The line is 12,500 pounds.
I don’t know why; but I have a suspicion that it may have come about before control augmentation was common, or because it was a lot more ‘busy’ once upon a time. I look forward to a factual answer.
Also pilot incapacitation. Pilots can have heart attacks and strokes. Also, coordination. When a plane is complex, it helps to have a second set pf eyes, or to distribute workload, or to read back checklists, or do the radio work in an emergency while the pilot is busy, etc.
For the regulations it’s a hodge-podge of different criteria. As pointed out by the several partial answers above.
14 CFR 91.531 specifies when a second in command is required to operate an airplane:
§91.531 Second in command requirements.
(a) Except as provided in paragraph (b) of this section, no person may operate the following airplanes without a pilot designated as second in command:(1) Any airplane that is type certificated for more than one required pilot.
(2) Any large airplane.
(3) Any commuter category airplane.
(b) A person may operate the following airplanes without a pilot designated as second in command:
(1) Any airplane certificated for operation with one pilot.
(2) A large airplane or turbojet-powered multiengine airplane that holds a special airworthiness certificate, if:
(i) The airplane was originally designed with only one pilot station; or
(ii) The airplane was originally designed with more than one pilot station, but single pilot operations were permitted by the airplane flight manual or were otherwise permitted by a branch of the United States Armed Forces or the armed forces of a foreign contracting State to the Convention on International Civil Aviation.
(c) No person may designate a pilot to serve as second in command, nor may any pilot serve as second in command, of an airplane required under this section to have two pilots unless that pilot meets the qualifications for second in command prescribed in §61.55 of this chapter.
So the meat is (a) 1, 2, and 3. I’m not in the mood to write a book tonight, so that’ll have to do. It’ll get anyone started on Googilng more. But 2) Large = 12,500 lbs as has been mentioned above. Which using conventional aluminum tech is a decent proxy for the ability to carry more than roughly 10-15 people.
As to the rationale …
As airplanes get more complex and faster, it’s easier for a single pilot to become overwhelmed by the pace and amount of stuff that needs doing under normal conditions, much less emergency conditions. Also, the number-of-pilot regs were written before the highly automated airplanes of today. I can leave HAL to fly for minutes at a time without deep concern he’ll crash the jet. That was much less true in the 1980s, much less the 1940s when big complicated airplanes burst on the scene and the regs were written.
The maximum plausible disaster is certainly part of FAA’s thinking. Apparently they think, say, 10 dead is a bunch worse than, say, 8. But as between 10 and 500 they’re happy enough with two pilots.
Redundancy against pilot incapacitation has been mentioned.
Another big rationale is error detection and management. It’s a statistically proven fact that in airline operations the second pilot who’s not actively flying detects the vast majority of the mistakes. In a very real sense, the person actively flying is too close to the work to reliably QC it too. And we all give a bit more leeway for our own idiosyncratic shortcomings than we’d happily accept in the person next to us. Two pilots keep both “honest”. At least in a culture that values professionalism, not corner cutting.
IMO this error management issue is the rock on which efforts to go to single pilot jets will founder.
I love flying (not a pilot…passenger).
I would be deeply reluctant to ever get on a single pilot passenger jet.
Weirdly, I will get on a single pilot GA plane which is probably far more dangerous.
I need to rethink this.
Caveat: Some GA planes have parachutes and some of the really swank ones have auto-land systems so there is a little leeway there.
‘Probably’ is way too generous. I love general aviation, but I am under no illusions about the risk. Flying in a small plane is about 10-20 times more dangerous than driving in a car, depending on how you measure it. Closer to motorcycles, actually.
Scheduled airline flying is orders of magnitude safer. General aviation has a desth rate of about 16 people per million miles of travel. Major airlines are about 50 times safer than GA. Regionals are about 5 times safer
Those parachutes provide the illusion of safety, but consider that A) most accidents happen on takeoff and landing, where a chute won’t help, and B) deploying the chute at altitude makes you a passenger in an uncontrolled vehicle that could land in a very bad place.
In the history of ballistic parachutes only about 400 lives have been saved. That’s not nothing, but given the added cost and weight of the parachute system, and some evidence that pilots fly more recklessly when they think a parachute will save them, I don’t know if they really account for much.
Thinking about it a little bit I guess it is that I would be flying commercial waaaay more than on a GA plane.
Commercial may be 50x safer but I will be flying commercial 100x more than in a GA plane (that’s just me…YMMV).
Sure. But the biggest risk you are taking when flying commercial is likely the drive to the airport and back.
In terms of risk of desth, GA is closer to riding a motorcycle, with one big exception: The risk is much more in your hands. You can be the best motorcyclist in the world and that won’t save you when someone rear-ends you at a light (an accident like that killed a friend of mine). In a GA plane, your risk is almost completely determined by your own behaviour and skill. Structural failure in flight is exceedingly rare, as is a mid-air collision. Most accidents are caused by flying into bad weather, running out of fuel, or botching a takeoff or landing. Training and discipline can lower your personal risk way below the average.
Just a small nitpick that point (B) is not entirely accurate. All parachutes are controllable to some extent, depending on the design of the specific chute. But even the classic old round parachutes are controllable in the sense that they have forward motion and are steerable. The bigger problem is that a novice parachutist will probably have poor visual judgment in regard to altitude and speed. And it is indeed true that a strong wind may become the dominant factor in where you land.
Nitpicking in reverse.
Everything you say is correct about the sorts of parachute that people wear on their back. Or those installed in military ejection seats.
But the parachutes we’re discussing are attached to the whole airplane, much like the recovery parachutes on a re-entering space capsule. These are completely uncontrollable by the plane’s occupants. You’ll go wherever the wind chooses to take you and land on whatever happens to be there facing whichever random direction the airplane happens to be facing when the ground arrives.
Which is still a darn sight better than riding down in a crumpled heap of bent aluminum or shattered fiberglass after a midair or structural failure.
Replying to the last few posts in general …
@Sam_Stone nailed it here.
Thanks for the correction. I was indeed thinking of a personal parachute, the kind you wear on your back. I wasn’t aware that such a thing as a whole-airplane parachute even existed.
I’d have given more explanation if I’d known this was new to you. See here for a bit more:
Lots of armchair experts think they’re a panacea to pretty well eliminate fatal lightplane accidents. As @Sam_Stone said, they cover very excellently for a set of very severe bad situations that are rather rare. But they do zippo for the far more common ways lightplane pilots most often kill themselves and their passengers.
It is not a panacea but it also seems that a parachute for your plane does, overall, improve the chances of surviving when something goes badly wrong with your plane. Interestingly, it seems to be of use (statistically) pilots need to be trained that it is an option. Without the training many just forget it is there.
It by no means is a get-out-of-jail free card for when things go wrong but probably better to have the option than to not have it. In the video below the guy goes over the Cirrus CAPS numbers that illustrate the above. (They also note that it can be helpful even at low altitude and should be used…it may not fully deploy but it still provides drag which means a lighter impact…every little bit helps kinda thing.)
How many times have they been used? Does the number include ultralights, or are we talking about ‘real airplanes’?
About the worst case I can think of at altitude is to lose a wing. Here’s a video of that with a parachute.. start at 2:15 in the video. I’m impressed.
Me too. He couldn’t have been much above 500 feet when the problem happened and he had a good long hang time under the chute. Which implies it’s good for a lot more of the envelope than I’d have assumed. Still no help for final turn stall/spin or CFIT.
It was unfortunate the parachute cable got wrapped up in the tail which led the the nose-first touchdown. Then it settled on its back, trapping the pilot. Normally the fact the wind then dragged the airplane around would have been bad news. But that’s probably what gave him a chance to get the canopy open while it semi-flipped around a wingtip. The fact pretty soon a fire was going would have meant still being in the cockpit would likely have been fatal.
On another note, I wasn’t familiar with the airplane in the vid, nor it’s manufacturer. Per the comments, the title misidentifies the airplane. Its actually a
Just a couple of hours ago there was a mid-air collision over Colorado, and remarkably everyone involved walked away uninjured. Is that a parachute to the left of the Cirrus in the photo? Some commenters are speculating that the parachute may have saved the lives of the people in the Cirrus.
On a completely different note, I had no idea anyone was still flying Metroliners in the US.
https://denver.cbslocal.com/2021/05/12/small-plane-crash-mid-air-collision-cherry-creek-reservoir/
Yes, that’s the chute. You can see the shrouds running from behind the cabin to where the chute lies on the ground.
I don’t know. I didn’t dig that deep into the data.
The point is, there are certain circumstances (structural failure, engine failure in IMC) where it would be really, really nice to have a ballistic parachute. However, accidents like this rarely happen. For example, I have never heard of an in-flight structural failure of a strut-braced Cessna. Given how much 150’s and 172’s are abused by student pilots, that’s saying something.
Only about 10% of GA accidents happen in cruise flight. The most common (47%) happen on final approach and landing. 14% happen on takeoff and initial climb. The rest happen during the climb and descent phases.
You parachute wonj’t do anything for a takeoff or landing accident. That’s 61% of accident causes. If we say that the parachute might work in the first half of a descent or last half of a climb, then that’s a total of 19% of GA accidents where a chute might save you.
But then there are the negatives: The chute is heavy, and uses up useful load, making it more likely that people will fly overloaded. There’s evidence that when people know they have a ballistic chute aboard they take more chances - pushing harder into IMC, flying more recklessly, etc. And there have been cases where pilots pulled their chutes when better options were available. One pilot flew into cloud and panicked and tried to deploy his chute. The chute didn’t fire. Then he came out of the clouds and landed normally. Had the chute worked, at the least he likely would have destroyed the airplane, but he could have also landed in a way that caused serious injury or death.
I don’t have anything against ballistic parachutes, and in some planes like the Cirrus they might be a good idea. I recall that the Cirrus VK-30 (I think) had a problem where it could enter an unrecoverable deep stall and just pancake all the way to the ground. If I had that plane, I might like a ballistic parachute.
See post #2073 (my post just a few above this one). A lot of your objections are answered in the video linked in that post.
I dunno. base to final stall/spin can’t be any worse than losing a wing. If you had the smarts to recognize a spin then deploying a chute seems doable.