MikeE wrote:
voluntarily undertaken some analysis of their infringement returns.
What are infringment returns? I havent come across this terminolgy before?
No, what is sad is that it was only a matter of time before a more formal process was introduced.
You only have to look around you in the clubhouse, or chat to other pilots, to discover how many don’t even know what the AIP is, what it contains, and how to brief properly, let alone how to check NOTAMS, AICs etc.
And some think it’s CAA/ATC/airspace design that’s the issue……
…and thanks for the welcome!
You only have to look around you in the clubhouse, or chat to other pilots, to discover how many don’t even know what the AIP is, what it contains, and how to brief properly, let alone how to check NOTAMS, AICs etc.
And some think it’s CAA/ATC/airspace design that’s the issue……
I am sure the truth is somewhere in there between all the extremes. That’s where common sense and practicalities come into the picture. You try to find a solution that make the end result a better one without creating new problems or an environment some players cannot live with.
You only have to look around you in the clubhouse, or chat to other pilots, to discover how many don’t even know what the AIP is, what it contains, and how to brief properly, let alone how to check NOTAMS, AICs etc.
That’s true (and the subject is poorly taught everywhere, largely because there is no mandate to produce pilots who can competently fly A to B) but I cannot see what bearing this has on airspace busts. They are navigation errors (lateral and/or vertical) which nobody who can read would do in an armchair; they are the result of some momentary map-reading cockup or a distraction. I very much doubt any significant % are errors in a pre-planned route.
There is basically nothing in the AIP or AICs (AICs and all their various bizzare colours are a peculiarly weird British thing, not to mention the convoluted process of locating them) which is relevant to airspace in a preflight context (you use the charts for that) and while a notam may contain tempo restricted (usually this means prohibited) airspace, this comes up in a notam briefing, and a negligible % of the 100+ busts each month are busts of a TRA. I think most busts of the “summer TRAs” (the Red Arrows and such) don’t get sent to Gasco; the highly provocative stuff tends to get prosecuted. But their numbers are miniscule.
Is this research for a PhD or similar, or was it commissioned by the CAA?
skydriller wrote:
I kinda get your point…but you have seriously said (as a pilot?) that on an approach to land, you might drop 100ft and crash looking at “an alarm”….I mean really?
Quite frankly it would have to be a hell of a distraction at less than 100ft above a runway…So no, I dont think the errors related to infringements are the same as those that may lead to an aeroplane crashing.
A Lockheed 1011 went into the Florida Everglades while the entire crew was distracted by a burnt out lightbulb, with the loss of all on board. It’s rare but it happens.
GA planes land with the wheels up quite frequently when the pilot is distracted by something minor.
alioth wrote:
GA planes land with the wheels up quite frequently when the pilot is distracted by something minor.
I think it is a good analogy for CAS busts, I am not sure there is much to understand/educate in the “wheel-up landing problem”, you can reduce its extent, blame it on pilot skills, system malfunction, poor training… but some residual occurrences will stay there as long as distraction is around (which is sometimes related to complexity of airspace 
)
alioth wrote:
A Lockheed 1011 went into the Florida Everglades while the entire crew was distracted by a burnt out lightbulb, with the loss of all on board. It’s rare but it happens.
Not sure of the Aeroplane type but I seem to recall that in the incident in question they ran out of fuel? The reason they did so was that the burned out lightbulb you refer to, was indicating a landing gear malfunction, and that they got fixated on it while reducing fuel aboard to “minimums” before expecting to do a landing with gear collapsing? I remember reading about it during HF training.
Regards, SD..
They crashed while trying to sort out the light bulb, indeed. A hugely famous case which gets dragged out by the media almost as often as David Learmount gets dragged out by the BBC, the main difference being that his condition will get worse over time, and eventually he will end up like Lenin
The problem with these cases is that they involve total and complete muppets. What the other 99.x% of pilots do (to bust CAS) is substantially different.
But, as with all media work, the boring stuff is, ahem, boring. So, you have to spice it up. It makes “you” look important, authoritative, and suggests that you would never do something so stupid, so by implication you are totally brilliant and everybody in the room should take you dead seriously.
So, when you go to any NATS, CAA, Gasco, etc, presentation, they always drag out the same old videos which show, wait for it, some total muppet. Shutting down Luton for half an hour while trying to work out which way is east and which way is south.
Or they show some drama, with minus 273.16 relevance to GA. I recall one video showing a 747-100 with a suspected four engine failure (turned out to be faulty indications on a newly installed bit of avionics kit). The cool as a cucumber USAF female pilot flew it at what looked like well past Vne, to land at EGLL, where it was “suggested” it was towed into a top secret hangar so nobody could see what was in it. Well, maybe some nukes; they move them about all the time…
Maybe some pilot busted CAS while changing a light bulb but I think such a case would be worth its weight in room temperature superconductor and would be plastered all over the CAA website, all over social media, all over Gasco of course…
If someone can get a PhD on the back of this project, good luck to them. A PhD is supposed to bring a contribution to knowledge.
If it is commissioned by the CAA, they could do better by reading the vast numbers of reports which are sent back to NATS and then again to the CAA as an MOR, with the pilot having been told it is only a data collection exercise for safety purposes, only to get the letter from [name removed because he threatened legal action if it is posted, but his name is on the bottom of a vast number of CAA PDFs] a month later with their “sentence”
What the CAA should do is watch all the Sidney Dekker videos and just back off on this crazy initiative which will just drive people to turn off transponders, or hang up their headsets. Then the CAA will get less licensing income from all the Part M outfits which will be short of work. Maybe that will have an effect?
Most of the people at the Gasco session got there because they had Mode S. Next time you see a CAA employee who flies GA, take a look at his instrument panel… it is quite “educational”. As usual, google is your friend. But, mum’s the word 
VintageFlyer wrote:
You only have to look around you in the clubhouse, or chat to other pilots, to discover how many don’t even know what the AIP is, what it contains, and how to brief properly, let alone how to check NOTAMS, AICs etc.And some think it’s CAA/ATC/airspace design that’s the issue……
Why do you suppose that airspace busts are such an incredibly overheated topic in the UK, whereas in other places with much more GA traffic and other distractions (e.g. densely flown areas of the US) the subject is not often discussed, and not a big issue. Do you think it’s something about UK pilots or EASA training that’s the issue?
It’s the airspace, and in terms of enforcement a CAA that apparently cannot make the intellectual stretch beyond a Dickensian approach that they see as preserving their petty power. Fairly obviously it’s not effective – systems for normal people need to be designed for the lowest common denominator if you want them to actually work, and pilots are normal people.
I think this whole post was to silence the other post on CAS busts and GASCO.
I’ve not met a behavioral researcher who wasn’t trained in approaching subjects before.
This was a rather broad frontal assault.
Definitely not standard practice for studying humbled people.
