With a 30 deg wind, LDSB is not going to be easy (from the sea) but this is all part of basic aviation knowledge. For example in such a situation you fly a steep approach so you don’t get caught up in the downdraught, and aim to touch down further along the runway (there is plenty of it, and with that wind you will need very little of it). Regulation won’t achieve anything.
European FI’s can very well refuse to sign and order more training, particularly if we are talking rental planes in an organisation
On a “club/rental” checkout, anybody can refuse anything 
Loads of bodies refuse a rental to someone who has not flown for 30 days, for example.
gallois wrote:
I had always thought of pilots in general as being inteĺligent people capable of analysing a situation and taking decisions.
Am I wrong about this?
That’s also how I look at it and how my instructors when I took my PPL presented it: Now that you got your license, you should know that you need to learn more! The PPL syllabus cannot cover all situation, it would take too long. But it should emphasize that once you get your license, you should not only be careful but also be on the look out for anything else you need to learn for any flight you consider. If you have never flown in the mountains, you should know that you need to seek extra information and make sure you can do flight you plan for in a safe manner. That extra level of information can be obtained in many ways. We do NOT need more regulation for this.
As @Lesving noted, the Norwegian authorities publish a guide for pilots visiting Norway, giving a lot of very valuable details of the specifics about flying in Norway. That’s how it should be, it’s easy to find, a decent pilot planning to fly to Norway, when preparing his flight will find it (otherwise, I would argue that he has not prepared his flight into Norway) and should read it. Croatia can do the same, maybe not based on this accident, but rather on all the local knowledge that would be valuable to give to foreign pilots.
gallois wrote:
But for heaven’s sake don’t start cutting the GA population even more by regulating more training with more hours and more complexity and more cost for to get a ppl and never want or need to experience these things.
Why are people so adverse to making things safer?
Look, when we learn to drive, what do you think would happen if we say, ah well, in our area we don’t have motorways nor larger cities, so we keep to side roads. How competent would anyone getting his drivers license at a max speed of 50km/h be to later on drive in the Center of a large city or on motorways?
Why is the knee jerk reaction to any sort of challenge regarding training immediately “it’s going to cut GA population”? Learning how to use your airplane throughout it’s full envelope is not going to cost anything more, it just needs adapting the use of time available. Instead of scud running for 20 hours why not go someplace you can actually fly at 8-10k ft and do that instead of counting windmills for a change?
gallois wrote:
If you want to do something which you have never done before. Do some research and some training. Find someone who has done it before and take their advice.
Exactly. And this can well mean, if you plan to fly in the Alps take your time to go there and get an intro. Or fly over the mountains high enough so they are not so much a factor.
Look, we lost one of our members with his family because he flew way too low, apparently out of a misconception that that is how things work. Well, they don’t. Maybe instead of teaching all sorts of tosh in theory, it might be an idea to do some practical work on performance? I think the students would learn a lot more from this than learning methods and stuff which has been out of use since Lindbergh.
The very base of Part FCL is that EASA countries issue licenses which are fit for all countries, not only EASA. Therefore, it is not quite fair to those who learn if there are massive differences how this is done.
Safety is always about knowledge. That is why we are having these discussions. Safety recommendations is always about systematical deficiencies, otherwise safety can become oppressive. I have been fighting against the latter but I am a strong advocate of the former.
Isolated accidents should not lead to safety recommendations, which usually trigger rule making. Systematical deficiencies however should lead to improvement by recommendation and if necessary changed rulemaking. Not more, but better.
Those arguments were done e.g. here.
You could have a school which teaches more advanced stuff but the resulting PPL would find few customers, for a number of reasons, one of which is that some large % of PPL customers have no strong interest (or funding ability) in flying afterwards.
It’s been tried higher up the food chain (with the IR) and AFAIK every attempt went bust.
One has to just accept that the PPL is a retail product, like a mocha cake, and for as long as a man can set up in a wooden hut selling mocha cakes for 10k, when yours are selling for 20k, nearly everybody will buy his cakes.
Pilots who want to do more advanced flying (like, ahem, going A to B and more than 100nm ) just need to educate themselves. If one is completely stupid, one won’t get through the PPL exams, so this should be possible.
Peter wrote:
ou could have a school which teaches more advanced stuff but the resulting PPL would find few customers, for a number of reasons, one of which is that some large % of PPL customers have no strong interest (or funding ability) in flying afterwards.
Sorry, but flying your trainer within most of it’s envelope as well as learning performance basics for flight planning is not “Advanced” but the very basics I expect from any PPL student.
I did my PPL in 1983, with a Cessna 150 which had a radio and nothing else.In the roughly 40 hours we did loads of circuits, then flights to some nearby airfields and finally the so called “360km” flight and the two alpine flights.I did my first solo at 9 hours TT and my PPL check at about 39 hours.
Within that time, we flew the airplane throughout it’s envelope, that is up to 10’000 ft during the alpine intros and while doing the normal cross country flights, we flew between 6000 and 7000 ft during cruise. My FI was a King Air Pilot in his day job. this helped. We also flew into controlled airports (actually were based on one too) regularly, including ZRH during my training. This helped enormeously. I did my RT exam before the PPL with total ease and I’ve loved to do RT ever since.
So doing what I am asking does not cost one Euro more than a normal PPL.
Before people go crazy saying that it is outrageous to demand that people have to fly higher than 2000 ft during their training and learn the skills neccessary, maybe we should have a look in the PPL syllabus. Maybe one of the resident FI’s here can enlighten us as to what is expected by a PPL candidate in terms of how to use their airplane.
I am sorry, but flying an SR20 at cow knee level is misuse of equipment and shows lack of skills. And if a whole group of people has done the same, it is very likely a systematic problem.
@Mooney_Driver. When I wanted to go fly in the Alps and not just above them I went to a club in the alps and took some lessons with an insteuctor there. That was my decision I didn’t have to be told that I needed to do it.
What I found was that flying the plane was pretty much the same as I had already learnt during PPL training. The stick worked the same, the pedals worked the same. You still kept the same picture of the runway and the aircraft speeds were pretty much the same. What was different was learning how to read a rising terrain and to plan my altitudes better. I learnt how to read the local weather and how to anticipate changes and the speed of that change. I learnt what happens to the air on the sunny side of a mountain as opposed to that on shadow side and what to expect on each side of a ridge and how to cross it at an angle. I learnt the importance of being more precise with approach speeds especially when there was no chance of a go round. But most of all I learnt when a flight was a go and when it was a no go under mountainous conditions. None of which changed rhe way I had been taught at PPL level to fly the plane.
These lessons have remained with me and I felt well worthwhile doing.
With the same instructor I flew onto glaciers for breakfast with other members of the club. Unforgettable experiences but I decided not to take the qualification as I felt I would not do it often enough to maintain the currency I felt was needed to be safe.
I made these decisions not a rule maker sitting in a committee meeting and trying to figure out a way to write a rule forced on them through a misguided kneejerk reaction.
Perhaps part of the PPL course should be an introduction to common sense. Oh I forgot, it is now its called Human Factors.
I fully agree, the best way to do those things which are not part of the PPL syllabus on your own at your time.
It is also a good thing to make people aware that such stuff exists and is available even locally.
IMHO it would also be a good thing that post this accident the training scene in those countries might step back and think about what happened and how to avoid repetitions.
We should also consider that a SR20 is not necessarily a base trainer. And performance training is part of the type familiarisation, or at least should be. We do it with every pilot we put on the Mooney.
No, we don’t need additional rules, but we need the current ones (PPL Syllabus) followed and if necessarily adapted in order to provide better value for the same money. I think this is not a goal people will object to too much.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
I think once again it’s difficult to compare. Many FI’s in the US are usually pretty fresh themselves and on the way to their 1500 hrs to get their ATPL. So they are quite up to speed. Lots of FI’s here are folks who have been teaching for a very long time and never flew anything serious, nor had the ambition.
I think that’s the main point. FIs. The “Syllabus” whatever that consists of is for the FIs to teach the minimum stuff required, it’s not created for the student to learn “all that is necessary” to suddenly become a 500h pilot. FIs comes in many shapes. Most come straight from school themselves and have no experience to draw from. Others have been FIs for years, but never flown “true GA” or commercially over some period continuously.
For the students it makes little difference how/what they learn, as long as they learn to fly. A fresh FI with little or no real world experience can only do that if he/she has a plan to follow.
172driver wrote:
I’ve now had a look at the FlightAware track. Interesting, to put it mildly. They must have skimmed treetops and/or roofs in some parts of their trip. Question to our Dutch friends here: I know there aren’t any mountains in Holland, but during training do you never go higher than 3-4k ft?
Bit late to the party, here’s my 2 cents; during PPL training four years ago in Rotterdam we were mostly limited to scud running by the massive class A on top, and the new Lelystad airspace limits a bit the FL55 class E on the south end of the IJsselmeer en route to northern Germany. With the short renting windows available, I doubt that anyone from my club regularly flies more than the usual hourly hop within the Netherlands or close by where the landscape is almost 2D.
What is annoying is in my opinion the mismanagement of the airspace, especially the massive class B in the east: everytime I come back from Germany and pootle happily along at FL95, Beek and DutchMIL (i.e. the Netherland’s FIS) force me down to FL55 or below which is idiotic as I could easily stay high and gradually descend towards Rotterdam. So I’m not surprised that they crept along close to ground level since that’s what they were probably used to.
Probably biased, but I fail to see why it was – especially with a nicely-equipped Cirrus – for them seemingly so difficult to get away from probably bad weather by climbing … when I f*cked up some time ago by questionable decisionmaking and ended in IMC with doubtful knowledge about the cloud base, ground situation, etc., it was a no-brainer to trust my AI and ASI, climb away from hard things that might hurt, and advise ATC about my emergency. Did cost me club privileges, of course, but better getting a bollocking on the ground than a headstone …
