Gentlemen
I had been flying Beech 55s for 17 years until I allowed my MEP rating to lapse 3 or 4 years ago. I have flown half of my Baron time on the accident aircraft which is the subject of this discussion. I delivered the aircraft from its post-avionics upgrade in 2009. The GNS530 replaced a KX155 and a King IFR GPS. The KR87 ADF remained, with a fixed card KI227 indicator. This aircraft had an Altimatic IIIC autopilot which had been u/s for as many years as I have flown it.
I have scrolled through your comments here (quite quickly – forgive me) and, having flown with and known both the deceased very well, I and others in professional aviation regrettably believe the causes of this tragedy extend to reasons more human factor than technically driven. I wouldn’t get bogged down in discussing the perceived under-used capabilities of the 530 for this particular accident. Both the 737 and King Air 200GT are EFIS / PFD / MFD concept aeroplanes. The Baron had basic-T instrumentation; the attitude indicator in particular was of vintage design without pitch increment markings or a flight director facility.
The report discusses the CAA’s model of risk (I forget their terminology for the moment); interesting to note they acknowledge technical risk elimination (i.e. replacing the off airport NDB with an error-proof system) more of a priority than training the pilot to identify and avoid risk. If they stand by this concept, I’m bemused as to why they’ve dragged their heels for so long in rolling out RNAV / GNSS approaches for UK airports. The trials, after all, extend as far back as 2006 IIRC.
It seems Europe is seriously deficient in RNAV. Just don’t understand why. Why on earth would anyone cling to NDB approaches over RNAV’s? Even the FAA says that if you have the choice in an emergency between using your uncertified iPad with some GPS software, take it over shooting an NDB approach. It’s safer.
It seems Europe is seriously deficient in RNAV. Just don’t understand why
To make an airport legal for AOC ops, it needs
so that is why NDB approaches exist all over the place. You can probably stick an NDB somewhere for a low 5-figure sum and the service contract is probably of the order of 5k a year. Probably another 5k for the annual calibration flight… Dave Phillips would know.
The design fee for any IAP is about 20k GBP per IAP and in the UK the airport has to pay this out of its landing fees, fuel sales, chocolate cake sales. There is/was a Slovak company (discussed here some time ago) which was doing it for a bit less, but not hugely less.
But really this is a redherring because Dundee has an ILS which is the gold standard for IAPs. LPV is nice but almost nobody, and even more almost nobody when it comes to AOC ops, is equipped to fly LPV. In fact almost no AOC ops are equipped to fly a GPS approach of any kind, as a % of total aircraft.
Many thanks for your great informative post, @Velar
I think that every IFR airport in Germany has at least an LNAV approach, and many of the ones that have an ILS have LPV or LNAV/VNAV, which is almost as good.
Why is that different in the UK?
The point is that a procedural ILS approach is, to a certain degree, more complicated than a GPS approach, because the way they are designed, the former often reference distances from various navaids a fixes for stepdowns, turning points, etc., increasing the risk of messing something up.
On a GPS approach, every turning point, every descent point, every final approach fix and every missead approach point is coded by a waypoint for itself. Thus, one never has to do that “when four DME from xxx, descend this and there…”. One just has to use the passing of certain waypoints to initiate certain action. Sure. these still carry the risk of messing up, i.e. taking one waypoint for another, but it is still much more intuitive.
In the days of ubiquitous GPS, we shouldn’t any longer use the workaround of using distances to certain navaids to define a point in space.
And that’s even the only factor: Other problems can be forgetting to switch from GPS guidance to VLOC, not settingthe correct final course on the HSI – or sidelobes of an ILS (which I personally didn’t believe much in until i experienced it personally).
The new gold standard is LPV, IMHO
See this article: http://aviationweek.com/commercial-aviation/eu-wide-use-lpv-approaches-targeted-2018
UK is/was leading?
On the GPS approach point I think they are operationally relevant in France, Germany, Holland, Denmark (presumably more). In Northern Europe it really is just the UK where they are non existent. Should a precision GPS approach with an appropriate minima be available (or a non-precision with +V), I will always choose to fly it over an ILS.
LPV availability in Europe:
Thank you, Jason. Then it’s very different than what was described in the above Article …
Do you have a list/link for European GPS approaches (all of them)?
On the GPS approach point I think they are operationally relevant in France, Germany, Holland, Denmark (presumably more)
Dundee (let’s keep this on topic otherwise I will start deleting posts) is in the UK and chooses to pay loads of £ for the ILS while not getting a GPS approach.
This is a commercial decision. They are not stupid.
While there are many LPV airports on mainland Europe, my comment was based on flying to/from the UK, which focuses the topic to airports which have customs/immigration but don’t have an ILS, and we have already discussed this here a number of times. If anyone (especially Flyer59) would like to discuss something else, please start a new thread on it.
JasonC wrote:
In Northern Europe it really is just the UK where they are non existent.
Only an British man could look at that map and say that 
