Timothy – yes of course, exactly right. There are times ATC can be hugely helpful and hints that steer you in the right direction as well! It is horses for courses, and my comment was simply that in these circumstances it is possible ATC would not have been much / any help. I think the pilot was set on his routing, and, as I have said before, if it was weather related, and he had chosen to turn away from the weather to the East I dont suppose it would have been an issue at all as he had already requested a change of altitude and I guess so far as Jersey was concerned he was on a VFR flight plan and nothing unusual in any of those requests. I well recall setting up for an approach in a very gusty 40 odd knot cross wind some years ago and the chap in the tower saying something like you might find your approach a little more than sporting. I ended up at Biggin with a little more wind straight down the runway but it was a lot less sporty! A good word in the ear that day.
FWIW I suspect that if you have broken the rules before departure, but then do everything in reasonable order, including requesting an excursion into class A for weather avoidance or whatever it maybe, as long as you reach your destination or diversion in one piece no one is likely to take much more interest. I dont know whether that should be said, and it isnt said to encourage any rule breaking, but it might just put to rest any doubts in someone’s mind that you need to try and cover things, and if there is an enquiry and it saves your life well so be it. I suspect requesting a climb, turn, diversion or whatever for weather is always well received and acted on immediately and very unlikely to ever be refused, but, if push comes to shove, of course declare a Pan or Mayday.
Fuji_Abound wrote:
FWIW I suspect that if you have broken the rules before departure, but then do everything in reasonable order, including requesting an excursion into class A for weather avoidance or whatever it maybe, as long as you reach your destination or diversion in one piece no one is likely to take much more interest.
I do totally buy this, and think it is very, very true.
But… :-). If you were to be carrying a very public figure, who probably had already complained about the plane falling apart, not arriving on time, etc… and you were carrying out this flight fully knowing that if questions were to be asked on the ground you’d likely be in trouble…
- I would think that probably is the added incentive to stick to a planned route and altitude that maybe isn’t quite working out the way you planned it initially and push on into something you aren’t really quite comfortable with. Be pretty easy to convince yourself to man up and tough it out, when that really is a bad idea?Yes, that is true, especially if you thought it would end up with a diversion and inevitable delays when (maybe) there was already pressure to run to a schedule. I can well imagine the flight might have ended up somehwere like Biggin as a sensible diversion at that time and still open, but all sorts of logistics getting to Cardiff. Southampton may also have been possible but who knows with the weather closing from the West. As ever in this game the key is to have a pretty good idea where you would go if needs must, and warn the passengers as well, and then I guess there is less likely to be complaints form anyone concerned. All very easy in hindsight.
Mr Ibbotson’s JAR-FCL PPL from 2010 has surfaced online.
Of course he could have obtained the Night Qualification at some later date.
No Night Rating at that point in time – 2010.
As you say could have got ‘night’ in subsequent eight odd years.
It looks to me as if the restriction is due to colour blindness as the ATC and radio requirement suggest an inability to use light signals or pyrotechnic signals.
If so it is unlikely that a night qualification could be obtained.
They claim to have unearthed some “dodgy charter” flights around this football scene. Then they dig out a rep for an AOC holders’ trade association, claiming, as he would, that there is a lot of dodgy charter going on.
I think there are a lot of charters that are breaching the current regulations, partly because the public don’t understand what they are buying and partly because the cost of getting and maintaining an A to B AOC is so high that it drives those who want to do things properly out of business.
Add to this the chance to off set the high cost of aircraft ownership and you have the perfect breeding ground for inovative schemes to provide air transport. The problem is without some regulation eventualy someone pushes things to far to save a bit more money and you end up with a pilot who is not qualified or an aircraft carrying too many defects.
What would amaze me is that this would be a big business. There seems every indication that the piston charter business is almost totally dead. We had a poster here, what_next (he left after an argument with somebody else) who used to have a piston charter business (Cessna twins) and who wrote at length on how and why it collapsed. One also doesn’t see piston charters going on, at airports where they did take place (e.g. Shoreham, where the “famous” G-OMAR was thus used, in between “training” and self fly hire) some 20+ years ago.
It seems that customers dried up because airline travel is cheap, chartering a twin was expensive, and today’s generations are not willing to climb inside some rattling old heap. And I find it hard to believe that somehow there are more customers willing to do all these things if the flight is illegal, and thus possibly a bit cheaper. And is it cheaper? Those bird watchers in the recent high profile Murgatroyd court case paid £1500 to be flown.
Hence I think this PA46 thing was something odd. Doubly odd to be seemingly flying with an old Mode C transponder when anyone flying “for real” will have a Mode S just to get airspace access in much of Europe, especially as anyone flying a PA46 “for real” will be doing it IFR which needs Mode S even more, and thus not appearing at all on FR24 or the other Mode S tracking sites. I don’t know what the full scope of the activity was (I am sure the Daily Trash are still digging it out) but it was very likely something where the clients were not complete strangers. You simply could not dig out enough arm’s length clients for a piston charter today, especially an illegal one (a SEP cannot be used for charter).
Do you infer the lack of Mode S solely from the absence of FR24 tracks? I believe it’s possible to not appear on the site by simply telling them to hide you.
