Ballistic Recovery Systems (CE) (USOTC:BRSI)
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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.