Per AirNav: KTEX - Telluride Regional Airport Telluride has an AWOS-3, not an ATIS. As such there’s no provision for manually adding non-weather related remarks or NOTAMs to the voice or data broadcast.
Those guys only hope for advance warning was to self-announce on CTAF & hope the plow or somebody in airfield ops was A) listening and B) answered.
They should (i.e. maybe they didn’t) have gotten a thorough weather briefing in El Paso an hour previously. Which should (there’s that word again) have included a NOTAM about the runway being unusable due to snow coverage. But since they took off for a closed airport apparently some part of that didn’t happen. They *may *have called ahead and been assured the plowing would be done by their ETA. But if so I’d expect them to have been primed for the possibility it wasn’t and the runway was still fouled by snow and/or plows. Which apparently they weren’t.
Given the name of the jet’s operating company I am speculating that they originally departed from an airport in Mexico, landed in El Paso for customs/immigration clearance and then continued to Telluride without further weather updates. Which opens the possibility that the Telluride field NOTAMS were L-typed NOTAMs that never made it into whatever international flight planning / weather briefing / NOTAM system their employer subscribed to.
Thanks for all the insight. The news articles explicitly say the pilots did not radio the airport which if true still boggles my mind. The fact that everyone walked away is absolutely amazing.
Depending on the rest of the circumstances not making radio calls is completely within the realm of reasonable. Not ideal form, but not crazy either.
The last time I flew a jet into an airport with no control tower we didn’t call the airport either. We had assurance from Center there was no other IFR traffic around and they turned us loose 20 miles out to fly our approach on our own below their radar coverage. It was 2am, the weather sucked, and the control tower and everything else on the airport was closed. Which gave us confidence there were no VFR aircraft mucking around. Making a couple of self-announce calls was about #17 on our priority list. Staying awake & right side up was #1, 2, & 3.
Going into the same airport at 12 noon on a sunny day if for some weird reason the FAA control tower was inop we’d certainly have been self-announcing up a storm while dodging Cessnas right & left.
It’s not real clear to me which situation these guys were in, but other than time of day it sounds closer to the former than the latter.
In that cold, with those mosquitoes, keeping a first class medical, having to plant trees and fight fires from the ground while they farm out the flying???
Prolly want you to walk on water and have a PHD in forestry and be under 25 too.
40-60 Thou?? Bawahahahaha
Wings of Hope is having their annual airplane raffle. The page warns that last year the tickets sold out in just 22 days. Tickets went on sale today, and as I write this there are only 40 tickets left. :eek:
Holy Schnoikes, that’s fast!
I bought six, so I have a one-in-500 chance of winning a 1964 PA-28-235 Cherokee. Up until I typed that, I assumed it was a PA-28-140. I hope I win! (Of course I won’t. But the money goes to a worthy cause.)
WTF just happened in LA - a Lancair IV (reportedly) crashed/landed on a highway and a car on the shoulder didn’t escape in time.
Q: I do not see a tail number on this thing, nor do I see any indication that the gear was down.
It appears to have been a turboprop version, which explains how the car was skewered with the plane’s windshield even coming close to the car.
The first of the Lancair IV’s used Cessna 210 main gear (until Cessna objected), so the gear may have been sheared off.
But a million-dollar airplane without a tail number? With that much money on a paint job?
Even if it was your basic “high-speed taxi test” that did the usual “ooops! I didn’t mean for it to lift off!”, it still should have had a tail number.
My only speculation would be a piece of tape with the number had come off.
Assuming of course the FAA’s public database is current up to the minute. It may get updated once a month and the operator had a perfectly good ferry permit or temporary certificate or whatever.
Or not. We shall see. Either way, I’m glad I had nothing to do with it.
Well, the site says it’s updated each night at midnight. My recent experience with the FCC was extremely accurate in that regard, but yeah, this is the FAA and their practices could be different.
(Of course I won’t. But the money goes to a worthy cause.)