IFR/Flight Following -- ATC Preferences?

JFK JR stacked the deck against himself in so many aspects that he
pretty much doomed himself and his pax before they broke ground.

The what/if scenario's are plentiful

What if:

He delayed his departure for the next morning?
He offered some poor starving CFI to go with him for a price?
He put the wing leveler back on his a/p when he started his descent?
He followed the coastline and flew to HYA and waited for the morning?
He followed the coastline to HYA and took a ferry?
He hadn't just had a cast off, was tired? was perhaps taking painkillers?
How many martini's did he have at lunch?

Accidents are chains of bad judgements, usually no one link in the chain
is going to cause it but when you get so many mistakes and bad judgement
in the chain then you pretty much leave yourself no options.

It was a shame, I don't think he was a bad guy, and if I had $100 for
every time someone asked me as a pilot "what happened with JFK Jr?" I
could have had my commercial ticket now and paid for.

Robert


Steven P. McNicoll wrote:
"Judah" wrote in message
. ..

I'm not sure of the exact numbers, but I believe a controller will
issue an alert if a pilot is descending faster than 1700 fpm.



Rate of descent has nothing to do with it. The controller is required to
issue an alert if he is aware the aircraft is at an altitude which, in the
controller's judgment, places it in unsafe proximity to terrain or
obstructions. Since Kennedy was over water it seems unlikely terrain or
obstructions were a factor.



I also suspect that in the Boston area, a pilot might be instructed to
advise
prior to altitude changes, creating a query if he had not. I agree that
an official Altitude Alert such as those you might get for being 200'
below an assigned altitude on an IFR route would not apply here. But I
have been asked to confirm airport in sight when descending VFR with
flight following and even this could have woken JFK Jr. up...



And if he'd been asleep a wakeup call may have saved him, but I don't think
a low altitude alert would have relieved him of vertigo.



I'm not sure I get your point here. Do most pilots follow frequencies
as they traverse sectors so that they can listen for other people's
pireps and traffic alerts? I always found it easier to just ask for
advisories.



The point is those things are unrelated to flight following.