BRS Saves 200th Life!Cirrus aircraft under canopy with BRS Parachute. (Photo: Cirrus Design)
19 April 2007 - 11:06PM
Business Wire
It was the summer of 1983, and Jay Tipton�s plan was simple: He had
invited his wife Jo and their 3 year old daughter Sarah to come
outside their Colorado home to watch dad fly his light aircraft low
and slow over the house. Tipton had planned on dropping a love note
to his wife as he flew by and then watch it flutter down to her
waiting hands. But he never got the chance. A thermal caught one
wing of his aircraft and shoved it skyward. In less that a second,
the nose of his plane dropped and Tipton�s aircraft rolled over on
its back and entered a spin, a flight condition often referred to a
graveyard spiral. He probably had little more than a hundred feet
left before he hit the ground when he pulled the bright red handle
that hung above his head. Boom! He heard the sound of a detonation.
A moment later, his whole airplane swung back upright and he was
hanging under a parachute which gently set him down in a nearby
field. �It might sound very melodramatic but when I climbed out of
the wreckage and saw my wife and 3-year-old daughter running to me
from across the field, I could have cried,� Tipton wrote in a
letter to Ballistic Recovery Systems (BRS), a then small company in
Minnesota which manufactured the emergency parachute. He had
installed the BRS parachute system just two months before it saved
his life. As miraculous as the story might sound, surprisingly it
is not uncommon. Since Jay Tipton deployed the first whole-airframe
parachute in 1983, BRS has documented dozens and dozens of such
stories from pilots flying BRS-equipped aircraft all over the
world. And on April 11, 2007, James Turpen departed from Tucson,
Arizona in a Cirrus SR22 for a flight back to his home in Colorado.
Not long into the flight, Turpen began to have difficulties and
when his instruments warned him of an imminent impact with the
terrain�terrain he couldn�t see because he was inside the clouds�he
made the command decision to pull the red handle above his head. He
heard the solid-rocket motor shoot skyward, deploying the
aircraft�s whole airplane parachute. Moments later, the Cirrus came
to a gentle rest in a pine forest in western New Mexico. Turpen
walked away from the crash and became the 200th person whose life
was saved by deployment of a BRS whole-airplane parachute. �When I
first got the news that we�d just saved our 200th life, I just
closed my eyes and took a deep breath,� says BRS CEO Larry
Williams. �It just reminded me and all of us here at BRS that what
we do really does make a difference.� BRS had been making
whole-airplane parachute systems for recreational aircraft for a
decade when the National Aeronautics and Space Administration
approached them. NASA offered BRS a Small Business Innovation
Research grant to use the company�s expertise to design and test
alternate materials for parachutes, as well as continuing the
development of a �continuous disreefing device,� a technology used
in BRS systems today. It was only a few years later that two
brothers in Minnesota took note of the remarkable BRS parachute
system. Alan and Dale Klapmeier were designing an innovative new
airplane they called a Cirrus, and approached BRS about including a
parachute system. By 1998, a Cirrus SR-20 began flying as the only
FAA-certified airplane in the world which had a whole-airplane BRS
parachute system. Cirrus and BRS had to wait several years for the
real payoff. In October of 2002, Lionel Morrison, a 53 year-old
architect, pulled the red handle in his Cirrus and landed unharmed,
thanks to the FAA-certified BRS parachute that brought the disabled
aircraft safely back to the ground on a golf course north of
Dallas, Texas. When the media finally got their chance to interview
Morrison and ask if would ever even think about getting into an
airplane again, he said, �I had a good airplane with a great backup
system and it worked! So I have MORE confidence now, not less
confidence�.� As simple as it might sound, the BRS system is
actually a high tech marvel. A whole-airplane parachute is
exponentially more complex than parachutes typically used by sky
divers. The single handle available to the pilot in the cockpit is
connected to a state-of-the-art solid rocket engine, technology
borrowed from the military�s F-16 ejection seat system. That rocket
deploys the whole-airplane parachute in little more than a second
and the aircraft then floats all the way back down to ground,
passengers and all. The BRS systems which have saved 200 lives is
now undergoing tests with much larger canopies and with much larger
load carrying capabilities. The reason? Personal jet manufactures
along with a legion of high performance aircraft designers have
requested their newest aircraft to include BRS parachutes. When
this wave of new designs begin final flight testing, they will
become the largest and fastest passenger aircraft in world to take
advantage of Ballistic Recovery System whole-aircraft parachute
technology. �It�s like seatbelts and airbags,� Jay Tipton says,
nearly 25 years after being the first person to deploy a BRS
parachute. �We now expect those safety items to be in every car and
I think the same thing is happening with emergency parachutes in
airplanes.� As the years have gone by, he admits to replaying that
moment he used the parachute over and over again in his head.
�Because of that BRS system, I got to watch my daughter grow up and
become successful, I got to be with my sons as they grew up and
became successful and I got to continue to enjoy my marriage with
Jo. None of that would have been possible if it wasn�t for my
parachute. It saved my life and I�m very thankful.� One thing is
different today than when Tipton first pulled his parachute all
those years ago. Now there are 200 other people that know exactly
how he feels.
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