The Great Ongoing Aviation Thread (general and other)

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1681

One of the other issues is the difference between private and commercial flight. A guy like @Magiver can legally use his iPad magic to help him get his lightplane in and out of tricky situations. That’s smart piloting in his situation.

Not so a commercial operator. It’s gotta be 100% TSO’d certificated, officially maintained official built-in avionics. Even our FAA-approved iPads can’t be plugged into the airplane’s power; that’s too integrated to be legal given that an iPad is not built from end to end to FAA standards.

That another large economic barrier to having fully safe low-end commercial operators like sightseeing companies.

1682

LSLGuy is absolutely correct about TSO’d equipment. However, back in the 80’s commercial pilots were known to bring their handheld GPS’s into the cockpit for overseas flights because they were more accurate than the equipment in the plane.

And IFR pilots will pour buckets of money into their plane’s certified navigation system only to use it as a backup to their ipads. It’s typical to flight plan everything on the ipad and bring it into the plane so it uploads into the certified equipment. So the flight is legal with the certified equipment but the ipad is SOOOOOOOO much easier to use as a “reference” tool.

If you loose the GPS signal feeding the ipad (which seems to happen when it’s most inconvenient) then the TSO’d stuff carries the day.

1683

Fascinating article - thanks!

1684

a well written article. I don’t understand why complaints weren’t taken seriously. Some of them had to have been made by pilots who could have articulated their concerns in aviation terms. It looks to me like they were trying to fly low enough to see sky through the Martinsloch rock opening.

1685

I think it was mentioned elsewhere that the percentage of qualified pilots is higher in the USA than most other places, so I could easily believe that in a relatively sparsely-populated area, no pilots complained - and if so, I can see such complaints being dismissed by aviation folk as just being about a little noise every once in a while rather than actually endangering life.

What I never understand about this kind of accident is how some pilots can be so careless with their own lives - the other one, which I’ve mentioned before, was the South American football team plane crash where the pilot was trying to get to the destination on what he knew was the last drop of fuel, and fell short. Then there was the pilot in Nigeria who pushed on to his destination several hundred miles away despite one of his two engines failing early in the flight. In this particular case, maybe if you’ve spent your career in the air force routinely flying tens of feet above terrain, you forget how dangerous this can quickly become - especially when in a slow, underpowered old airplane as opposed to a modern fast jet. Just like we all drive for thousands of hours without incident, probably getting gradually more and more complacent, until something trips us up - and sadly, that sometimes proves fatal for us and/or others, just like in aviation. It’s a very human thing.

Admiral Cloudberg posts write-ups like this every Saturday - I have no personal connection to him, I just enjoy reading them. If you have a few hours spare, enjoy the archive. This one was particularly interesting because the investigation had no data recorders to review, so had to rely on eyewitness testimony and what recordings they could recover from personal devices.

1686

I haven’t found a good relationship between skill level and risk assessment. I’ve had many an argument with very high skilled people about risk. the severity of the consequences is often overlooked in risk assessment.

1687

ETA: @Magiver just above wasn’t there when I started.

This, plus not having a real safety-first orientation to begin with, explains most of these kinds of events.

Sadly, in the rattier corners of aviation both US and abroad, broken airplanes serving broken businesses through broken airports overseen by broken regulators is the norm. So one is faced daily with a choice: Accept “That’s just the way it is” and keep flying dangerous shit, or say “Today’s the day I quit and get a job in a shoe store.”

Lots of folks will rationalize sticking with it. Until their number comes up.

Something else to consider. Anyone who drives will be killed in a car crash. Unless something else kills them first or they get old first and quit driving.

For a careful driver in a civilized country they might be able to drive for 300 years before getting killed. But if they kept at it long enough it’s a certainty they’ll be in a fatal car crash. Same on their bike, flying, walking across a street, etc. If you do anything with non-zero hazard enough times, you will roll snake eyes eventually. The only question becomes which risk actually gets you before the others have their chance.

Even in high-risk aviation folks can do dumb stuff successfully for weeks, months, and a few years. But they’re taking a one-way walk on a finite pier whose end is shrouded in fog.

The unthinking approach is to say “Well, it’s worked every time so far therefore it’ll definitely work again today.” The thoughtful approach is “It’s worked every time so far, which means the statistically inevitable accident in my future is closer today than it was yesterday. I need to try ever harder to keep it at bay another day.” That same attitude applied daily without fail will get you to retirement in one piece. Probably.

1688

Very well said. The right way to assess risks is likelihood of occurrence times severity of outcome. Focusing on either half of that formula means ignoring the number that actually matters: the product of the two.

Here’s another related point:

Competence and confidence are orthogonal ideas. People can be either, neither, or both, with little connection between the two. Some highly competent people are far over-confident.

Over-confidence also comes in two flavors:

  • I understand and assess the risks, but I assess them as low. Mistakenly too low.
  • I don’t even notice the risks that exist. I’m not overconfident; I’m oblivious.

The former group are potentially trainable. The latter group have a personality defect unsuited for this line of work. Or this hobby if the folks are hobbyists.

In an inherently dangerous business, you can’t actually be fully “competent” when you have a confidence problem in either direction. You (any you) could be very skilled at airplane steering, but if your confidence is misplaced high or low, you still suck at the total package.

1689

In some cases, the pilot took minor risks before and got away with it, and each time you get away with something like that it reinforces the idea that your judgement is better than average and therefore you can make your own rules with impugnity.

One of the people at our flying club had a habit of flying VFR in marginal conditions. He had a floatplane and flew in an area with lots of lakes, and no doubt convinced himself that he could scud-run with impugnity because he could land on any water if he had to, Search and Rescue was sent out for him more than once after he was forced down onto a lake somewhere and didn’t make his flight plan. After a couple of events like that, I’m sure it just reinforced the idea that he was good enough to do this stuff and get away with it.

One day we were socked in at the flying club, with pretty much zero visibility. So we were sitting around in the club tower drinking coffee and sharing old pilot’s tales when we heard the sound of an engine, and suddenly this guy’s floatplane (Cessna 170) appeared on the ramp. He had just landed, almost blind. He came into the club laughing about how hard it was to find the runway, etc.

A couple of months later, he hit a mountain while trying to fly out of a pass in IMC. It took quite a while to find the wreckage, and he was kiilled on impact.

When word of his crash got back to the club, no one was surprised. In fact, the general commentary was that everyone knew it was coming. Some members, including a grizzled old air force guy with many thousands of hours warned him about his flying, but he kust wouldn’t listen. He knew better. And it was his plane, so there was nothing we could do about it but wait for the inevitable.

1690

Isn’t that what recurring training is for?

I thought all pilots need to do simulator training on a regular basis (once a year?) and I thought that it is the simulator where they throw emergency situations at you to keep you on your toes.

IANAPilot…just what I thought happens.

1691

Fatal crash today (2 people) Rock County (Janesville), WI. (AirNav: KJVL - Southern Wisconsin Regional Airport) Made WI news, and even ABC National News, which surprised me. It is awful, but is it really national news?
Details are sketchy at the moment – most sources say the plane took off, reported some sort of problem, and was heading back to the airport. I believe the tower saw the crash and called 911. The plane was an experimental (js online says Velocity V-twin)

Brian

1692

That’s just for airline pilots, the recurrency for private pilots is much more relaxed. Even if they all did have to go through simulator training, it is very difficult to dream up training scenarios that test your ability to make good decisions. It’s normally more about handling the aircraft and managing a specific scenario.

1693

ETA: Whoops; @Richard_Pearse is up and posting. He wasn’t there when I started.

That applies to airline folks. The interval is either 9 or 12 months, depending on some boring details. AIUI some bizjet folks do the same thing, driven by their insurer.

For many, many years there was no refresher training at all for hobbyist pilots, even of sophisticated airplanes. Starting 30-ish years ago hobbyist pilots are required to fly one flight with an instructor every 2 years. Which can be a real joke, or can be real training, depending on how diligent an instructor you choose to hire.

1694

I’m going to disagree with you on this. My friends taught me to fly and they would dream up interesting things to test me on. The first year I went to Oshkosh by myself my buddy came up with a scenario to test my situational awareness. Damn if it didn’t come up enroute and I immediately recognized the rabbit hole I was about to go down and changed tactics.

Yes, the biannual check ride can be a rubber-stamp sign-off but it can also be a meaningful experience.

1695

Yes hangar chat, war stories, and discussion can be excellent ways of improving your SA and decision making skills, but a simulator, which was under discussion, isn’t so good.

One of the problems is that, to get you to the learning point of an exercise you often have to deliberately make a number of other bad decisions that go against the better nature of the student.

An example that comes to mind is EGPWS warning scenarios. Instructor acting as ATC vectors you towards a hill. You say “negative, there’s a hill out that way”, they say “yeah I know but we need to trigger the EGPWS so just run with it”. You do something you would never ordinarily do. The EGPWS says “PULL UP”. You pull up and avoid the hill. All in all it’s not a good training exercise.

Or maybe you’re trying to train for what to do after you’ve flown up a valley in bad weather. To do it in a simulator with simulated bad weather you first have to get the student to get into the valley in the first place and they might say “the weather is bad, I’m not taking off”, or “that valley looks dangerous, I’m not flying up it”. The instructor is then forced to ask the student to pretend they’ve made a number of bad decisions. “Yes it’s bad weather but I want you to take off anyway”. “Yes that valley looks like a trap, and it is, but I want you to fly up it.”

It can work if you just run a scenario and see what happens, the student may happen to make some poor decisions that result in a particular learning outcome, but to try to come up with a believable scenario that reliably leads the student to the desired point of learning is very difficult. And if you come up with a good one, well we all talk to each other and before long everyone knows what’s supposed to happen and there are no surprises. I think it’s better to leave that type of training as discussion points rather than trying to simulate it.

1696

More info on Rock County crash (including flight path)

Brian

1697

Good find.

The flightpath has all the earmarks of an engine failure somewhere after they turned southbound followed by being unable to maintain enough altitude all the way around to a landing. One of the newspaper articles had a pic of the wreckage inverted in a pond or marsh with the main gear fully extended.

A lot of light twins can barely fly level when clean, much less with gear and perhaps partial flaps extended.

Other than the wiki article, I know nothing about the Velocity V-Twin. But I note the gross weight, general dimensions, and engines are the same as the Twin Comanche. The Velocity airframe is probably a bunch sleeker / low drag, but pusher configurations are generally less efficient at converting engine horsepower into usable thrust. Those’re probably roughly a wash.

The Twin Comanche was never known for good single engine performance once the gear was extended. Or if for some reason you couldn’t / didn’t feather the propeller on the dead engine.

There’s no assurance I’ve correctly identified their issue, but it’s a decent contender. It’ll be interesting to see the NTSB eventually says, minimalist though that will probably be.

1698

Looking at the flight path, it looks to me like he lost the engine, turned back to make the runway, then at some point he realized he wouldn’t make it and made a turn for a small field, then either hit the trees in front of it or stall/spun trying to clear them.

He may have thought he could make the field but never considered how much altitude he would lose in a large sweeping turn as opposed to level flight. That gets a lot of pilots who try to return to the runway after an engine failure, and often results in a stall/spin as they instinctively try to keep the nose up while in a turn with airspeed rapidly bleeding off.

1699

Yeah. I bet the long straight southbound segment was normal and when the engine quit he started turning towards a base leg. But overall it was way too gradual & sweeping when he needed to have taken a much shorter path towards the runway.

Based on his continuous descent, if he’d done a strong turn to a 90 degree base leg to intercept a rather short final he’d have made it with energy to spare. Instead he did a wide pattern & just kept descending faster than he was closing on the runway.

Which is part of why why I’m suggesting he either couldn’t or didn’t feather the propeller or began to lower gear and flaps way too soon for an engine failure return. Assuming a simple engine failure, had he gotten feathered and stayed clean he probably could have flown that same ground track with no loss of altitude all the way around to the runway threshold. Not that maintaining altitude would be something to actually do. But that having the capability to maintain altitude lets the pilot pick the point to begin the descent.

I’ve definitely flown airplanes where lowering the second notch of flaps or the gear, or worse yet both, is the moment you’re a) committed to landing, and b) you’ve locked in how much distance you’ll cover. Better pick that moment carefully and conservatively.

It’s also interesting to me that the last roughly 90 degrees of the track were almost directly over that main road (US-51) running along the east side of the river. That looks a bit like him thinking he could not make the airport, or at least he was unsure, so heading for a suitable road, which he then followed towards the airport. Smart thinking; runways are short; roads are long. aiming for something long takes one variable (your remaining range) out of the equation.

Per GoogleMaps the road there is 2 lanes each way with a painted center median lane, and a pole line running along the east side but 10+ feet off the pavement. That’s a beautiful place to make a forced landing. It was even nice and straight in the place he was running out of altitude.

But for whatever reason at the end he turned away from the road and ended up in the marsh. For sure FlightAware is constructing the path from intermittent points, and we can’t really tell whether the end game is stall-spin, deciding he couldn’t fit amongst the cars, or something else.

As I’ve said upthread a few times, every time you lift off you’ve got to be mentally & emotionally ready to wreck the airplane to save yourself. Folks die when they can’t bear to make a forced landing that’ll bend the airplane, so instead they lose control and plummet into a flaming heap of wreckage.

I may have missed it in the original news articles, but the weather is always nice on Googlemaps & flightware’s re-creation. But it may have been marginal or worse when these folks had their problem.

1700

Late add: There are a bunch of good pix of the recovery effort here:

Which seem to support it being decent weather shortly after the accident and so probably decent weather at the time of the accident.