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