Also: PC-12 Record, Maule Nation, Cockpit Lockout, 34,000 Airliners Needed, Beechcraft Wins Big Contract
You know you're having a bad day when a flight goes so bad that you feel you must resort to using a parachute to see you safely through the flight… and then the chute malfunctions. That's exactly what happened last Thursday to Cirrus Pilot Tim Valentine while enroute from Addison, TX to Kansas. Valentine spoke at length with ANN shortly after the incident saying he experienced an instrumentation failure at 7,000 feet and "in the soup" while trying to avoid the backside of a thunderstorm. With the loss of his HSI and autopilot and a suspect attitude indicator, he decided to hit the silk by deploying the CAPS… a system that had been repacked the year bef