Planning a trip Hannover EDDV to Bornholm EKRN (with family, and risk management)

Ok, LeSving. I bite.

Looking at your reasoning, I understand your definition would be to prohibit passenger flights over water in SEP airplanes because the passengers, children particularly, can not influence the risk. Well, you can introduce a notice of proposed rule making to EASA. They might bite.

The other bit I read out of your posts is that you basically advocate that pilots should only fly alone or with pilot buddies who understand the risk in SEP airplanes. Well, you know, this kills almost 90% of SEP GA as most of us are married with children. So should we all stop flying? Because not a lot of wifes will tolerate a hobby which only he egoistic husband can profit from. There are plenty of those and they are reasons for divorce often enough, started with people spending too much time on forums.

I honestly don’t believe that such massive restrictions onto GA come from someone who spends his life advocating flying self-built soap box airplanes, ok, that is sarcastic but you probably get what I am trying to say. So do I understand you correctly that you never have taken your family for a flight at all, or more probably you don’t have one?

And even if only the pilots are allowed to fly, aren’t they the usual breadwinner in a family whose death would leave the children im poverty? So why should they take risks they do not deem suitable for their children as well?

I learnt flying on an airport LSZR where EFATO would almost 100% mean a ditching into the lake of constance. Most airplanes are SEP there and many are family planes. So far, ONE ditching occurred since 1983, the year I got mylicense. The risk of that would be much bigger than it is out of a 20 NM over water leg with maybe 10 minutes outside gliding range. But nobody cares as it would mean stopping to fly SEP there.

It is this kind of scaremongering which makes a lot of people stop flying, particularly if spouses are exposed to this kind of talk. Realistically speaking, this also would mean to stop a lot of other things where a lot more kids have been hurt than flying.

All of us are aware of due diligence and nobody puts his family at risk lightly, but you can go too far. You can end up just hiding under your sofa and die of overweight.

This is an interesting discussion. Would you fly with your family over water? I did it last August and got an engine failure on the way back.
It turned out well because it happened over land and I was able to put it in a field.

The family got out unharmed and it all happened so quick that they had no time to get scared.
But the flying fun is somewhat spoiled now. I didn’t have any appetite to go flying again the first two months after the incident.

Whether you should commence this flight with two young kids on board is something you can only answer for yourself.

I have learned that GA aircraft are not as reliable as we think they are.
An electrical failure or partial engine failure with your family on board will never make it to the statistics, but it will spoil the flying fun forever.

I’m enjoying flying again. But I changed my risk profile (no night flying anymore / only “fair” weather / and so far only with flying buddies).

lenthamen wrote:

I have learned that GA aircraft are not as reliable as we think they are.

I would say that it is not your knowledge but your feelings that have changed. Of course you knew before that engines occasionally fail and what happened to you doesn’t change the likelihood of a new engine failure for you or for anyone else.

But of course we should only do things we feel comfortable with — particularly when it is a leisure activity.

Feelings are strange things. On an overwater flight I feel much more comfortable if I’m flying over a closed cloud cover although of course I know that if anything it makes an engine failure more dangerous.

LeSving wrote:

Moral IS the point.

You are confusing ends with means and making the means the moral obligation and not the ends.

You do have a moral obligation to keep your children safe — that’s the “end”. To achieve that you use a number of “means” (like the “plan B”).

Where you go wrong is that

1) The means you choose are more or less arbitrary.
2) You make your chosen means themselves the moral obligation — even when they make essentially no difference from a safety perspective.

MedEwok wrote:

What is important to consider is that having had an engine failure makes it actually less likely for you to have another one. It’s like winning the lottery: winning it once is already quite unlikely, but doing it twice in one’s lifetime is exceedingly rare

Please tell me this is a joke :). If like in France, Geman doctors probably did a fair amount of math!

Probability of you winning the lottery given that you already won the lottery is the same as the probability of winning the lottery in the 1st place.

The conditional probability is what matters here. You having an event (engine failure) does not decrease the probability of another event happening!

(The same applies to twin engine plane. If probability of an engine failing on your flight is 10^-5, you shouldn’t think that since one of your engine failed, you now have 10^(-10) probability of the other failing. If events were independent, it would be 10^-5, but in reality it would be much higher, as there is an obvious (high, in my opinion) correlation between engines failing.

I also think that the probability of an engine failure will vary according to the phase of the flight. There is some anecdotal evidence supporting the proposition that engines fail more often when the power setting etc is changed. So it could well be that if you take off and fly over land for an hour and then cross 1hr of water, your chances of getting it over the water bit are smaller than 50% of the total risk.

@lenthamen I can understand you well, however this incident should actually show you that even the pretty much worst thing which can happen on an SEP has happened to you and you were capable of managing it to a good result. Most people fortunately never experience a forced landing like you did but you now know that even out of a rather bad situation, low altitude, no options, you managed to handle the incident professionally and safely.

Of course the “what if” factor comes into play and I very much understand your feelings about it. Anyone who claims that this will not stop his fun of flying feelings at least for a while will probably be lying. But generally, you can look at it from a very different point of view. You have shown to you and your family that an engine failure is not the end of the world but mainly a major hickup which you mastered well.

Thanks by the way for sharing the incident. While not directly you have acted very much in the spirit of Annex 13, even though it fortunately was not an accident. We can learn from it and we can make use of your experience.

MY take of your experience for myself is that it re-enforces my general flight tactics which is to fly as high as possible at any given time. My departure and arrival profile into my homebase below some controlled airspace is alway the one to climb as soon as I can and to descend as late as possible. In cruise, I try never to fly below around 7-9k ft which opens more options in case of cases. While this does not necessarily mean you reach an airport, it gives time for debugging and trying things like a mixture sweep e.t.c. which would have resloved @lenthamens predicament. But obviously he had no choice and in fact I would commend him for not trying but doing the most important bit, namely to get the airplane on the round in one picece while he had time.

Clearly, night flying and IFR to minimums in a SEP have an increased risk vs flying a twin. But if one looks at the accident stats around, engine failures with fatal consequences are still a lot rarer then CFIT and other pilot errors. Clearly yet again, this does not rule out you will encounter one, but to encounter it just when it is a real dangerous problem is something pretty remote.

We can follow Le Sving’s take on it and make SEP flying something scary that it is not and ban transporting pax on them, like several countries used to do for commercial flying, or we can take the necessary precautions and carry on.