I don’t fly single engine at night in Nevada. Too many big rocks and no lights on the ground. During the day I have no issue… I flew past several 11’000’ peaks yesterday at less than 11,000’… but it was the middle of the day.
Damn you, I was just about to post that. Many’s the night I’ve been walking around Missoula and seen the lights on Mount Sentinel; between the idiot lights just for the pilots and the idiot lights attached to the transmitters, you’d have to be flying blind to miss it.
In addition to that, people build on mountains around here. Not a whole lot, but when you see the house lights getting higher, well, your average suburban house doesn’t levitate.
No, I think most CFIT incidents don’t involve any VMC at all. You’re flying along in IMC, flying an approach probably, and then you hit the ground. Why? Because you weren’t where you thought you were. It’s that simple. Why weren’t you where you thought you were? That is not so simple.
Yep. For a night rating, Transport Canada requires:
[ul]
[li]20 hours flight experience in the same aircraft category.[/li]
[li]A minimum of 10 hours night-flight experience, including no less than 5 hours dual instruction (which must include a 2-hour cross-country), and 5 hours solo flight time, which must include 10 takeoffs and landings.[/li]
[li] 10 hours dual instrument time.[/li][/ul]
The requirements in Canada are more stringent because so much flying is done in sparsely populated areas with very few ground references.
Thanks for the info guys.
At night in the boondocks you need to do some instrument work the first 500’ or so more often than you might think.
flying at night over mountains does not guarantee you can see them. So that means you have to fly an altitude that is high enough to clear all mountains on your route of flight. Those altitudes are posted on aviation maps along with any tower that may be on top of them.
That leaves navigation. The worst GPS will put the pilot plus or minus the width of the plane. If that’s not available then navigation would have to be off a VOR or compass heading.
Because it was illegal, we never flew hang gliders at night.
Not even when the moon was full, and you could see really well, and only needed to put a car with the emergency flashers on near the landing field so you could identify which unlit patch of ground you should not land in after you didn’t fly.
A day or two before the full moon was the best time not to fly at night because it was illegal. That way the moon rises earlier, and you don’t have to wait 'till midnight for it to be directly overhead when you are not flying. By not flying earlier, the granite rocks can hold enough heat to create mild thermals, so you can have long duration non-flights.
The only really hard part of this was that the moonlight wasn’t quite bright enough to see cholla cactus in time to do more than cringe if one happened to be in your non-landing path at the end of a non-flight.
I would think CFIT is a very rare occurrence for airliners; generally, problems involve take-off and landing issues. CFIT is more likely for small planes flying at the same altitude mountains fly at.
(Recall an interview with the one-time president of Piper (?) who described CFIT - they were sitting in the back of the aircraft when it suddenly disintegrated around them. One of the lucky ones.)
When iwas doing my private pilot training, the instructor took us into a cloud (probably not allowed, but he was IFR-rated). he said - just follow your gut instead of looking at the instruments, try to keep it straight and level. After about thirty seconds, he said to look at the instruments, and see what they said. My gut told me I was straight, the instruments, as he pointed out, showed us in a spiral, turning about 180 degrees a minute and descending about 750fpm. You inner ear is not designed to provide inertial guidance.
Unfortunately, your brain is reasonably good at convincing you that, in spite of the fact that many other have failed trying this, you will surely succeed.
Up until relatively recently, CFIT was the most common cause of commercial jet accidents. It has since been taken over by loss of control (LOC) accidents but is still a major cause. Of course commercial jet accidents are themselves a very rare occurrence so what you say is not wrong per se.
About CFITs. I’ve heard a few recording where the pilots are warned by the whoop whoop pull up and they don’t take any action. How does that happen?
When your brain gets overloaded it sheds information in order to concentrate on what it has decided is the most important task. This results in “tunnel vision” where you become focussed on something to the exclusion of everything else. Your hearing is one of the first things your brain sheds. It’s pretty common to talk to someone who is focussed on a task and have them not respond to you. Sometimes you need to employ another sense such as touch or sight to get their attention. Regardless of the fact we all know what “whoop whoop pull up” means, if the brain doesn’t process the information then we don’t even know it’s there.
There can also be occasions where you get false warnings and if you have these regularly enough you will become desensitised to it (the EGPWS that cried wolf.)
Check out this video of a pilot so focussed on landing on a mountain strip that can’t hear the gear horn blaring away.
Wow! You would think that with training or self-preservation instinct that a sound we know to associate with “You’re about to die.” would trigger our reptile brain to tap our mammal brain on the shoulder and say, “Ummmm … you may want to listen to this for a minute.”
I saw an episode of “The Missing Eviidence” TV show about numerous small plane crashes in “the Nevada Triangle.” The area was already known for a large number of missing aircraft, but the search for missing billionaire Steve Fossett revealed a lot of small aircraft wreckage they hadn’t even realized was there – apparently there were more crashes than anyone had realized.
After dabbling in Areqa 51 conspiracy theories, the program more sensibly concluded that unpredictable weather conditions coming off the Sierra Nevada mountains, including vortices and microbursts, were the primary cause of the allegedly large number of crashes.
So when flying near mountains it’s not just terrain you have to look out for.
Do you mean recordings of accidents, or recordings of ordinary flying?
Every now and then the darn thing fires for inappropriate reasons. The early versions were much more prone to this than current ones.
More specifically there’s a tradeoff between providing usefully early warnings of a rapidly deteriorating situation, and going off under benign conditions at places where the terrain and desired flight path are closer together than is typical.
The same issue applies to the windshear warning systems. In fact they’re more prone to overreacting than the GPWS is.
Although false alarms are rare, almost all pilots’ lifetime experience is 100% false alarms, or at least 100% not-impending-disaster. If it fires *unexpectedly *that’s supposed to be interpreted as a serious wakeup call to immediately perform an urgent pre-programmed escape maneuver.
Conversely, there are many airports where we expect at least a “caution terrain” automated callout or two during a 100% normal approach and landing. *Not *getting one would be abnormal at some cities. And if we’re a bit high & steep and diving a bit to get back on the vertical profile and that happens to be near one of the terrain choke points, a brief “whoop whoop” may happen. Mostly expectedly. With no escape reaction needed or desired.
You can see the problem that forms when the pilot believes he/she is in situation #2 when in reality it’s situation #1.
As **Richard Pearse **says, mental tunnel vision is the common reaction to task saturation. You’re suddenly simply juggling more balls than you can keep in the air. Something’s got to give. Cutting out the audio is a built-in human coping strategy. Everybody does it. The next step is to cut out more and more inputs until finally you’re thinking & flying with reference to about 2 square inches of panel. Here’s hoping it’s the right 2 square inches!
The cockpit design engineers know this and design the warnings to be unignorably loud. Which can be a real PITA in that they pretty well preclude thinking or communicating between pilots when they fire off. Which is great when there’s a simple scenario with just one thing going wrong due to pilot inattention. “Hey Dummy! Look at THIS right NOW” is a useful corrective for those cases.
But try to resolve a complicated electrical problem while both the overspeed and stall warnings are continuously blaring while also hand-flying in clouds with half the instruments going berserk. Well let’s just say a “silence all noisemakers” button would have been nice to have that night.
Pretty much all accidents happen when the pilot(s)’ mental model(s) of the situation deviates from reality far enough that bad stuff slips in. Suddenly something, whether it’s trees in the windscreen, unexpected instrument readings, or some noisy warning system, will jolt the pilots into awareness that model != reality. But the anomalous input(s) don’t directly cause an immediate crash realignment of model to perfectly match reality.
Instead they trigger a process in the pilots’ minds of “Huh; that’s unexpected. Is that a false input or is my model wrong? Let’s check everything out. Check, check, check, cross-check, check. Shit, model *is *wrong! Quick, let’s change something to recover aircraft to safe state. Whew! Now resync model to new reality.”
This may only take a few seconds, but if the situation is dynamic enough in a bad way it may be changing as fast or faster than the crew can catch up. And throughout the catch-up process you need to simplify things to regain your mental balance ahead of the airplane, but not simplify so much that you fasten onto some defective info or misinterpret good info just because it conforms to your old mistaken model.
This is where long-term boredom, complacency, and low proficiency (or low native skill) can add up to never catching up to the problem before it overwhelms the crew. Long haul flying, highly automated aircraft, and low-skilled crews contribute to this brittle failure mode where everything is fine for years until something bad finally happens and then the crew’s ability to go from dozy night shift security guard to Chuck Yeager is tested beyond the breaking point.
Excellent explanation.
Those are called Maximum Elevation Figures, MEF, and are calculated upon either the highest obstruction or elevation in the quadrangle. The MEF is either the highest obstruction, round up to the next 100 foot mark then add 200 more feet to get the MEF. For an elevation its round up to the next 100 foot mark then add 300 feet.
Also not all obstructions are charted, only those 201 feet and taller are charted, or those above 300 feet inside of population centers.