| Issue #30, October 20, 2006 |
TWO PLANE CRASHES: WAS IT THE AIRCRAFT?
By Sabrina C. Mashburn
On September fifteenth, 2006, at 1:20 p.m., Mountain Standard Time, Mr. Sergio Savarese, 48 of Southampton and Mr. Ivan Luini, 46, of Sag Harbor called in a distress signal to Denver Air Traffic Control indicating they were encountering icy weather. By 1:33 p.m., all communication had been lost, and moments later, their Cirrus SR20 was seen falling from the sky above the Colorado-Wyoming border. Although the public seems to have all but forgotten this tragedy only one month after the accident, the death of Yankees pitcher Corey Lidle last Friday, who was flying a Cirrus SR20, exactly the same type of plane that killed the two East-Enders, brought their plight to the forefront once again.
Since the Cirrus SR20’s entrance on the market in 1998, it has been responsible for 33% more deaths per year than any other aircraft in the United States, according to a report by the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association.
Plane crashes can almost always be blamed on user error, not machine malfunction. In Lidle’s case, it is still unclear as to who was flying the plane when it crashed, but his flight instructor and friend, Tyler Stanger, who was in the plane beside him, was a careful pilot. All four of these men in the two planes were good pilots and respected businessmen who were not prone to making careless errors in life or in the air.
After both crashes, pilots across the country expressed not only their sympathies for the victims’ families, but recognition of the possibility that this could have happened to any of them had they been in similar situations to those.
As anyone who has spent time in the mountains already knows, the best time to do anything at high altitude is from the break of dawn to around noon or one p.m., because, after that, some very big storms start to roll in. Eight percent of all plane crashes since 1991 have been caused by the weather, and, for small planes like the Cirrus SR20, icy conditions similar to those encountered by Mr. Savarese and Mr. Luini are considered the most perilous weather condition of them all. James Fallows, a journalist and owner of a Cirrus SR20, noted that on the afternoon of the crash, he had been stranded in a Salt Lake City airport, because all of the commercial airlines had cancelled or delayed their flights due to the very same weather system these two Long Island men must have flown into. Fallows also notes that the icy conditions that took down the little Long Island Cirrus would have proven fatal for any pilot in a plane without a de-icing mechanism. Because the Cirrus SR20 does not have the TKS-Based, Weeping Wing Ice Protection System employed by its more expensive sister jet, the Cirrus SR22, flying through clouds with inner temperatures below freezing would cause any Cirrus SR20 to be coated in ice and fall from the sky.
In the case of Mr. Lidle’s plane, he and Mr. Stanger were attempting a tricky maneuver at the time of their crash, as they had decided to make a tight 180-degree turn over the 2,000-foot-wide East River to avoid flying into LaGuardia airport’s airspace. Pilots surveyed by the New York Times, who have flown a similar path over the city, said that they would rather receive a citation from La Guardia or fly over the wider Hudson than make the risky 180-degree turn. The fact that Lidle had only received his pilot’s license in 2005, and that his instructor had flown over New York City only once before, coupled with a brand-new plane and difficult maneuvering, seemed to stack the odds against the duo from the start. However, Lidle had asked his flight instructor to accompany him on this flight for that very reason, and had probably purchased the Cirrus SR20 as his first plane because of its speed in going from point A to point B and it’s parachute system, which has been promoted and discussed in the news ever since their plane crashed, as the reputation of the Cirrus SR20 was put on the line yet again.
There is a parachute system; the Cirrus SR20 is equipped with none other than the famed Cirrus Airframe Parachute System, also known as CAPS. Although icing conditions are included on the short list of situations during which deployment of the parachute system should be considered, according to Cirrus, the CAPS from this particular crash was found miles from the plane it was designed to protect. The CAPS must be deployed manually by applying 35 pounds of pressure to a lever at an altitude of at least 10,000 feet in order to set off a small rocket that should propel the parachute into the sky above the cockpit. Because Mr. Luini and Mr. Savarese had requested an altitude change to 11,000 feet during their final distress call, that would have given them only 1,000 feet to deploy and inflate the parachute. Also, the CAPS has only been tested at speeds under 130 knots, and most falling airplanes, especially ones spiraling towards the ground (Cirrus planes are notorious for their propensity to spin like tops even when flying in normal conditions), will fall at speeds well over 200 knots. It is not known as to whether Mr. Lidle or Mr. Stanger attempted to deploy their CAPS before the fatal crash.
Because of the specialized situation in which the parachute is able to save a falling plane, only 6 planes have been saved by the system off of Cirrus’ own test field, and every one of these landed on ideal, flat expanses of land which, according to many pilots, would have been ideal places for an emergency landing with or without the aid of a parachute. Mr. Savarese and Mr. Luini’s parachute was found four miles away from the crash site, dragging a piece of the plane’s fuselage; it is unknown as to whether one of the men in the plane attempted to employ the parachute, or if it deployed after detaching from the body of the plane during the descent. What is known, however, is that it certainly did not lower the aircraft to the ground and absorb the impact of the landing with it’s specialized landing gear, as the Cirrus website claims it should do when deployed.
Mr. Savarese and Mr. Luini were celebrated furniture designers who helped to bring fashionable Italian designs to American homes. Mr. Luini is survived by his wife, Micaela, and their fourteen-year-old son, Mattia; Mr. Savarese is survived by his wife, Monique, and their nine-year-old sons, Luca and Mattea. Both Mr. Lidle and Mr. Stanger are survived by their wives; each had one child and Mr. Stanger and his wife had another on the way.
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