"C Kingsbury" wrote in message
link.net...

"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.

Yes, that pilots make mistakes and many are unprepared and ill-trained. I
do not mean that of these two pilots, bet certainly many are.


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.

I do not see how they are inherently "safer." I prefer them - they let me
get closer to the ground before having to make a decision. A decision that
was not made by the plane in question.


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.

Better than a localizer in that dimension?
The localizer is not a bad guidance system. They failed to get to the
appropriate height.


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.

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? 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.



-cwk.