How much support or training did the pilot receive? Did he ever get 4 hours in the sim training for all kinds of things that can go wrong on transatlantic flights, including performance, long range cruise at different altitudes (decompression etc..), applicable ATC procedures when non normals arise? Is there no training required for BGBW?
Was there any pressure to „get it done“? Why not a worldwide nav/chart database? Why no arctic survival kit? Would be interesting to see what kind of oceanic ops experience he had. The ATC exchanges do not make me think of an experienced, confident pilot who is familiar with NAT/HLA ops!
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Pilot: „I’m not sure about this BGBW airport, looks challenging!“ Boss: „It’s a fast highly capable twin turboprop – what’s your problem“.
Flying privately spending your own money is one thing, having a boss with a schedule and feeding your family with a flying job is another. Enough horror stories out there. In the end, he pulled off a good crashlanding and survived. That’s an achievement.
What I learn from the danish report is:
Such flights need a lot of preparation regardless of equipment (P180 is top of the line, and still…), should be done with experienced pilots, and special focus needs to be applied to fuel calculation before and during the flight.
I still say that this pilot was lacking the most basic skills – the ability to fly the aircraft at the speeds required to achieve the range he needed – and not any special skills for this kind of operation.
RobertL18C wrote:
If you took off with perhaps insufficient planning hoping that destination was above minima that would be first hole in the cheese.
One way to look at it, but that is not the “cheese theory”, it’s just one thing leading to another. Poor planning of fuel, poor fuel management en route, have to divert, run out of fuel, emergency landing. It can all be chased back to poor planning to start with, cause and effect. The effect of poor fuel planning and poor fuel management is that you sooner or later will run out of fuel.
Seems like ATC have a share of the blame here too. The report could find no reason for the flight being limited to FL200 or below. If ATC had cleared him to a sensible altitude then his other deficiencies might have been mitigated.
Katamarino wrote:
Seems like ATC have a share of the blame here too. The report could find no reason for the flight being limited to FL200 or below. If ATC had cleared him to a sensible altitude then his other deficiencies might have been mitigated.
ATC cant clear him because they need to climb/descend him without radar coverage. It is a procedural service. They couldn’t find no reason they said they didn’t know the reason.
They started multiple times that there was no apparent reason the flight couldn’t have been cleared higher. On the diversion leg for example, the only other traffic was a wing of fighters, 150nm+ away and diverging at FL270 or so (haven’t dug back in to check those specifics). If ATC is saying that’s not enough buffer in an emergency then either their procedures or execution are sorely lacking. The overall impression from the report is that Gander wasn’t really interested, and the report specifically calls out ATC procedures as being inadequate.
On the diversion leg I agree. However, regardless you shouldn’t accept a clearance unless you know you have enough fuel. Even if you hope for higher, you need a PNR in case you don’t get it.
Can’t argue with that. The guy’s problems were certainly 95%+ of his own making.
Flying in that part of the world is riskier than tootling around Europe, and Pilots must take extra care to plan accurately and to have get out options for every potential problem. Reading the report,I deduce that this guy made little or no extra preparation to mitigate the additional challenges of this flight. It seems like he just treated it like a run of the mill flight in Europe.
In particular:
Not having the database that shows all the available airfields – Nuuk was clear and long enough. I suspect he didn’t have any paper topographical charts either
Not carrying a second pilot – or person to discuss options with.
Not carrying an emmersion suit or cold weather clothing
Not studying the BGBW approach plates in advance to “really” know what his minima was – and what the surrounding terrain was.
Not studying topo charts to know the terrain, and what airstrips might be usable in an emergency.
On my trips to the USA, I realised that I just couldn’t do all this planning and calculation whilst in the air. Therefore before leaving, I bought and or downloaded all the topo charts, I planned the possible approaches to each planned – and each possible diversion airfield, I marked up all the lumpy bits to be avoided, and also the entry / exit points of the fjords (as a last resort).
And as a (really) last resort, I even created user waypoints on SkyDemon to guide me around the IAP’s for Reykjavik, Narsarsuaq, Nuuk and Goose bay, plus the key waypoints to guide me up the fjords.
This latter step became necessary when inbound to Reykjavik in really sh..t weather, we found that both our 650’s had been loaded with corrupt databases and had “lost” all the IAP’s for Reykjavik. To rescue the situation, I copied the all the approach waypoint data off the paper IAP’s into SkyDemon, and used that to guide us to a safe landing (in Overcast 400’).
You’re always likely to land with more fuel by committing to your destination as long as the approach is above limits for a second attempt. The main error was in abandoning a suitable destination airport to divert to an alternate without the fuel to so and maintain a final reserve. The decision to commit to the destination
should have been made much earlier given the consumption of any contingency fuel in flying at a lower level than planned.
If you’re likely to land below your final reserve fuel it’s always a MAYDAY.
The write up linked to in the initial reply has some really good points, particularly the part about runway filters. In an emergency such as this, getting down in one piece on a runway surface not authorised within the AFM is a far better outcome than landing off airport, particularly in such a harsh environment.
