Flugleiter in Germany - pointless?

what_next wrote:

Because our lawmakers (and me as well, which is why I will continue to support them) feel more comfortable if someone on site can raise the alarm and help in person in case something goes wrong

IMHO this is exactly what you call it – a “feeling”. How many lives have been saved (directly or indirectly) in the past 50 years by the German “Flugleiters”? I am with Patrick here: Everybody should have the freedom to choose whether this risk is acceptable to him or not.

Jacko wrote:

Even if we could cite one or more instances of this actually happening, I’m sure that the German “flugleiter” control-freakery has killed more than it has saved, specifically by creating a psychological barrier to precautionary landings

Very true!

I am as German as it gets but like Peter, Patrick, Jacko and tschnell I don’t buy into the safety argument for a mandatory person on the ground for GA airfields.
I am a man of science and would like to see scientific evidence that GA flying in Germany is safer due to the Flugleiter than elsewhere. I am highly confident that nobody can provide such evidence. Peter already indicated this and Jacko correctly points out that even the contrary may be true.
Personally while I think Germany is a country superior to the US in many ways, aviation is one of the areas where the American mode of doing it is better and should be emulated.

MedEwok wrote:

I am a man of science …

No, you are a man of medicine. (I am a man of science. Aeronautical. For me, casualities in aviation are percentages. Mathematical figures.). To you, the most precious thing on earth should be a single human life. If only one of those can ever be saved by all Flugleiters together over five centuries, than it is worth having all those Flugleiters. One single life.

what_next wrote:

If only one of those can ever be saved by all Flugleiters together over five centuries, than it is worth having all those Flugleiters

If only one life has ever been saved by a second engine, single engine flying should be banned altogehter
If only one life has ever been saved by CAPS, SE airplanes without it should be banned
If only one life has ever been saved by TCAS, it should be mandatory equipment even in a Piper Cub

Aviation (and life in general) is all about managing the risks. And landing at or departing an unattended airfield may have its inherent risks, but these can be managed much more effectively than many other aviation risks.

what_next wrote:

To you, the most precious thing on earth should be a single human life. If only one of those can ever be saved by all Flugleiters together over five centuries, than it is worth having all those Flugleiters. One single life.

Thank you for pointing this out. What you just described is what we call “number needed to treat” (NNT) in medicine. This figure describes how many patients need to be given a certain therapy or procedure compared with a placebo or a valid preexisting therapy to attain a beneficial effect.
Generally, the higher this number, the less useful a given therapy is because all medical therapies have possible adverse effects which may outweigh the small benefit a new therapy may offer. The inverse of this number is called number needed to harm (NNH) and describes the same as the NNT for side effects.
In my opinion both concepts can be easily converted for non-medical usage. For the topic at hand, you could in theory find a number of how many people need to be bothered with worse operating hours, higher costs and the adverse psychological effects of a Flugleiter described by Jacko to save just one life. This would be the NNT for a mandatory Flugleiter. It would probably range in the tens of thousands or higher. A good NNT for a medical therapy should be below ten or at least in the lower double digits. In the end it is a political and philosophical question really on where to draw the line.

Formulating the goal of saving lives in such a radical way as you do is incompatible with a free society as ours in my opinion, as it puts an extreme limit on personal freedom for a marginal increase in safety. It is also not how medicine operates, btw, as patient autonomy generally allows the patient to choose riskier therapies or even decline perfectly good therapies because it is their free will.

what_next wrote:

If only one of those can ever be saved by all Flugleiters together over five centuries, than it is worth having all those Flugleiters. One single life.

That isn’t true. Because how many other lives in other circumstances could be saved by tapping all the Flugleiter resources and use them wiser. If the aim is to save lives, then you have to priorities and the only thing that counts is saved lives per man hour or per monetary unit. How many lives perish on the German Autobahn each year?

GA is a fringe activity on the grand scale. You can literally pour money into it, and the number of lives saved due to it, will not even be statistically significant. It wouldn’t be measurable, it’s undetectable because the numbers are so tiny compared with almost anything else. Another reason is that we know with high accuracy what causes fatalities in GA, and the cause sits firmly planted between the ears of us pilots, a place where money doesn’t really work

IMO, if you want to save lives, then the only wise thing is to use less resources on GA, and place those resources where it makes a measurable difference.

I’m glad this debate, like so many, is not a factor where I live and fly. Irrational fear masquerading as logic has never helped anyone. Also, I’d genuinely rather be dead than continuously debate the management of risk with unwelcome intruders into my life.

Peter wrote:

The other thing is that the on-airport fire crew almost never saves anybody’s life. In fact there is no recorded incident in the UK since WW2 when an on-airport fire crew saved anybody’s life in GA – this came out at a Govt presentation a few years ago.

Reference please? I’m personally aware of an airfield fire crew saving the life of a helicopter pilot yesterday (G-MATH, EGTB); I’m absolutely sure there are other examples. They don’t have to put-out a fire to save a life.

It was a presentation by the Minister for Transport some years ago in London. Yes; I am sure the criteria were specific e.g. a fire had to be put out. And plenty of firemen I have spoken to about it have agreed with me.

I think the argument was that an on-airport fire engine and all the crew and equipment are a lot less effective than may appear. They are required by ICAO for certain ops and obviously in any well managed airport they do other things e.g. staff the pumps, inspect and clear runways, cut the grass, move the planes out of hangars, etc.

Some flight schools (at least around here) have their own private GPS approach procedures for training purposes, but they are programmed manually, point by point. Putting them on the data card would make them quite a bit more realistic.

I think the only differences are

• you get the automatic 5nm => 1nm => 0.3nm sensitivity improvement (but can do that manually)
• you can select it by pressing the APR button (or whatever)
• LPV obviously needs to be done via a database

But I suspect David’s database is not the same, for an IAP that already exists.