I don’t know whether it is any more than a translation of the French BEA one. That one totally ignored the obvious factor of the “6500” label on the SIA chart.
Peter wrote:
I don’t know whether it is any more than a translation of the French BEA one. That one totally ignored the obvious factor of the “6500” label on the SIA chart.
Judging by the somwtimes awkward German of the report, this is merely a translation from French to German and otherwise probably identical to the original French report.
The SIA chart is not mentioned. The conclusion is merely that the accident probably happened because the pilot flew VFR in IMC in mountainous terrain to save time lost earlier due to a late departure.
It’s a report written by the BEA in German language and it has the same number as the French report.
The report states that the pilot told ATC that he is going to descent to 5kft. The flight track shows him at 5200ft prior to the crash and he crashed shortly after that while climbing again. So even if he would have misread the 6500 as MSA or as “terrain altitude” he was well to low for most of the last minutes of the flight. If he would have flown and crashed level at 6500ft then I would see it as a factor but since he descended far below that I can’t see how it would contribute to the accident.
It appears that it is a pretty straightforward VFR in IMC scenario. A fairly straight flight path until they noticed things went bad, then turned away but not on the track they came from but into a small valley, lost visibility and then made a turn right into the mountainside. Fairly classical scenario I’m afraid, augmented by the futile attempt to save a bit of time.
Tragic accident. Not only because better planning or less rush would have prevented it, but also because we have readily available technology in the form of Synthetic Vision that would have warned them about the danger. With all the (gold plated?) regulation in other areas, it strikes me as odd that we’re not getting a stronger encouragement to carry terrain warning. I don’t have the stats but it strikes me that more pilots are killed by CFIT than anything else
You can probably all come up with your favorite odd rule, but going back to the old debate on whether you must still carry paper charts or if you can rely on electronic versions – maybe the rule should be that you must carry an electronic map with terrain warning. I am no fan of every accident coming with a new set of rules, but I’d having sensible rules that addresses the biggest dangers would seem obvious.
mmgreve wrote:
I don’t have the stats but it strikes me that more pilots are killed by CFIT than anything else
Isnt GAs biggest killer “Loss of control”…?
mmgreve wrote:
I don’t have the stats but it strikes me that more pilots are killed by CFIT than anything else
In the past days pre-GPS this was the “main thing” most of it happened in 1970-2020 era mainly between Arizona & California when people went out “on their way”: PPL doing VFR-in-IMC, IR pilots unsure of position flying IFR bellow MSA, CFIT in VMC, with GPS & moving maps & Synthetic Vision had some awareness reduced to other factors such as takeoff/landing accidents
Even with full awareness of terrain & weather there are still TWO BIG “geometric/physic limitations”: even if you completely know terrain & weather, trying to figure out a workable route bellow MSA without dead-end on tactical basis is almost impossible (NP problem), then if you add performance limitations then one is surely dead: most GA aircraft don’t deliver more than 10% vertical gradients (actually most will barely do 2% gradients in cruise setting) without losing control on dive/stalls and turn/vertical performance is bit wider than the legal terrain & weather limits, for all practical purpose GA aircraft does fast cruise in 2D, the terrain sits in 3D, the number of routes to fly sits is 3D^N dimension where N is how many times you change heading which tend to blows up bellow MSA while the number of safe routes vanishes, most modern computers fail to do the task above, so I am assuming it is question of luck for pilots (none of us has a quantum computer), the only useful bit one get from GPS & SV & TAWS is to warn when you are bellow MSA to go above MSA where the route is simple to fly: a single heading A to B
I think in old GA days it was more safer if you stick to “planned procedural flying”: at each point you have route/height/heading to fly, going out of that means troubles, now with GPS & tactical pilot heading/atc vectors we lost some “procedural protection” but we have some additional “tactical awareness”, still the physics of GA aircraft flight performance vs terrain shape did not change that much…
The vast majority of IFR traffic, all the way from GA to airliners, has no terrain presentation visible to the pilots.
Airliners nowadays have GPWS which uses a topo map together with GPS to warn the pilots, and there are extras like “sink rate” and “five hundred” etc etc. But light GA mostly has nothing.
Stefan had an Aspen IFD1000, and the old TB20GT cockpit.
The fact that he found himself at 5000ft or whatever shows he had no idea there was terrain down there – despite having flown in an AOC bizjet operation for many years so obviously knew where the Alps are.
Even an old Garmin 496 wired to the intercom, like I had for many years before replacing it with the Aera 660 which does the same job, would have prevented this, and many other similar ones.
Once you get into the valleys, fairly crude displays just become a bit unfathomable for actually navigating around granite.
The GNS 430 for example will give a good understandable warning and depiction approaching high ground from flatlands but I can’t imagine using it in the valley in poor conditions. When it was less than perfect I was using 2x Skydemon plus the 430, and wide eyeballs.
Having flown the route Via Chambery to Albertville, I can’t say I feel much of a time saving over not cutting the corner S/E of Chambery. Even in Nice wx I’d probably still do that as it’s a nice view.
The valley at Albertville isn’t tight but you need space to loose the height of coming over the ridges, so flying around helps with that.
One option available (was pax when someone did it)
Was climb to MSA then circle down to VMC, over the lake. The lake is huge.
Peter wrote:
Airliners nowadays have GPWS which uses a topo map together with GPS to warn the pilots, and there are extras like “sink rate” and “five hundred” etc etc. But light GA mostly has nothing.
All you need is an iPad running ForeFlight and you’re good.
