Then you still have made a choice.
Yes. The decision is to continue or not continue the approach, it is not possible to do neither.
You can choose from phantom fears and kindness that can kill…
But that isn’t covered by my company’s SOPs.
There is something gloriously British upper class in using Latin. Eton/Harrow/Oxbridge. Only someone with a public school upbringing could have done that. Perhaps that is why AVRO and so much more of the UK aerospace industry has gone.
It’s a nice thought but “MINIMUMS” is pretty much the industry standard with “DECIDE” possibly being peculiar to British Airways (I couldn’t find much definitive information on it.)
These callouts are generally part of the enhanced ground proximity warning system and can be configured by the operator.
This is something that I find particularly frustrating. Not so much that it happens but that increasingly we are not permitted to apply some common sense to the situation.
One of our destinations gets quite hot, regularly over 40ºC (104ºF) during summer. The wind-shear warning system on the Avro RJ seems particularly sensitive at this airport on hot days. When it first started happening, we would get the warning and generally ignore it unless we felt it was actual wind-shear (which it never was). Then we were reminded that a system detected wind-shear warning has an associated memory item, the wind-shear escape manoeuvre, and it must be followed. Then we had situations where we were performing several wind-shear escapes prior to landing. Not fun for anyone, passengers included. They now have a manufacturer approved procedure that basically allows us to disregard the warning provided we are above 800’ but we still have to follow it below and this procedure is only valid for the one airport.
The crux of the matter is that, for our operation flying in to this airport, the system simply doesn’t work properly. My solution would be to ensure the crews are trained to recognise wind-shear ourselves (which we are of course) and then allow us to exercise reasonable discretion in regards to the system detected wind-shear. The company is firmly of the opinion that we must always do what the book says though.
That is a good thing. Regularly ignoring the EGPWS is less than ideal. We had an approach that took us over a ridge line. In IMC, following the instrument approach including the more conservative configuration profile, we wouldn’t get any warnings, but in VMC, flying a visual approach a bit faster and cleaner we would sometimes get EGPWS warnings. The company’s solution was to mandate that we always fly the instrument approach procedure regardless of conditions.