Seneca down at Avalon

"Richard Hertz"
Thanks for taking the bait. On one hand, nothing is tricky about it if
flown as published (obvious and self-evident). But a bunch of folks
died
here by not doing so. So what's tricky?

One way of describing what's tricky is that you can fly the approach as
published laterally, never descend below MDA, and crash.

I would not describe it that way - rather, more acurately, you fly the
approach and fail to execute the missed as published. That will get you
dead in many places and this is aout as "trickless" as they come. The
approach is named VOR/DME - so what is the trickiness?

All the information is on the approach chart. There is not much to do on
the final segment - just remain at 2100, keep a heading and then make sure
you know when to go missed. There is no timing on the approach chart and
it
seems fairly clear that the approach uses DME fixes.

Well, I have to agree that it's all there and if you fly it as published, no
problem. But this approach seems a little different than the 'typical'
non-precision approach.

I took a quick look at the first 111 approaches inf SE 2 of 4 NC & SC. I
looked at at all non-precision, non-GPS-only approaches. There were 38 such
approaches.32 of them had a missed approach point that was over the runway.
Of the six that had MAPs short of the runway threshold, 4 of those were
TACAN (military?) only approaches. Only 2 were similiar in this way to AVX.

Nothing wrong with different. Not necessarily tricky but I can see how a
careless pilot might continue on at MDA past a MAP short of the runway while
'searching' for a view of the runway. Thinking perhaps that I can see
straight down at the MAP so I'll just proceed along another mile (45 secs)
until I see the runway below then I'll rack it around and circle to land.

I'm not saying these folks were careless, just trying to learn something
from the accident.

On second thought, I'll stick with tricky.