PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - Cardiff City Footballer Feared Missing after aircraft disappeared near Channel Island
Old 7th Apr 2019, 11:36
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rlsbutler
 
Join Date: Feb 2003
Location: Axminster Devon
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We all know that flying is inherently risky. The ordinary GA pilot knows it. Pilots at all levels see it as part of their skill and practice to contain, minimise or avoid known risks.

Good Business Sense is being simply mischievous in pretending that the captains he knows (or knows of) have unacceptable and undesirable traits. By definition those airline pilots make a living from avoiding known risks. Who is he to tell them that, in seeking more pilotage risks to manage, they are exhibiting an undesirable trait ? GBS’s airline pilot feels professionally satisfied when, for instance, he believes that ATOPs procedures are well calculated and based on good probabilities. He is another character as a ferry pilot and would be another character if he should strip down and dress up for the Rio Carnival.

Megan wonders why Meleagertoo characterises ferry pilots as risk takers. If MLT invites challenge here, it is in seeing them as a group; judging almost any human activity in group terms is now illegitimate, useful as it often is. In any case I would have thought that ferry pilots are scarcely herdable in the way that cabin crew or allotment gardeners might be. Perhaps it is only PC righteousness that drives GBS.

That said there can be no doubt that risks to a ferry are increased just by the facts that (1) the pilot is likely to be unfamiliar with the aircraft (2) the ATC and Met environments are likely to be either less responsive or simply non-existent en-route than in the UK and (3) the terrain is likely to offer no escape over a large part of many routes in the event of a failure that could be managed in the UK. Each of those “likely” considerations could be (rather sketchily) quantified so that, while an ordinary GA flight might offer say 1-in-10000 mortal risk to GBS’s airline captain, a trans-Atlantic ferry flight might offer him an historic risk of perhaps 1-in-200 – both ratios being shamelessly plucked from the sky. A Cessna 152 engine failure is intrinsically survivable – but not in mid-Atlantic.
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