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

but when people spout things like adding another approach to an airport
would have saved these people I wonder why they think that.

Well, I'm the original spouter and I approve this spouting.

I thought my first post made the point pretty clearly but I'll elaborate
here.

What we are dealing with here is by nature a game of generalities. Every
accident is by definition unique, but looking at broad patterns certain
unmistakable trends emerge.

Among those trends is the fact that precision approaches are safer than
non-precision ones. Stabilized-descent approaches are likewise preferable to
step-downs, and several of the major airlines got approval for FMS-based
vertical-guidance for non-precision approaches starting a few years ago.

LPV approaches provide a capability that is on its face almost equal to an
ILS, and have all the inherent advantages of a stabilized-descent precision
approach. They provide better guidance in all 3 dimensions and simply allow
fewer opportunities for the pilot to screw up.

in this case. The bottome line is that you still have to execute the
approach and if they did not exdcute this one correctly, what makes you
think they will execute a different one correctly?

This is a red herring. My point is not to glom onto this case so
specifically but rather to make the broad point that since precision
approaches are generally safer, we should push for more LPV approaches as a
safety issue.

-cwk.