NASCAR Air Force Story

"Icebound" wrote in message
...

"Richard Hertz" no one@no one.com wrote in message
et...

"G.R. Patterson III" wrote in message
...


john smith wrote:

"Taking the chance on being delayed in an airport just won't work,"
Green said. "You have to be there Friday morning for practice or you
miss practice. Miss practice, and they don't let you attempt to
qualify."

Sounds like a recipe for "gottagetthereitis" to me.

Hardly - when you are talking about the pilots, equipment and approaches
they have at their disposal. This is much different than some private
pilot wanting to beat home a lowering cloud deck at night or trying to
beat a t storm...


Not at all different.

Yes sir, it is.


No matter how good the pilots, equipment, and approach equipment is , it
can still be insufficient to successfully execute the approach and be in a
position to land when the runway pops into view.

So, do we go a little below posted minimums, 'cause we might still break
through?
If we pop out high, do we steepen our descent and try to make what's left
of the runway????
Do we attempt to keep the runway in sight with a below-limits circle???...

(Everybody here tell me that you have never tried one or more of the above
and managed it successfully, and if you did it once, why not again).

Never. That might be why I am alive and some other folks aren't.


Remember, practice (or qualifying, or photo-shoot, or...) starts in an
hour.... If we overshoot, we may not do any better on the next try and
will have to divert.

So divert. You will not run into the ground. We are not talking about that
situation here anyway. We are talking about being at 2000 feet bewlow the
suggested altitude 7 miles or so away from the airport and failed to climb
and failed to turn on the missed procedure. Now that sounds to me like they
did everything wrong except the silly scenarios you mentioned.


Different conditions, maybe, but still the same potential for
"have-to-get-there". More dangerous than the Cessna beating the cloud
deck, because the tolerance for error is much smaller, and the financial
consequence much greater.

I don't give a rat's ass about financial consequence. There were no drivers
on that plane. No one "had" to be there. I don't know how you can say more
dangerous or more worth risking life for - sort of reminds me of the Jack
Nicholson quote from "A few good men" - "grave danger? Is there any other
kind?"

Your argument is horse ****.

"zatatime" wrote

I was thinking about a standard GPS (LNAV) approach, but fully agree
on the LPV type of approach adding more safety and ability. I'm not
real familiar with those, but aren't they fairly new, and thre's only
one GPS that is certified for them at this point? I'm sure the way
the teams spend money, they'll all have them as soon as possible, but
will there be enough approaches to make it money well spent? Seems
like its still a few years off to me, but again I admit I don't have
the lo down on them.

Thanks for the explanation.

z

True, but the Garmin 480 (and 580) is , and it seems that such an up to date
operation would have at least one of these. Garmin also has a page that
highlights all of the terrain higher than the aircraft (or on the present
climb/descent profile) as red, right? Seems like controlled flight into
terrain would be pretty tough with that running, and synthetic vision is not
even needed.

Lots of unanswered questions, that may never be answered.

Still I agree with a recent article in AOPA, that someone (forgot who) was
urging the FAA to get busy releasing approaches for those airports that do
not have precision approaches through conventional aids, and not waste time
on those who already have ILS in place.

Is a letter writing campaign from grass roots GA, to the FAA, on this
subject due? What do you all think?
--
Jim in NC


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"Richard Hertz" no one@no one.com wrote

Snip

No one has yet pointed out why
another approach to this airport would be useful or how it would have
helped
in this case.

Snip

Lower minimums with a LPV in place, might have gotten them low enough to not
have to execute a missed. That would have been helpful, since if they were
on the runway, flight into terrain would have been *much* more difficult.
--
Jim in NC


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Richard Hertz wrote:


And who is going to pay for your silver bullet?

Obviously, it will be paid for by owners and pilots, just like every
other piece of equipment. This is the way it should be. However, right
now, SV not widely available and costs a lot mainly because of very
high barriers to entry caused by the FAA bureaucracy. In the interest
of having absolute control over standards and process, the FAA slows
down the new product introduction process and makes it unprofitable to
deliver to market without a huge "certification premium". This is a
problem that can be minimized if not eliminated, if we could only find a
way to pressure the FAA to reform.

One nice thing about SV is that it does not depend on its full benefits
being delivered at some future time when everyone has it, like ADS-B or
TCAS. When you have it, you can benefit from it. Simple as that. I
think SV will be the "next big thing" precisely because of this. If I
were in the market for a new airplane, I would wait for SV glass
cockpits to become available.

Is this stuff so reliable
that you can ignore failure?

Absolutely not!

What happens when it fails?

There is no way to IGNORE failure. The engineers that put these things
together therefore are very diligent to provide a robust system that is
both fault tolerant, and very reliable to begin with. In fact, what I
said about the G1000 becoming a Gx000 with SV should remind you that the
SV only minimally complicates the system, and reliability issues are
really exactly the same as the current G1000 or any other advanced
cockpit system. Synthetic vision is merely more advanced symbology
running on a very similar system to currently certified and flying glass
cockpits, which have acceptable failure modes and redundancies.

Failures should never be ignored, and I contend that looking at the
current system, failure IS ignored with respect to the human factors of
the non-SV cockpit. The system interacts in such a way that too many
pilots lose situational awareness with perfectly running instruments.
That IS FAILURE.

It's a situation very similar to a gear squat switch. A problem was
identified with pilots getting confused between the flaps and gear
switches. They lose situational awareness for a split moment, and
despite all their experience and training, continue to make the
expensive mistake of pulling the gear on roll out or when taxiing back
to the ramp. Will more training help this situation out? Unlikely.
Pilots who make this mistake know where the switches are, but simply
mess up just that one time. What is the solution? Simple - change the
design of the interface so that it is unlikely to confuse one switch
from another. Don't make all the switches look the same, and locate
them in positions unlikely to be confused for something else. Better
yet, don't allow pilots to make the mistake in the first place by giving
them feedback about which switch they're on by not allowing the gear to
go up with weight on the wheels. Could this mechanism fail, causing the
original problem to occur? Sure! But for every failure of the
mechanism, many more would have avoided the mistake. By changing the
interface we decrease the failure rate, even though we're using the same
exact hardware! We have to look at the whole picture.


There is in my opinion an unhealthy attitude in the FAA and the aviation
community that does not weigh the overall benefits of introducing a
clearly safety inducing innovation into the cockpit versus the
possibility of technical failure. A classic example is the recent FAA
rule proposal (I'm not sure it passed) that mandated the use of a child
safety seat on commercial airliners. Sounds like a great idea, right -
the kids would be safer in a safety seat, no? But you have to look at
the overall effect. Since infants were allowed in the past to sit on a
parent's lap, and now would be required to be in and pay for a separate
seat, there will be a certain number of people that would opt to drive
instead of fly. The overall risk of driving versus airline travel is so
much higher, that statistically you would expect that many more kids
will die traveling by car because of the new "safety" regulation on
airlines.

Similarly, the FAA continues to regulate to such a high extent, that we
continue to fly with radios and instruments that were certified 30 years
ago, and likewise display reliability and quality from that era. It's
so expensive to go through the certification process that the majority
of us miss out on huge jumps in reliability and capability. In the case
of radios, it's mostly an annoyance. In the case of attitude
indicators and vacuum systems, it can be fatal. I haven't heard of
anyone at the FAA ever studying the overall effects of the system on
safety, even though there must be one, because pilots don't upgrade
equipment for economic reasons that are substantially increased by the
FAA process. Just like in the case of the airline child seat question,
the FAA should study this and act accordingly. (Yeah, I know...
Wishful thinking...)


Your argument
about "training alone will solve all our problems" can be thrown right back
at you with "Do you really think that ,insert technology/methodology of your
choice will solve all our problems?" You seem to claim "synthetic vision"
will do it. I have yet to be convinced, but perhaps it will.


I never said that SV is a silver bullet. All it does is reduce the
cognitive workload of the pilot from IMC to essentially virtual VMC.
Statistically, I believe this will save lives. CFIT accidents occur at
a much lower rate in VFR conditions than IFR conditions, despite many
more less trained and experienced pilots flying less capable equipment.
So statistically, I would expect that the number of CFIT accidents due
to loss of situational awareness would go down dramatically. That is
all I want. SV will not be a silver bullet because it can't make up for
stupid pilots making bad decisions (or highly unlucky pilots that don't
manage to break the accident chain), so we'll still have accidents. But
at least a good chunk of highly fatal CFIT accidents can be reduced.


Regardless, I was only stating, contrary to previous posters, another
approach to the airport would not have helped - the pilots (for whatever
reason) picked the the worst place to fly and found the highest piece of
terrain on the approach chart and flew into it. That is a problem.


We actually agree here, and this is what I said earlier - it didn't
matter much whether they flew a precision or non precision approach.
The problem is that they lost situational awareness and flew into the
highest piece of terrain on the approach chart. Would they have done
that with if they could see the mountain? No? Then I dare say that SV
would probably have saved them. The interface is just so dang intuitive
that it's much harder to miss the mountain that fills up the display,
even if you manage to blow the approach.

This is, in fact, the biggest reason that SV provides a higher level of
safety. Current approaches and interfaces are more difficult to use,
but are perfectly safe if you don't blow the approach, and can keep the
needles centered. However, if for one reason or another you can't
manage to keep it all in line, you find yourself off the approach in a
somewhat ambiguous situation. How do you know where you are with
respect to the obstruction on the chart exactly? If you're 4 dots away
from centerline to the right and 2.2 miles away from the VOR, and blew
the approach, can you point on the chart to exactly where you are? If
you can, bravo. Now point out the window exactly where that antenna
was. Or that mountain. It's just hard to do, and that's why pilots get
in trouble. With SV, you have precision "guidance" even if you're way
off the approach, and you can more easily avoid hazards.

It could not be solved by adding more approaches and spending more money on
flight testing another GPS approach.


I don't know about this particular terrain, but I would argue that there
is potential for making approaches safer in certain instances by routing
the approach over valleys, maximizing the distance from the mountains
and obstructions in the area. That would typically require more
complicated approaches that curve around mountains, like the approach
that I, a VFR pilot, was able to do with no more instrument training
than the private PTS by using an SV cockpit. Again, I don't think this
is a silver bullet, for cost and other reasons, but it can be another
initiative that I anticipate will increase the overall safety record.

-Aviv

"Richard Hertz" no one@no one.com wrote in message
. net...

Not a red herring at all. Precision approaches are "safer" if flown
correctly, but since this crew was not able to fly the localizer and
missed
properly, how can they be expected to fly any other one?

Maybe because the other one provides more positive vertical guidance. An
approach with vertical guidance to the runway end offers fewer opportunities
to screw up. Therefore it is more likely that the approach will be flown
correctly.


I responded to
this other person who objected to me doing what he thought was speaking
ill
of the dead. Again, I see no reason to belive that in this case a
precision approach would have been any better. They ran into a clearly
plotted bit of terrain that is 2000 feet below the approved height for
that
sector/part of the approach.

There is a question of intent here. I agree that if you willingly bust
minimums or go sniffing around where you shouldn't be that no magical
approach will save your ass. But we do know that circling to land at night
near minimums is a much more dangerous place to be than coming down an ILS
to even lower altitudes. It is likely that many accidents that happen on
non-precision approaches would not happen on a precision approach. Therefore
the publishing of LPV approaches should be seen as a safety issue and not
just a matter of utility. That's my point and I'm sticking to it.

-cwk.

"Richard Hertz" no one@no one.com wrote in message
news

"Icebound" wrote in message
...

"Richard Hertz" no one@no one.com wrote in message
et...

"G.R. Patterson III" wrote in message
...


john smith wrote:

"Taking the chance on being delayed in an airport just won't work,"
Green said. "You have to be there Friday morning for practice or you
miss practice. Miss practice, and they don't let you attempt to
qualify."

Sounds like a recipe for "gottagetthereitis" to me.

Hardly - when you are talking about the pilots, equipment and approaches
they have at their disposal. This is much different than some private
pilot wanting to beat home a lowering cloud deck at night or trying to
beat a t storm...


Not at all different.

Yes sir, it is.

....snip...

Your argument is horse ****.



Whoa-ho.... you seem to have misread my post completely. You seemed to imply
that there ARE NO "get-there" pressures. My argument is simply that the
"get-there" pressures are there. I never said it was worth risking life
for, succumbing to the pressure, or even worth considering it..... (where
the hell did you get THAT from my post??).

And I applaud you for never doing so. But can *all* the pilots in this ng
say the same?

I am certain that NASCAR pilots recognize those pressures more than most,
and that they are very professional about avoiding them.

As for this *particular* accident, there has been no information yet that
suggests *any* cause to me, mechanical OR operational.... nor do I expect
any for many months.