The Cirrus aircraft is loaded with advanced safety features lacking in older "legacy" aircraft. Yet, the Cirrus safety record appears to be no better — and perhaps even worse — than that of the legacy fleet. How can this be?
I’ve written before that "risk homeostasis" may be one factor at work. I suggested here and here that pilots might tend to use the advanced features of the aircraft to fly into more challenging conditions than they otherwise would. While using the features in that fashion might increase the utility of the aircraft, it necessarily undercuts many of the features’ safety benefits.
It turns out that that three human factors experts have published a short article (see below) on riskContinue Reading Cirrus Safety and Risk Homeostasis