Another Alpine crash - near LOWZ, SR22 D-EPRB

The whole procedure like this is questionable in my view. It is neither a proper IFR approach nor is the airport IFR and nor are the conditions at the airport very favorable for something like this.

An IFR approach to an airfield like this would normally require ATC at the airport, a CTR around the airport and a proper METAR / ATIS issued in such dangerous environment by a trained observer. None of this is present at Zell.

Looking at the Autometar which was quoted earlier in this thread, I still am not sure what station is the base for this and why it is not normally distributed. What DWD and Austrocontrol are doing in their platforms is to generate reports in METAR format from automated Synop stations all over the place, and my suspicion is that Zell works similarly. Knowing how those stations work and what they are intended for, I would be VERY careful using those for aviation purposes.

To properly do weather observation at Zell to be meaningful for this approach, you would at least need two measurement points for cloud base, one at the airfield and one below the MAPt. Similarily, you’d need multiple sources for present weather and visibility, ideally a trained observer on the field. In todays trend for automated METARS, this is often neglected. But if I see how many sensors you need to properly cover a simple ILS approach, trying to cover something like Zell with a Synop station is not very serious.

I am not happy with such half baked procedures which are so much out of standard that we already are now discussing for 17 pages from the armchair how to actually interpret the rules and regulations around them. For me, either you have a proper IFR approach which ends in the immediate vicinity of the runway and has proper outs or forget it. At the very least, a terrain critical place like Zell should have proper ATC and a CTR, which would allow to implement higher visibility and ceiling limits. Therefore, ATC could close the airspace if weather is below the limits for controlled airspace, in this case below 5 km vis and 1500 ft ceiling. This would prevent stuff like this from happening.

Mooney_Driver wrote:

This would prevent stuff like this from happening.

I don’t agree. As far as I can tell, the pilot did not follow the IFR procedures? (approach or not). He did certainly not follow any VFR procedure (or he wouldn’t end up in the mountain). As to why he did not, maybe we will never know.

This is an AFIS airport? At least the procedure say to contact the airport before coming closer than 10 NM. Maybe he didn’t? Or, maybe the weather was good enough, but he couldn’t land for some reason, and decided to leave without really thinking? But to head right up into the clouds doesn’t make much sense no matter how you look at it.

I think without knowing what the airport officers know, all this will be wild speculations (except the fact that he did not follow proper procedures).

I see it exactly like 172driver. The point of this procedure is to allow ifr flights a structured arrival to a point from where it can be determined if vfr conditions exist or not.

Besides all the technicalities involved my guess is this tragic accident needs more discussion on ADM.

I think the procedure is perfectly fine (@mooneydriver). As I’ve seen on several forums, noone would descend and continue beyond MDA without good VMC (good = actually, flyable under safe VFR and lersonal minimums). This accident was not caused by the procedure but by the decision to continue despite adverse weather conditions. As this thread pointed out, at this MAP a visibility of 5km is required. If you don’t have that, plus low hanging clouds, the result is scud running. That goes wrong often and is simply VFR into IMC (with some flawed decision making for the IFR-to-VFR transition).
I am thankful that Austria comes up with such procedures, it would be great to have them in other places too (actually, for example Rega has one over Lake Zurich but only for them). Samedan also has a very similar procedure with a MAP about 6nm from the threshold.

Flying back to the MAPt under VFR and climbing up the missed approach is certainly a highly novel way of getting out of there if the runway is blocked

Can anyone fly the valley to the left (over the lake) on a sim and find out the highest altitude point on its floor?

Worth noting there is this webcam which may be useful relative to the IAP. It points to the south west and is reportedly located at 4000ft QNH.

Flying back to the MAPt under VFR and climbing up the missed approach is certainly a highly novel way of getting out of there if the runway is blocked

Simply start the approach only when prior traffic has cleared the runway.

Mooney_Driver wrote:

Therefore, ATC could close the airspace if weather is below the limits for controlled airspace, in this case below 5 km vis and 1500 ft ceiling. This would prevent stuff like this from happening.

I’m strictly against ATC “closing” uncontrolled airspace for whatever reasons. I’m equally against saying “if we do not have the infrastructure of ATC, MET, airspaces, etc.like in Frankfurt, Zurich or Heathrow we must not establish an instrument procedure at all”.
Where should such a “closing” of airspaces end?
It can happen (and actually has killed pilots already) that you fly VFR into a valley in perfect VMC, but 5, 10 or 20 miles down the valley the conditions become worse and you find yourself in a situation, where weather has degraded and the valley becomes to narrow to turn around.
To prevent that, should ATC close the alps for VFR flying as soon as in some valley the pass at the end is not VMC with adequate terrain clearance?

If we start to demand that ATC closes the airspace as soon as pilots can kill themselves by doing stupid things, flying would indeed become much safer: The safest way to fly is not to fly at all!

LOWZ is a perfect example for a specific solution to a specific problem: If you have great VFR conditions in the valley, but a solid overcast on top, you can still perfectly simple and safe fly into this field. You do not need to cancel IFR somewhere over German or Swiss territory and figure out a complex way to handle ATC, airspaces, etc. on the last 40 NM.

There are still very rare cases, where a well prepared and prudent pilot can find himself in a bad situation: The runway that got blocked just before touchdown in marginal weather cited earlier in this thread might be one of them. But these cases are extremely rare (as in: never happened at all in real life as far as I can remember) and there are still options: In this case, a landing on the taxiway or on the gras strip south of the runway should be “perfectly” doable for our type of planes (“perfectly” as in “all people can get out of the plane alive and by themselves” which is a perfect outcome for a once in a century emergency…)

tschnell wrote:

Required visual references to continue an approach below DA/MDA are clearly outlined in AMC1 NCO.OP.110, and no special provisions are made for a circling approach.

AMC1 to NCO.OP.110 is about departures, not approaches.

JasonC wrote:

You have to be joking? What criteria do you think apply to descending below the MDA?

I’m not joking. As has been made very clear in this discussion, the LOWZ RNP A is not a normal instrument approach procedure but a cloud break procedure. If you were to apply the GM to NCO.OP.110 to determine the minimum visibility for the approach, you would get 5000 m. The distance from the MAPt to the runway threshold is almost 8000 m. If I haven’t been there before, I would be hard pressed to identify a small airport at 8000 m distance even with unlimited visibility, particularly as it doesn’t have any kind of lighting.

The criteria I would apply for descending below the MDA in this case is VMC (which given the altitude and height in this case implies at least 5000 m visibility). Given that you are heading down the center of a valley with a river leading straight to the the town with the airport it is more or less impossible to get lost as long as the cloud base is ok.