Rwy20 wrote:
Maybe they aren’t even aware of their status as expert witness in later civil and criminal court cases, and in my opinion accident investigation reports should be expressly excluded as evidence in any court case. Their sole purpose is to improve aviation safety, and too often this goal is in direct opposition with court proceedings.
Oh yea they are, or at least the ones you probably are thinking of are VERY aware. Whether the BEA types care is another story. They can and will always hide behind Annex 13 and the true purpose of accident investigations. Unfortunately judges and insurances do not care about Annex 13 at all.
Rwy20 wrote:
you would be very well advised to keep your lips sealed if ever talking to an accident investigator, and to destroy any evidence that may be used against you or your estate in a court case.
That on the other hand unfortunately is a very well known issue. I wonder how Germany handles this, as there the reports are totally devoid of any registrations and names e.t.c.
But particularly in Switzerland and some other countries where those reports and the underlaying data go straight to the penal courts as well as civil courts, trying to contribute to flight safety by being up front about any incident or accident without a lawyer present is a very bad idea.
Sad to see how accident reports seem to be taken at face value by judges as the tell all of what happened, although accident investigators may be speculating wildly. Maybe they aren’t even aware of their status as expert witness in later civil and criminal court cases, and in my opinion accident investigation reports should be expressly excluded as evidence in any court case. Their sole purpose is to improve aviation safety, and too often this goal is in direct opposition with court proceedings.
In other words, you would be very well advised to keep your lips sealed if ever talking to an accident investigator, and to destroy any evidence that may be used against you or your estate in a court case.
Peter wrote:
I don’t think anything short of full synthetic vision (e.g. a forward view, along the current trajectory, showing the terrain) will do the job.
I think that is what one needs: something calculates & plot whole safe route in Synthetic-Vision with forward view & full horizon with projected flight path trajectory?
Bellow 1000ft agl with terrain around flight rules and weather conditions are irrelevant, if one has to pull/push nose more than few degrees to avoid terrain then he has less understanding of how piston aircraft flies (once got wrong impression that my engine had problems before turning back not that fresh POH performance is way less than extra300 or military jets and 70% terrain gradient, checked my engine, no issues found and I did some maths, the picture is way more clear now, I simply was just lucky that day)
Also for fast SEP touring at MTOW, tactical turn back or climb above terrain are really theoretical concepts, one is fixated on flying A to B as fast as possible, that works well while staying above MSA, and one can maybe leave that “slow light weight local flight” for latter? (or even better: mountain scenery flying in a cub or mountain wave flying in a glider)
172driver wrote:
All you need is an iPad running ForeFlight and you’re good.
Or SkyDemon or…..
Peter wrote:
Stefan had an Aspen IFD1000, and the old TB20GT cockpit.
The Aspen can have synthetic vision but this one probably did not. It is vicciously expensive for a piece of software (3000 $ I believe).
Any GNS430W with Terrain would have done the same job too. The tragedy is, they flew up a valley and had they just continued it, would probably not have hit anything… I wonder what prompted that right turn into the mountainside.
Even the portables do it, I wonder if the apps mentioned in the ipad don’t. My Garmin does a pretty good representation of terrain.
Peter wrote:
Airliners nowadays have GPWS which uses a topo map together with GPS to warn the pilots, and there are extras like “sink rate” and “five hundred” etc etc. But light GA mostly has nothing.
All you need is an iPad running ForeFlight and you’re good.
Once you get into the valleys, fairly crude displays just become a bit unfathomable for actually navigating around granite.
The GNS 430 for example will give a good understandable warning and depiction approaching high ground from flatlands but I can’t imagine using it in the valley in poor conditions. When it was less than perfect I was using 2x Skydemon plus the 430, and wide eyeballs.
Having flown the route Via Chambery to Albertville, I can’t say I feel much of a time saving over not cutting the corner S/E of Chambery. Even in Nice wx I’d probably still do that as it’s a nice view.
The valley at Albertville isn’t tight but you need space to loose the height of coming over the ridges, so flying around helps with that.
One option available (was pax when someone did it)
Was climb to MSA then circle down to VMC, over the lake. The lake is huge.
The vast majority of IFR traffic, all the way from GA to airliners, has no terrain presentation visible to the pilots.
Airliners nowadays have GPWS which uses a topo map together with GPS to warn the pilots, and there are extras like “sink rate” and “five hundred” etc etc. But light GA mostly has nothing.
Stefan had an Aspen IFD1000, and the old TB20GT cockpit.
The fact that he found himself at 5000ft or whatever shows he had no idea there was terrain down there – despite having flown in an AOC bizjet operation for many years so obviously knew where the Alps are.
Even an old Garmin 496 wired to the intercom, like I had for many years before replacing it with the Aera 660 which does the same job, would have prevented this, and many other similar ones.
