplane are we try to marry all that together in the three to five days and i think we've been very successful with that to the point where as i say these t a a airplanes are showing that relatively inexperienced pilots with the automation uh... help of automation can really uh... become quite uh... productive the one thing that we caution people about those did not fly on automation in some place where you don't want to be if automation should go away on yet for some reason so that's the thing we stress there yes hi uh... understand that this is about you know the ntsb showing up for accident investigations and i have a situation where last november i had a catastrophic engine failure those of the f a s words over of the mountains of north carolina but i was managed to get an airport under me in a runway in front of me and i landed safely and it was just completely quiet there was no personal injury there was no property damage except for the engine itself and and a few dents in the calling from parts flying around under there and uh... i'd i'd left the scene and the people that were there the manage people that were managing the f b o called the f a a and and they came in and took pictures and left they've never contacted me i've never spoken with them i've called the ntsb and they're taking kind of a passive interest in this because it's so low-profile and i was told that this engine will eventually be shipped back to tell it i continental and it'll be swept under the carpet they're supposed to do an analytical which means an analysis of what happened and there's a number of people out there that have this kind of engine that want to know just what happened and i've been told that well it wasn't my fault and we don't know yet whether it was a maintenance issue whether it was a factory issue or what was going on with that engine but there's a number of people that want to know but since it's so low-profile it gives continental the opportunity to just say well it's on the shelf over here and it'll be forgotten about and because it's not ntsb driven this is what i'm told the analytical is not ntsb driven that it's going to take its time it could take six months to a year before they get around to it if they even decide to do that and so what can we do to try and move that process along even though it's very uh... you know under the table very low-profile compared to some of the accidents that happened out there well there's a number of things we can do first of all uh... i can assure you from having been on numerous accidents over the last nine years that when we form an investigation party you'll have an ntsb person and f a representative and an engine rep and an airframe rep at the site so there's typically at least four of us there we formed the team and uh... uh... it's a it's kind of a lightweight team but we we actually are very good at putting these teams together working very well on it regardless of whether it was an investigation or not on it which probably is not required tcm i can assure you will tear that engine down they do want to find out what happened and so my recommendation today to uh... to kind of accelerate matters is that you go to the continental tent today and ask for kirk nelson he's there he's uh... he's a rep he understands this very well uh... i don't think the guy that runs analytical is here today i didn't see him yesterday but he could be here and uh... the name is terry horton and if terry's here he's the one that would schedule that uh... mind you anytime they get a fatal accident or uh... an ntsb coded accident yes they will put a priority on that simply because that's really important too but they'll shoehorn you and i assure you they will go through that engine when they do it it happens fairly quickly uh... we can typically go through an engine in about a day or less depending on what the issue is i think the longest one i've ever been on was about two days uh... typically the shortest ones about three hours so somewhere between three hours and two days you can have a written report saying what actually happened uh... terry horton is the manager of that particular area uh... kirk nelson is the contact here at sun and fun he is here he will be here all week and they're at the continental tent that's the best i can do for you today yes sir that will work they're very good at this by the way and they're very diligent on doing this i've been through a number of tear downs okay anybody else we appreciate your questions and this is outside the accident realm uh... do insurance companies when people pull a parachute in a three hundred thousand dollar airplane do they look at that do you know if they cover it or they say sorry that wasn't an accident i'm glad you brought that up it's a good it's a good point i think there were some life's tales out there in the early days that g if you pull the handle you destroy the airplane you know automatically and uh... it took it took a while for people to understand that you don't fiberglass and composites uh... are very repairable of the twelve deployments that we've had ten of those have been not only repair but return to service uh... the other two weren't even recoverable one of them was at the bottom of the ocean and uh... another one was really broken up when it hit the Hudson River so uh... i can tell you that uh... they are very repairable and for that reason it's a fairly expensive airplane uh... we can actually do repairs on it which in the insurance parlance economically feasible let's say you have a four hundred five hundred thousand dollar airplane you can sometimes fix it for a hundred and twenty five thousand dollars uh... that looks to insurance coming like a really good deal and i also might point out that when they come down under caps they don't have to pay a death penalty uh... death benefit which gosh that should be in their accounting somewhere so uh... we think that it's a really good deal and and they do have the ability to fix these things we we do have composite classes that we teach at at service at the factory we also have a hundred and sixty some odd service centers out there that are capable of fixing these things as well as a number of independent people can fix them so composites are truly a boon to the industry and they're very crash worthy and they are very repairable hope i've answered your question okay well thank you for your time and your patience this morning and welcome sun and fun and have fun thank you very much for your time