Planes With Parachutes: How Whole-Airplane Parachutes Work

Some small airplanes carry a parachute big enough to lower the whole aircraft, with everyone inside, to the ground. It started with hang gliders in the 1970s and is now standard on every Cirrus. Here is how it works, which airplanes have one and what the record says.

Figure	What it is	Source
510+	Lives saved by BRS parachutes	BRS Aerospace, 2026
269	Lives saved by the Cirrus parachute (CAPS), end of 2024	AOPA, August 2025
133 knots	Demonstrated deployment speed on a Cirrus SR22	Cirrus Owners and Pilots Association
2,000 feet	Height Cirrus advises pulling at or above	AOPA, August 2025

How a whole-airplane parachute works

The pilot pulls one handle in the cabin. A small solid-fuel rocket fires and pulls the packed parachute out and away from the airplane, clear of the propeller and the tail. A ring on the lines, called a slider, holds the canopy back from opening all the way until the airplane has slowed, so the opening shock stays survivable.

Then the airplane comes down under the canopy. On a Cirrus SR22 the descent is about 15 to 28 feet per second, which Flying magazine compares to jumping off something about 13 feet high. The landing gear and the seats are built to absorb most of that.

The parachute does not replace flying the airplane. It is the answer for the situations where flying the airplane is no longer an option: a midair collision, a structural failure, a pilot who has become incapacitated, or an engine failure at night over terrain with nowhere to land.

Where it came from

Boris Popov fell about 400 feet in a hang glider in 1975 and survived. In 1980 he founded Ballistic Recovery Systems (BRS) in Saint Paul, Minnesota, to build a parachute that would bring down the whole aircraft. BRS parachutes went first on ultralights and light sport airplanes, then on certified airplanes.

Cirrus built the parachute into the design of the SR20, certified in 1998, and made it standard equipment. The Cirrus Airframe Parachute System (CAPS) uses a BRS unit. The first life it saved was in October 2002, when a maintenance error left an SR22 pilot near Lewisville, Texas without aileron control. He came down under the canopy unhurt.

Which planes have parachutes

Airplane	Parachute	Standard or option
Cirrus SR20, SR22	CAPS	Standard
Cirrus Vision Jet (SF50)	CAPS, about 90 feet across	Standard
Flight Design CT series and F2	BRS	Standard
ICON A5	ICON Parachute System, built by BRS	Standard
Pipistrel Alpha Trainer	Whole-airframe ballistic parachute	Standard
Tecnam P-Mentor	BRS	Factory option
Cessna 172 and 182	BRS retrofit kit	Added after the fact, by supplemental type certificate

Most training airplanes in the US are Cessnas and Pipers built in the 1960s and 1970s, decades before any of this existed. A retrofit kit can be fitted to a 172 or 182, but it adds about 80 pounds and costs tens of thousands of dollars installed, so few schools do it.

Our fleet in Riverside is factory-new Tecnam P-Mentors, and every one of them carries the BRS parachute. On the P-Mentor it is an option, not standard, so if you are comparing schools that fly the same airplane, ask.

What the record shows

BRS counts more than 510 lives saved across every aircraft its parachutes are fitted to. For Cirrus alone, AOPA counted 132 parachute deployments and 269 lives saved by the end of 2024. The Cirrus Owners and Pilots Association reports that no one has died in a deployment made above 1,000 feet above the ground.

The more interesting number is what happened when pilots were trained to use it. Cirrus fatal accidents peaked at 16 in 2011. Cirrus, the owners' association and instructors then pushed one simple rule, pull early, and trained it until it became a reflex. By 2014 there were 3 fatal accidents in a fleet of about 6,000 airplanes flying more than a million hours. AOPA's Air Safety Institute gave Cirrus its Joseph T. Nall Safety Award for it.

The lesson for a student is that the parachute only helps if you are trained to pull it, and early. Waiting to see whether things improve is how altitude runs out.

What it costs to own

Repacking. A BRS parachute is repacked every 6 years and its rocket replaced every 12, per the BRS requirement Flight Design publishes. A Cirrus parachute is repacked every 10 years, and that has cost over $10,000.
Weight. The system weighs about 80 pounds in a Cessna 172, which comes out of what the airplane can carry.
Price. On a new airplane it is part of the price. As a retrofit on an older Cessna, kit plus installation runs well into five figures.

Questions

Do small planes have parachutes?

Some do. Every Cirrus has one as standard, as do the Flight Design CT series, the ICON A5 and the Pipistrel Alpha Trainer. Others, like the Tecnam P-Mentor, offer it as an option, and older Cessnas can have one fitted as a retrofit.

How does the Cirrus parachute work?

The pilot pulls a handle, a rocket pulls the parachute out of the fuselage, and the whole airplane descends under the canopy. Cirrus demonstrated it at 133 knots, and advises pulling at or above 2,000 feet when there is time.

How many lives has the airplane parachute saved?

BRS counts more than 510 lives saved across all its systems. The Cirrus parachute alone had saved 269 by the end of 2024, according to AOPA.

Can you learn to fly in a plane with a parachute?

Yes. Some schools train in Cirrus airplanes, and every airplane in our Riverside fleet has a BRS parachute. A discovery flight is the easiest way to sit in one and see the handle for yourself.

Do commercial airliners have parachutes?

No. A whole-airplane parachute works for light aircraft. An airliner is far too heavy and too fast, and its safety comes from redundancy instead: two or more engines, two pilots and backup systems for everything.

Sources

Last reviewed October 2026. Save counts change every time a parachute is used, so check the source for the latest number.