MENDOCINO Co., 3/14/24 — Three people survived a plane crash with only minor injuries last Friday in Whale Gulch, a remote coastal community roughly one mile south of the Humboldt County line. Their good fortune can be attributed in part to an emergency parachute designed to slow the aircraft’s descent before impact.
The Cirrus SR-22 single-engine aircraft was headed to the Charles M. Schultz—Sonoma County Airport in Santa Rosa when it lost power around 1:15 p.m., roughly five minutes after taking off from the airstrip in Shelter Cove. The plane was equipped with a proprietary Cirrus Airframe Parachute System (CAPS) which the pilot deployed before drifting into some trees near Yellow Road.
The plane sustained substantial damage, according to a report from the Federal Aviation Administration, but the occupants suffered only minor injuries.
Mendocino County Sheriff’s deputies identified them as a 38-year-old man, 38-year-old woman and a 2-year-old child from Santa Rosa, though the plane is registered to an address in Reno, Nevada, and the victims have been identified as Nevada residents elsewhere in news reports from other outlets.
Cirrus developed the parachute system in the 1990s, according to a Wikipedia entry for CAPS, and as of Sept. 2021 it had been used at least 126 times with successful deployments reported in 107 of those crashes. So far at least 220 people have survived plane crashes using CAPS and at least 21 of those aircraft have been repaired and put back into service.
A similar parachute system exists for some Cessna brand aircraft.