"Blasto" wrote in message
ups.com...

"Blanche" wrote in message
...
112 mph, 30 deg bank = 3000 ft turn diameter
112 mph, 45 deg bank = 2000 ft turn diameter
112 mph, 60 deg bank = 1000 ft turn diameter

The margins you guys are talking about seem awful tight, but that's why
you're pilots and I'm not. I can calculate pretty well in my head and
have good technical ability (was a contributor to the original Ethernet
standard that became the Internet), but hurtling along in the sky
trying to figure and implement turning radii?

You'd want to plan it in advance, not calculate it in real time. (In fact,
it is just such a calculation--in combination with other factors, such as
the high-density traffic--that convinced me in the past that there's not
enough of a safety margin, so I've chosen to avoid the East River.)

What we may need here is a
contribution from some of our better legal minds: can you craft an
enforceable law making it a little harder for new GA pilots from
non-aviation backgrounds to zip next to skyscrapers, all without being
communistic or fascistic about it?

Such a law would be neither necessary nor sufficient to address the risk.
Small planes have been flying along the Hudson River and East River for
decades, and this is the first such crash I'm aware of; so there seems to be
no necessity for tighter restriction. Further, such a restriction would be
insufficient to prevent this sort of accident. After all, Lidle was flying
with an experienced CFI (flight instructor). But (apart from mountain-canyon
flying) a pilot's experience almost never addresses a situation like this,
so years of prior flying wouldn't necessarily help. In fact, this is the
sort of thing that a new pilot might even better at than a moderately
experienced one, because students are drilled in all sorts of obscure
matters that they soon forget because those matters don't come up in the
course of ordinary flying.

--Gary