Yes, along with opening our window shades and putting our seat backs in the upright position. They do this while we still have a little bit of coffee left in our cup and then never return so we are left holding the empty cup and wondering where to put it.
I watched that whole video. The major take-aways for me about the tragic death of this young woman who was well on her way to a promising career in aviation were that the proximate causes were mostly not her fault and were mostly due to bureaucratic incompetence and greed.
It seems that the major cause was allowing 100-ft smokestacks to be built on an industrial plant directly in the runway approach path. An aircraft on the required approach, which was steeper than normal because of the stacks, would have had relatively little clearance above them (the video implies as little as 98 ft, but that seems like a ridiculous safety margin).
The city was keen on having the plant because “it would benefit the local economy”, and the FAA was lax in allowing the stacks to be built in the first place, lax in condoning revised plans to increase their height, and completely failed to enforce the requirement that they be painted in high-visibility orange and white stripes. Years after they were built, they still had not been painted, and in bad weather with low visibility the gray stacks were practically invisible, especially with the massive clouds of steam the stacks themselves were emitting.
As for the pilot herself, it was hard to tell what she may have done wrong because the Cessna Caravan had no FDR or CVR, but the presumption is that she was coming in too slow with too little power. What is known is that at some point she lost much more altitude than planned, while presumably not being able to see the stacks. But her biggest fault seemed to have been being in the wrong place at the wrong time, a victim of both weather and bureaucracy. I think the video mentions that her parents are suing the city.
That type of fire truck is technically known as a tiller.
Not having watched the video, but having read lots of articles about constructed encroachment onto airfield airspace …
Congress has not seen fit to grant FAA the authority to insist on anything about protecting airspace around airports. FAA can recommend but not enforce. So it’s left to negotiations between state and local governments, whoever owns and/or operates the airport, and whoever wants to build an encroachment.
Some states have laws protecting (some of) their airports from encroachment. Other do not.
I was reading a (paywalled) article just last week about a case in South Carolina where a county-owned airport was about to be encroached upon by city-owned adjacent land that had been sold to a developer to build a 4-story apartment building. That every landing or launching airplane would just skim over on the way in or out.
State law prohibits that encroachment, but leaves enforcement up to the airport (county in this case) civilly suing the other jurisdiction (city in this case). Meanwhile the grading and building goes on. Once folks move in, the clamor to shut down the airport due to noise impacts and risk will become unstoppable. Which was probably the city’s intent all along.
I haz a skeeered! 
On a different note, I was listening to the scanner of the air ops for a/the Calif wildfire. It sounds like they are dynamic in where they are taking off & landing from; makes sense as you'd want an airport close to the fire for more support time rather than constantly going back & forth from a base well away. I gathered this because they were talking about where the refueling trucks were. I wonder how close of an airport & how dynamic it becomes in a fast moving fire. Obviously, it takes time to get a truck in position at the right airport but I sure wouldn't want to be driving a couple thousand gallons of avgas around when there's a wildfire anywhere within a hundred miles of me! Two airports relatively close flying distance might be quite a distance for a truck, especially if they have to cross a river & navigate to a weight-appropriate bridge to do such &/or go over/around a mountain between them.
Well, it’ll be Jet A since only the spotter plane will be avgas powered… You also need to move water and retardant, plus mechanics and other staff. On a daily basis I imagine you’d be based out of a single field. As I’ve posted before I ski with a guy who runs an aerial fire fleet, and he said they have to be fully prepped every evening to move to a different field or even a completely different fire.
Here is the specific court filing:
I’ve been watching the Lake Fire near Santa Barbara over the last few days. In this case, the spotters are an OV-10 Bronco and a Twin Commander, both turboprops, both Jet-A.
I was thinking the water and retardant would be more of an issue than the fuel. On each flight, a water bomber drops hundreds of gallons on the fire; I would think that would be more than the fuel used to get there.
When I was in Minnesota a few months ago, I happened to see a couple of these:
It’s an agricultural plane (crop duster) modified to drop water on fires. I think the idea was that it could refill the water tank from lakes or rivers near the fire, make multiple drops in (relatively) quick succession, and only return to the airport to refuel. I don’t know how many of them were built, or how well the concept was borne out in practice.
There are built-in sunshades for the cockpit side windows of most airliners. Just a spring-loaded roll-up on one edge with a matching hook on the other edge. They’re not opaque, but they’re supposed to be used only while airborne away from airports when spotting traffic by eye is less important.
It is all but universal that pilots carry some sort of automotive sunshade to cover the forward facing windshields. Back in the day it was common to use paper nav charts for that purpose. On a clear day driving into a low sun it can simply be impossible to see the instruments with that orb staring you in the face, sunglasses or no. Or it’s coming in the side window and destroying your vision even as you’re looking forward. Likewise on a hazy or thin cirrostratus day the glare from the brilliantly lit fuzzy light brown or light gray outside world can be painful and debilitating to seeing the instruments.
Bottom line, sunlight at altitude is very different and more powerful beast than sunlight down here at the bottom of the atmosphere. Blocking the exterior view and relying on our equipment and procedures to alert us to approaching aircraft goes on all day everywhere with everyone. And yes, if another airplane is known to be approaching we’ll uncover enough to try to spot it. Which sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t. Both for lack of visibility, intensity of vision-trashing sunlight, or the simple inability of even trained eyeballs to locate moving dots vaguely over that way in time enough to matter.
Returning to this event and various comments by others below @Magiver’s cite …
Here’s the direct download link for NTSB final report - Event ID WPR22FA151.
As was detailed in a (paywalled) article I read today in the BizAv press: The factory should not have been allowed to be there there. The instrument approach should not have existed or should have had much higher minimums in light of the factory. The runway should have had an appropriate PAPI installed or been closed altogether. The factory should have painted its stacks in high visibility colors / patterns. The company which had the accident should have had internal procedures to ensure all pilots knew of the screwed-up unsafe reality at that airport with greater company-mandated mitigations. The pilot should have known that the reality of those weather conditions at that airport were such that although the approach was fully legal, it was almost certain to fail due to all the improperly unmanaged hazards already mentioned. And lastly, the pilot should not have forgotten to lower the flaps for landing. As a result they stalled / mushed out the bottom of the approach and into the factory. In de facto IMC while flying below minimums on the correct 3D path. Which is a violation. Those IMC conditions caused by the factory’s emissions.
Whole lot to criticize there on a whole lot of levels. But ultimately the pilot makes up for everyone else’s shortcomings every time or pays the full price for everyone’s failings. Including their own.
An Aero Commander would be a piston plane.
Not necessarily. There are turboprop Twin Commanders, see 690A.
Ignorance fought. It was already a zippy plane without the high cost of turbines.
thanks for the link. I thought the FAA had authority to enforce such issues.
After the recent supreme court case I am not so sure. I do NOT mean this to be a hijack here…there are plenty of other discussions elsewhere on this board about it. But, I do think it is relevant here to wonder what will happen to the FAA now that Chevron was overturned.
In welcome news, last week the FAA “decriminalized” depression and anxiety in the US pilot force. Ordinary diagnoses of mild forms of these things are now officially no big deal. Potentially opening the doors to avoiding a lot of suffering, a lot of ill health, and a few mishaps along the way.
There are still disqualifiying more severe mental health conditions and disqualifying medications. But the 90% volume of ordinary cases of “too much shit in your life to cope right now” are fully acceptable for professional treatment and continuing to work your career.
It will take awhile for this to flow through the whole bureaucracy and for AMEs and pilots to believe it really works as it’s advertised to. I would not want to be the first penguin into the water tomorrow.
The major airlines and pilot unions are doubtless quite happy. Although they too will take months getting used to this, updating their policies, forging new agreements, and generally wading gingerly into their part of the now-different water.
Here’s the official change Guide for Aviation Medical Examiners | Federal Aviation Administration (faa.gov) under the “New” and “Updated” sections near the top. The intended audience for that document is the AMEs examining pilots and issuing medical certs. But any professional pilot who hasn’t read this doc in detail is somebody playing “I’m an ignorant fool” with their career.
FAA made these changes after a long consultation process with the pilot community, the aviation industry, and the medical community. Many people were cynical that for all the talk of good intentions, simple bureaucratic fear of taking the initiative would stymie any concrete results beyond another dusty report on the big dusty shelf of un-adopted good ideas moldering at FAA HQ.
I’m happy to see that this time the cynics were wrong.
FAA has not yet produced any sort of a press release that I could find. I also checked the websites of the umbrella organization of US pilot unions CAPA, as well as the big 3 unions themselves: ALPA, APA, and SWAPA. And the US airline industry umbrella org A4A. There are no laudatory (or cautionary) press releases yet, but this sorta kinda came out over the holiday and I suspect everyone’s PR machinery is still waking up.
FAA Announces Significantly Liberalized Pilot Mental-Health Policy Changes
By ALPA Staff
This is certainly the result of lobbying efforts by pilot unions and that’s fine. But it puts the airlines in the middle.
How are temporary mental deficiencies measured? We can measure temporary visual deficiencies. A broken arm or leg can be tested before return to work.
Mental issues are more subjective which makes measurement difficult.