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D-ESPJ TB20 crash near Annecy, France, 25/11/2016

Wow. I guess all you can say is at least it will have been quick.

EGTK Oxford

Seeing the above picture reminds me of my own approaches from the East over the mountains into Sabadell LELL. I am very, very afraid of those rocks and check multiple times when my flight path happens to be over those rocks instead of my preferred route (GIR into the wide valley towards LELL).

What does help me is the synthetic vision on my PFD. I turn off the navigation display to have SV full screen and thus be able to see what lies directly in front and hopefully below me. As long as the mountains are brown-color coded depicting their height everything is ok. When they become painted yellow I should start to worry and do something. When they are painted red I should pull up immediately.

As I’m afraid of performing a CFIT I also run my iPad with Skydemon with terrain safe mode and I have the high-res terrain data installed. The good thing about that is that it shows me problems that may lie 10 or more minutes ahead. On one occasion that has helped me to avoid an issue while I was trying to get under the clouds and follow a valley. I simply saw that it’s not going to work as planned, called up ATC to tell them I was climbing again and went a different way.

I believe that terrain awareness through a graphical representation of what is in the flight path ahead is pretty important in less than perfect weather and it even helps on a blue sky CAVOK day as one may misjudge height when trying to get into a destination inside a valley when descending from a high altitude. I’d rather have some support.

Frequent travels around Europe

Ugh.

Those pics indeed indicate a frontal collision with the mountain. Whether it was controlled or not remains to be seen, but given that the position is pretty much in line between the last radar position and Albertville, I’d be surprised if it wasn’t.

Was the pilot a poster here?

LSZH(work) LSZF (GA base), Switzerland

Mooney_Driver wrote:

Was the pilot a poster here?

Yes

Very sad :(

JasonC wrote:

Wow. I guess all you can say is at least it will have been quick.

Exactly my thought upon seeing this pic. Drives it home. I am with @Stephan_Schwab on this one. While I – so far – have never used the SV in FF in anger, I run it when flying above an undercast over mountainous terrain. It really gives you a great idea of what lurks beneath. Anyway, sad story.

I too run a topo map when flying above cloud-covered mountains, but you would need a lot of balls to be flying around/within mountain peaks in IMC, looking at an Ipad with its consumer-grade GPS optimised to locate the nearest Macdonalds, hoping that there will always be enough of a sky view to keep the GPS working.

I am sure these people were not doing the latter.

I had known Stefan something like 8 years and he wasn’t into that sort of thing. He did fly through frontal wx (below the 0C level) which I won’t do but many people do it. He saw a good number of his bizjet colleagues get killed doing stuff like this, and he resigned from one RHS turboprop job where the owner (a pilot also) wanted him to do dodgy stuff; the owner later killed himself.

So it will be of interest to many how this happened, but I doubt we will ever know, especially with the sort of BEA report I have seen where they say (for example) “VMC conditions prevailed” apparently because the flight plan was VFR…

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Peter wrote:

Ipad with its consumer-grade GPS optimised to locate the nearest Macdonalds,

Peter, that’s not the way this is done, nobody uses the built-in GPS. We will prob90 never know what happened, but having SV running gives you a pretty damn good idea what’s below and ahead. And unless you turn your airplane upside down, a view of the sky is not an issue.

Peter wrote:

looking at an Ipad with its consumer-grade GPS optimised to locate the nearest Macdonalds,

Funny how such a big proportion of the US fleet manages quite ok with said GPS… (without overheating either).

Very sad outcome and condolences to family and friends.

Oxford (EGTK), United Kingdom

Peter wrote:

looking at an Ipad with its consumer-grade GPS optimised to locate the nearest Macdonalds, hoping that there will always be enough of a sky view to keep the GPS working.

Well, I don’t know how this airplane was equipped, but there are several options these days to have virtual terrain on inbuilt avionics such as the Aspen PFD. I have just decided to add this option to mine recently after seeing it in action.

If you want something on the Ipad, I would go for Xavion in a single.

But even my very pedestrian Garmin 495 was very capable and would give me very visible altitude alerts in such a situation, the 695 has a really good terrain database, which would, in emergency, allow to find a valley. But nothing beats a good virtual terrain, provided it is good enough in resolution.

LSZH(work) LSZF (GA base), Switzerland
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