Carry On Regardless
So on the back of the AS365 spotted in the mountains thread, I thought this observation may start a few discussion/debates around these parts.
So to set the scene:
I am lucky/unlucky enough (depends on your point of view) to live quite close to an airport which mixes GA & Commercial traffic quite well, and in fact at this same airport I have been known to partake of some rotary wing aviation myself, both in the piston & turbine category. Quite often the departing & arriving VFR GA & rotary traffic is routed over or very close to chez jackjones, so we get a very good view of most aircraft of all kinds.
The synopsis of events:
There I was merrily going about my morning chores earlier today, when I heard the unmistakable sound of rotors - I am sad enough to be able to roughly identify the type from the sound of the rotors, but this is merely because I have spent the best part of some 20 years surrounded by all types of aviation machines. Upon hearing the blades I thought "by Jeeves that person is brave for being out in this" by this I meant the earlier mentioned airport METAR being thus: 290850Z 32008KT 2500 DZ SCT003 BKN006 14/12 Q1016 at this point I think it prudent to point out that I am merely 6 miles away from this METAR station, so I would suggest that this weather IS an accurate description of the conditions around Chez Jackjones at the time of observation.
I decided to poke my head out of my south facing bedroom window, and low and behold, there coming over the trees just touching the base of the scud was a lovely twin engine rotary flying machine, who upon spotting my abode made a rather abrupt course correction to the east in order to not overfly us, before again altering their course back to a North-Westerly heading and carrying on towards the close by airport. As the rather nice flying machine passed over Chez Jackjones, I decided to find a North facing window in the house to observe the aircraft as it headed into the murk.
Direction unaltered the machine, crew & pax (if any) carried on in a poker straight line towards the high ground and eventually what would be the airport. I looked at the aircraft on FR24 to see what the track etc of the machine was, and yes as I suspected it was dead straight, direct to the airport via one of the reporting points - my thoughts are at this point, whoever was at the controls was "most likely" following the magenta line of whichever software based navaid, with possibly a HDG hold selected whilst trying their best to see into the murk and beyond.
I have been careful to leave as many details out here as possible, as I dont wish to start a witch hunt to find out which of my fellow aviators was at the controls at my point of observation, more over I merely wanted to provide some points for debate/discussion.
My own thoughts as I watched this person head of into the distance were:
1. OK, they may not have the experience, balls or ratings to simply decide to "go IFR" at the point when the viz & cloud started pushing them down, but why just carry on, they were already flying over PLENTY of open land suitable to put down onto and avoid becoming a statistic
2. OK they decided to press on, and quite rightly went down to avoid cloud - but surely when one decides to go down for cloud avoidance and better viz it is advisable to slow down also? This guy was in no way slowing down, no I dont have a speed gun handy at my house, but in my estimation (and when checked on FR24) he was in excess of 100Kts.
3. All of us either know people who are unfortunate enough to lose their lives, or we read the reports where someone has made the mistaken decision to "press on" in the hope that "its better on the other side". Here however it was not - sure this persons destination may not have been the close by airport, they may have decided to divert there due to the inclement weather spoken about - but at what point would each of us decide enough is enough and put our aircraft onto a suitable piece of ground and sit the weather out for a little while - after all, our helicopters are blessed to be able to land and take off with no runways.
Anyway, all of the above is the ramblings of a middle aged man who usually lurks these forums rather than posting - today I thought I would add to the debate.
Message Ends.