As a general rule for these sorts of aircraft …
The plane can only be flown solo from the front seat; there are many controls that are not duplicated into the back. For actual flight training by a military, the instructor is in back and the student is up front. Which student already has a bunch of ground school and sim time before the first time they fly the real thing. SO the student can reasonably be expected to be able to start it, shut it down, and deal with emergencies with reasonable skill.
Conversely, for joyriding, photo missions, and the like, the real pilot is in front and the passenger / crewperson is in back. Which doesn’t mean that back seater won’t get some stick time, but if so they’re just steering, not doing the full mental and physical mission of high performance flying.
As applied to this accident I would bet that the Qantas captain in the back seat of the surviving plane was a passenger for that mission. Perhaps a very active passenger. But she wasn’t the PIC; that would have been an employee of the planes’ owner/operator: Jetworks Aviation.
How did I miss this?!? Our close friends are (or have been) on the LAX airport board, and fly out of there pretty often (general aviation)!
Crazy stuff. Glad no one was hurt. That guy is bad news.
“LAX” is a common abbreviation for the sport of lacrosse. It might be a common local abbreviation for the town / area around La Crosse WI; not being from around there I just don’t know.
But in aviation circles, “LAX” is Los Angeles International Airport, and La Crosse Regional airport is “LSE”.
As to the P-8;. Oops; that’s a very expensive mistake; those ain’t cheap. Once it’s been thoroughly dunked in salt water I don’t know how much can be reused.
The runway is 7800 feet long, so adequate even in rather rainy conditions. Not generous, but adequate. For comparison, the runways at LGA & DCA are 7000 feet long. Not an airport to land long at, nor with a significant tailwind.
There are no instrument approaches, so if the weather was poor-ish that might have led to shoe-horning where it ought not have. The other issue is the runway is hemmed in by mountains off the west side, but to the east is open sea.
Presumably it’s pretty much a one-way airport, where all landings are southwest bound from over the ocean and all takeoffs are northeast bound to over the ocean. Many USN bases from WW-II are that way; the plot of land was big enough for WW-II airplanes and the terrain was many minutes away at WW-II speeds. Not so true for today’s equipment.
What are the navigation options for this airport. Given the accuracy of a GPS system to what extent can it be used if there are no certified approaches for it?
You only fly IMC on an published approach, period. So to descent below the MEA on an airway you need a published procedure or you need to be in VMC conditions at the MEA. For a radar environment you can be vectored down to the MVA for the zone you’re in right now. If you can pick up VMC from there AND can see the runway itself, not merely the ground, you can continue visually. Relying on GPS to fudge not really being VMC when you need to be is simply not done.
I no longer have easy access to nav charts, so I can’t do more than guess on MEAs. Given the mountains nearby the field, I’d bet the MVA even over the water is 1500+ feet at, say 5 miles out.
If the situation was rainy, I’d expect vis to be a bigger problem than ceiling. Trying to scud-run in a jet ends in tears very quickly. 3 miles vis is fine when you’re on a published procedure that will align you in 3D with where you need to be. Trying to fly a purely visual approach in 3 miles vis at 160 knots is like trying to fly in 1-mile vis at 50 knots. If coming from the ocean, there are no visible landmarks until you’re very close to the shore and the runway threshold is just beyond the shore. If you’re in the right place, great. If not, a go-around is the only safe option.
And if the real problem was just swirly major tailwinds and a long touchdown, well in either case GPS is no help.
Takeoffs and landings are toward the sea - almost a constant on shore breeze. I live on Oahu and have golfed a hundred or more times at the Marine Base. Landing toward the bay? - I’ve never seen one toward the bay. Even the VTOL Ospreys go toward the sea. The P-8s used to be based there so there’s institutional knowledge even if the unit moved to Whitby back in 2017. They still fly there/here for exercises several times a year. Conditions at that time were 10kts at 060 (dead on shore for the runway) with gusts to 19kts.
My look at Google Maps had me thinking there wasn’t really room to fly a base leg and turn final over the bay in anything faster than a helicopter. You’d roll out on final, flare, and touch down. Which is not un-doable, and the military has always been more comfortable with closer shaves than the airlines. Never have flown big airplanes for the military I probably bring a more conservative attitude to that kind of work than they do.
Hmm. 10 gusting 19 down the runway but they ran off the end? The Instagram vid referenced in the cited article shows a gray rainy day. Although it might have been taken an hour or 3 after the mishap. If they landed long and hot enough or had poor braking in heavy rain it can happen regardless of headwind or tailwind. But a 10+ knot tailwind would sure improve the odds of an overrun.
I do not know the geography there but my rough guess of where the camera is and what terrain is seen in the background suggests they did land from sea towards bay and ended up in the bay. As well the water the plane is sitting in appears dead flat; no surf or swell. You might take a look at that vid and see whether the terrain in the background gives you a hint.
I’m not invested in any particular answer; just playing amateur investigator with little hard data. Yet.
It’s a big deal if it leads a flight into Iran where they can shoot it down. It can be countered using older navigation systems. Technically a GPS system could be set up to use ground based transmitters for triangulating a position. Could be done with a handheld as a check against the plane’s certified system.
It was good enough for me during Desert Storm. I rated a Iridium satellite phone but my boss couldn’t wrangle me a GPS. (Note this was 1990/91) and there were only 3500 GPS sets in theater - for about half a million troops and civies like me).
My receiver was a YachtMaster, typically used on boats but worked fine on land - it gave me headings and distances as if I was at sea but the units could be set to almost anything. We/I used the stations along the Saudi-Iraq border. They warned that they might be shutdown but they worked the whole time. Probably because the Iraqis relied on the stations too.
If you know it’s happening you can just deselect the GPS from the navigation solution. The system will then be Inertial Reference with DME/DME updating, or VOR/DME as a second preference, and from a piloting point of view behaves just like normal, albeit with a lower position accuracy. I gather the issue with this spoofing is that it’s not apparent that it’s happening, ie the aircraft thinks it knows where it is and would still show GPS primary nav with high accuracy.
Certainly true for airliner- or bizjet level avionics.
Although as the article explains, when the spoof appears suddenly and radically shifts your GPS position & velocity vector it can fool the overall nav system software into getting so confused that all position reference, even IRS, becomes unusable. It amounts to malware exploiting a unprotected GIGO problem within the overall FMS. You would hope that you could simply disable GPS input and have the FMS fall back to an un-corrupted IRS output. Apparently at least some FMS’s don’t handle that well. Or perhaps some crews apply the wrong remedy and make things worse.
@aceplace57 mentioned “small planes” which I took to be light planes. AFAIK, most of those nav systems are pure GPS; if you somehow switched off the GPS input the nav solution turns into “Hellifino where we are”. leaving you with some combo of VOR/DME, a sectional, or dead reckoning. Or what’s left of Loran-C - Wikipedia. Although I would bet the percentage of GA airplanes equipped with both a GPS & LORAN navigator to be approximately zero.
Exactly right — excuse my brain fart. Here in La Crosse, Wisconsin, I live in a “lax” world from sunup to sundown — I once suggested we should be called “laxatives” — but of course the airport is LSE.
I have Garmin Pilot on my phone and it uses GPS and cell towers. not sure if I can switch off the GPS and just use the towers but it would be an easy update if it needed to be.
General Aviation pilots are probably addicted to moving map software. It is overwhelmingly superior to Loran which was superior to VOR. Trying to triangulate on a paper map at night in gusty winds is a very challenging task so any VOR navigation is going to be to/from VOR’s until the final destination. Otherwise you’re dialing in multiple transmitters and diagramming the heading on a map to locate the plane. That’s done on a folded map on a tiny kneeboard while keeping the plane at altitude and level.
I once lost all GPS signals over Lake Michigan at night in marginal VFR that eventually deteriorated to IFR. I ended up using a passenger as an auto pilot while I sorted things out. I had a plan B and needed a plan C because the goal is to fly ahead of the plane. That was with a handheld GPS with no backup. Now it’s all software driven so you can have it loaded up on multiple assets. Most pilots probably use an iPad backed up by their phone.