I ran across something yesterday that reminded me of Cory Lidle

[jmowreader]

We all remember Cory Lidle, the New York Yankees pitcher who died when his Cirrus SR20 airplane crashed into the side of a New York apartment building.

Recently I've been looking at websites for small airplanes. I don't know why. Anyway, I came upon this one...

http://philip.greenspun.com/flying/plastic-airplanes

which is a comparative review of the Diamond Air DA40, the Cirrus SR20 and the Columbia 400. In the piece was this rather interesting paragraph...

The bottom line on safety seems to be in favor of the Diamond. As far as I know, as of February 2006, only one DA40 worldwide has been fatally crashed (botched instrument approach in very low IMC) whereas a Cirrus pilot manages to kill himself every month or so.

According to this guy, there are two real strange things about the way a Cirrus flies. First, the control stick is spring-loaded, so it feels the same all the time. On most other airplanes, if the plane starts to fall out of the sky or does something else stupid, the controls change their feel. Not so on a Cirrus. The other is that there are trim tabs on the ailerons, which is rare on a small plane, and the Cirrus' autopilot uses them to bank the airplane...which means that if you turn the autopilot off when it has the aileron trim deployed, you're going someplace you didn't intend to.

Okay, let me see...Lidle was a low-time pilot (less than 100 hours total time) in a plane with atypical control systems...over airspace with LOTS of things to run into. Sounds like a recipe for disaster to me.