TimR wrote:
It is not always as easy as it looks.
It’s referred to as get-there-itis, as I’m sure you know. It happens easily and has cost many lives. The problem with it, one not always knows when one is experiencing it. It’s the way our brain works…
TimR wrote:
It is not always as easy as it looks.
I agree, sometimes it’s not easy as it looks but pilot has to perceive himself/herself as PIC at the first place, a person responsible for safety of the aircraft and all people on board. No peer pressure is allowed and accepted. My first sentence to anybody who flies with me is: “If you’re not flexible in terms that our trip can be extended or shortened or ended by other means of transport, don’t join me.” Anything can happen, from bad weather to punctured tire and you must not allow to be distracted and to make compromises lowering safety. I know it’s easy to write this here and sometimes it’s hard to keep up with this in real life but cases like this confirm that bad judgement (probably caused by rush) kills.
It is an interesting question if a Cirrus chute would be useful in the middle of a TS but it is worth it for any loss of control and the resulting overspeed and Gs?
You can fly in convective air (gliders do +/-15kfpm on “total energy varios”) and you do get away with it on airbreaks only but I don’t see how you could avoid loss of control, overspeeding and structural failure without them?
The Cirrus chute will dissipate energy and it is not just from gravity AFAIK but I doubt anyone from their marketing department will claim it will get you away alive from the core of an active TS but those who do paragliding may have an answer to this?
TimR paints a realistic scenario for the lining up of holes in the cheese which eventually lead to disaster. Time pressure is a huge killer in many regards, not only aviation. This, combined with get-there-itis is maybe the most dangerous thing you can come across and many normally very structured and competent people have fallen into the trap. With different factors piling up, people can get utterly irrational and develop a tunnel vision on one aspect of the problem (Airport closing, let’s get out of here, we’ll sort it out in the air) or similar, they completely shut out anything diverting attention from that particular goal.
I wonder what of those radar pics he had available to him before departure. If he had them, there is no explanation why he headed straight into that cell rather than to divert to the east via Nordholz, which looked much better.
Quite possibly this tragedy also shows yet again how important it would be if Europeans finally get their act together to provide proper in-flight weather like in the US. If the guy would have had this big red blop on his MFD in the Cirrus, I very much doubt he would have flown into it but around it. Clearly there are possibilities to do that already but rental pilots with often limited time and ressources will mostly not have systems like ADL or even one of the current apps capable of displaying weather meaningfully. Very few have a DWD weather subscription or something similar but go for “free” sites which often lag behind in time and resolution. There really is no reason why national and financial considerations should prevent a better distribution of weather information to pilots, particularly in flight. Lots of graphic products are utterly useless if they can’t be viewed or received in the cockpit.
Having said all of this, where he was flying and at the altitude, any 3G/4G tablett running a flying app should have had ample contact to download the current situation over the normal phone net. The question is, was he trained and capable to use these devices properly.
It is always sad to see such utterly obvious accidents.
Looking at the website of the flying club, (was) 6 aircraft (2x Aquila, 2x 172, SR20, SR22) + 32 FI & FE, many airliner staff, based on a ‚real‘ airport doing a lot of movements – that is a decent operations and far from the typical small we-get-a-plane-together. Btw, ain‘t no gasoline at these islands, so not factor in get-there-itis. Given the combined power visible on the website I also suspect they did have enough smartphone and tablet devices on board to see the radar pictures before takeoff. Location of the crash looks as if the hit the DCT button, but FR24 profile does not look as 100% autopilot. Hope they retrieve the wreckage soon and we get hints – strange accident.
TimR wrote:
I am just trying to paint an illustrative scenario. I would bet you a decent amount of money this exact scenario has occurred to many pilots flying into LFAT for a lovely weekend day. It has happened to me (at least bullets 1-4).
I’m would likely go in this scenario, although it would be a borderline case. On the other hand, I have an ADL unit.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
The question is, was he trained and capable to use these devices properly.
That’s also one serious gap in pilot training. Teaching about online services and information sources is almost non-existent in Europe (speaking from my experience in Croatia and neighboring countries and listening pilots from other countries). None of FIs in Croatia is aware of autorouter, none uses ADL (or ever heard of it), very few use advanced weather services.
Few days ago the crew of business jet departing LDZA haven’t received standard weather package from their company and the only source for METAR/TAF they knew was ippc.no which was down at that moment. Also, they were clueless where to find MSLP charts and other weather data. Airport ground crew didn’t have the idea how to help them because they only knew for ippc.no as well and with met office located on the other side of the airport, walking there wasn’t an option. I generated them weather briefing from autorouter in 5 minutes.
I to to agree with your observation Emir, although in Germany, it is not quite as bad. Every PPL student learns how to use flugwetter.de, which has all the weather products you could wish for. Still, yes, they tend to focus on METAR and the rather useless GAFOR in PPL training, and they only teach how to do straight yes/no decisions based on that… no real qualtitative, shades-of-grey style weather briefings and appreciations.
Back when I was PPL instructing (2005), I remember going in a cross country with a student (almost ready for his checkride) when the weather was a bit similar to that of last Sunday, i.e. several showers and smaller thunderstorms around but otherwise good and no real „lines“. During the preflight, I showed him to use the radar images on the PC to make a decision and actually plan the route according to the weather situation. He made big eyes! We later made an impromptu intermediate stop enroute in order to get an update on the radar situation (this was long before the ADL) and re-assess our planned route. He was amazed. When were back home, he just said „wow, I would never have thought that this flight was possible so safely today. This was great!“ He even contacted me back a year or so later, long after he got his PPL in order to thank me for that lesson. A fond memory of mine.
Anyway, it is not likely that this Cirrus pilot didn‘t know anything about this stuff. He had some experience. Plus, Cirus pilots don‘t tend to be the low-teh kind a guys. And even if… as someone else above stated, he MUST have seen that black wall ahead of him, with blue skies to his left and his right! If this accident was weather-induced, then it doesn‘t make much sense.
We have had many previous threads on this topic – example example.
Basically PPL training is a “retail market product”, not a scheme to recruit military or other pilots who will be flying €50M aircraft and should ideally not crash them too often. It is structured to conform to ICAO (40hrs minimum I think) while having the lowest possible price on the school’s price list. If you trained pilots to a high standard for flying from A to B, the price would probably double. It would be unworkable because the average pilot already takes about a year, and those who just want to do aerobatics would be very unhappy.
I have known or met many experienced pilots who basically never “got weather”. One was a former “hangar mate”, N2195B. I wrote about him previously. Seneca… PPL/IR. Another one has over 3k hrs and uses the BBC for weather. I don’t know anything about this particular crash but there will always be these pilots.
Even if the pilot didn’t check the radar before departure, I wonder how it ended up in this situation. Given it was VFR and daylight VMC conditions at departure a severe TS like this one should reveal itself as dangerous just by visual appearance, even a low level. Dark, heavy rain, poor visibility ect. What made the pilot fly in that direction? Of course, we don’t know what he actually saw or the reasoning behind his decisions, or what ultimately brought the plane down yet.
I agree with TimR on the flight planning issues. I think we all know it shouldn’t be rushed or that we shouldn’t have get-there-itis, but in real life and if you actually use your aircraft to get around things gets more tricky. The list of issue and problems you can face as GA pilot is long and you have to sort it all out by yourself which can lead to distraction. Just the other week I was at an airport getting ready for a 5 hour flight, waiting for a fuel truck. Fuel arrived 1 hour late, then showed up with too little fuel. This required an unplanned last minute refuel stop, being rushed by bad weather moving in – hardly ideal. It’s always easy to evaluate and recognize a poor decision after things have gone wrong.
Weather is overall a major factor in flight safety and easy accessible in flight weather has big safety impact.
As the last IAOPA newsletter spoke of there are positive movements with the UAT weather trials, and really this project needs to be speeded up EU wide!
