Student pops the chute rather than the parking brake

According to the article, this particular student had
his Commercial Single Engine and Multi Engine Land certificate, Certified Flight Instructor certificate, and about 250 hours of flight time on the same make and model of the plane.
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It could happen:

“Hey bud! Set the parking brake while I hold the tail!”

“Sure thing, just a second!” Opens door, seat belt falls out again, leans inside, gets tangled in headset cables, moves headset cables out of the way by hanging them on cable organizer (the parking brake handle), pulls cover off the BRS actuator, sees warning label, ignores warning label since there’s nothing on any checklist that says to pay attention to any warning label, sees big red handle, and pulls.

Hilarity ensues.
 
Gilbert Buettner said:
The IP pointed to that line on the checklist, and the Vietnamese student reached up and fired a fire extinguisher into the engine.
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I can't be the only one here who knows more than one guy out there with the callsign 'Snuffy.'

Nauga,
the fire distinguisher
 
This probably isn’t the first 0/0 BRS save, and it probably won’t be the last.
 
FWIW, I don't use the parking brakes in the Cessnas at our flight school. I don't trust them. I am not worried about releasing them, I worry about them holding.

In Pipers, I do use the parking brakes and have never worried about them. Interesting that it's on the Piper checklist for starting and runup, but not on the Cessna checklist. Hmmm.

I owned a Bonanza for 17 years but never used the parking brake. It was always inspected during the annual, and I was told it works just fine, but I worried it would slowly release pressure over time.

About ten years ago there was a huge line of storms approaching the airport and I was working the line with another guy. There was a Cherokee 140 tied down, but we worried about hail, so we wanted to put it in an empty hangar. The owner had set the parking brake and locked the door, but we used a tug to move it to the hangar anyway. Not easy! The next day I called the owner to tell him where his airplane was, and he was immensely relieved. He had driven to the airport to check and thought the storm had tossed it into the lake next to the airport.
 
geezer said:
Either the preflight briefing was bad, or the pilots retention is troubling.

I have flown with pilots like that, but only once each.
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I've flown dozens of 172s and not a one was equipped with a BRS chute. I blame that instructor for not ensuring his student was absolutely and thoroughly aware and checked out with the fact that this aircraft had a rocket propelled parachute installed. Kind of like having a loaded pistol on the seat next to a passenger and saying nothing about it. Having said this, the "student" was an idiot for pulling a handle he hadn't seen on any 172 he had flown,
 
sourdough44 said:
Hopefully in this case the plane isn’t totaled by the chute pull.
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In the 172, the 'chute blows out the rear window and rips harness cables out from under fairing strips on top of the cabin to the anchor points on the front spar carrythrough. The rear cables attach to a beefed-up bulkhead aft of the baggage compartment. Minimal or no structural damage. Just ripped-off fairings and a busted window. Maybe some powder burns?
 
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Some smart Alec loves to post after accidents that a BRS equipped plane would not have had the incident.

well, in this case, NOT!
 
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