Cirrus owners rave about having the CAPS parachute system as the ultimate safety backup, but if you’re shopping for a used Cirrus, know this: Many used airframes are coming up on the required 10-year parachute repack cycle. This work is expensive, requires considerable down time and can only be accomplished by select and highly specialized shops.
This should be taken into consideration when negotiating the sale price and if you pull the trigger on an airplane that needs the repack, you should know what you’re getting into first. In this article, we’ll take a look at this major service event, including the mandatory repack requirement and what you should expect for costs. During our research, we discovered that all repacks aren’t created equally.