3 pilots on-board and at least one was an FI ? I’m speechless …
The worst GA accident in Croatia (some ten years ago or so) included 4 FIs on board – iced and fell.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
Well operations of an airplane HAS to be executed as if it was. There is no margin for error nor for tolerance of reckless behavior.I strongly disagree with the notion that it should be left to individuals to decide what they are capable of especially in aviation. Any privilege a license holds has to be trained and examined prior to people venturing out on their own. And retrained and reexamined if allowed to lapse.
I prefer to stick with reality. The reality is that private GA is 80% low hours pilots who fly max 5-10 hours per year. They maintain their skills from basic training but that’s about it. Those skills are more than adequate to fly anywhere, but they chose not to, mostly due to time and money constraints, as well as all the non aviation related hassle (and cost) related to longer trips. For the 20% rest we have other skills like “aerial work” (towing, SAR, round trips) that is fun and let you fly for free. Others like to compete. It could be navigation, landing or more “advanced” like aerobatics and competition gliding. Some like to instruct. All of that injects purpose and meaning into recreational flying, and most of the pilots in that 20% group do a bit of everything.
The thing is. For the “other stuff (”aerial work", competition and instructing), you need much more hours or special training, basic skills and/or licenses/ratings than what you get when doing what the “80% group” does. Let’s say the 20% group also includes “high hour tourers” (people who fly far and often). My experience is that they constitute maybe 5-10% of those 20%. On the other hand, almost everyone in the 20% group fly longer trips, but only every now and then. Mostly it is for a purpose, to get to a fly-in or competition, service on the plane or whatever. Cross country flying has to have some quantifiable purpose. The has to be a reason to bring you AND your plane to point B for most people. It’s transportation, pure and simple. We also have true “explorers”, people who travel around the world in the same manner as people sail around the world, and they do it in all kinds of aircraft. But they are a tiny minority for sure, less than 1% of the 20% group.
Most of the things you can do, except just “flying around”, do indeed require extra ratings, licenses and/or skills and hours, because it is so specialized. What you don’t need any additional ratings or skills for is cross country flying. That is included in the basic training. With a GPS and modern weather forecast it isn’t difficult by any stretch of the word. It requires airmanship and common sense though, but the same applies to mountain hiking, sailing on the main oceans, skiing across Greenland. None of this is difficult, it’s just that it requires experience to do it right so you can enjoy it, and come back alive. Experience comes gradually from doing, you cannot learn experience in school.
The point I’m trying to make here is that IF we regard private GA as just another means of transportation, then it is the worst form of transportation ever. It’s slow, dangerous, uncomfortable, unpractical, expensive and the dispatch rate is abysmal. This won’t change until private GA has gone through a technological revolution. We need pilotless drones with the ability to fly in all kinds of weather, land everywhere, have a range of 1000+ NM, have at least the same safety as public transportation, have no environmental impact and comparable cost as flying business on an airliner. In 200 years maybe? In the mean time we have to live with what we got. Private GA is a recreational thing, and any utility value is a bonus, or just boring depending on how you look at it. Private GA is dangerous due to a number of reasons, but dangerous is just fine because we are private individuals capable of handling it with experience, common sense and airmanship.
The point I’m trying to make here is that IF we regard private GA as just another means of transportation, then it is the worst form of transportation ever. It’s slow, dangerous, uncomfortable, unpractical, expensive and the dispatch rate is abysmal.
That’s one point of view. It can be safe, fast enough, more practical, more confortable and even cheaper than any other means of transportation. E.g. flying from Croatia to Corsica or Sardinia in Citation on a sunny day fulfills all of these and yet it’s still GA.
cessnatraveller wrote:
The flight path/profile does not show any clues for an aircraft having engine problems
Did you look at the vertical profile?
At what point in the horizontal profile did the aircraft start its climb to 7,000 ft?
And at that point in the horizontal profile did the continuous descent (at a sink rate consistent with a glide) begin?
LeSving wrote:
The point I’m trying to make here is that IF we regard private GA as just another means of transportation, then it is the worst form of transportation ever.
That depends to a very large extent where you live. I use GA for transportation all the time, but admittedly that’s a lot easier here in the SW US than in most parts of Europe. I haven’t been on a commercial plane for trips of < about 800 nm in years.
This thread reminds me of all the reasons I choose to fly my family in a twin.
I do not rely on FR24 data.
I prefer to see a genuine radar plot.
And why would a crew with engine troubles fly directly towards higher terrain?
For better or worse, the FR24 plot is prob99 going to be spot on.
What you don’t get with FR24 is coverage at the ends of the flight, at low levels. Radar data tends to extend the “story” there, but we know what the trajectory was. We just don’t know why.
Most pilots are not running any device which shows terrain elevations.
Peter wrote:
Most pilots are not running any device which shows terrain elevations.
That may well change once ForeFlight is rolled out in Europe. It does show the terrain along your route within a user-definable corridor. I certainly use it (in the US).
Mark_B wrote:
This thread reminds me of all the reasons I choose to fly my family in a twin.
If your flight planning is as bad as it appears to have been on this flight, the second engine isn’t going to be of much help.
172driver wrote:
That may well change once ForeFlight is rolled out in Europe. It does show the terrain along your route within a user-definable corridor. I certainly use it (in the US).
I think most of the major systems show terrain. I think what Peter was getting at is that most pilots don’t use some form of electronic navigation.
I’m not sure if that’s correct or not, but if it is, it’s certainly changing.
