Ah! Peter Island – what a glorious place, B Sousa – tried to convince the hotel management that they needed a 206 shuttle when I spent a couple of weeks on holiday there in ’86. Must be a wonderful job!
On the hovering at 5000 ft issue - how’s this for a daft exercise. We were required to do some transponder trials back in the late 70’s at London Heathrow. Requirement was to position a Bo105 on a cold clear NIGHT some 3 miles south of LHR at 500 ft and climb vertically up a searchlight beam to 5000 ft. The ground station at LHR shone a small searchlight at us and we shone one back at them from the open sliding door so they could keep track of our angular elevation with reference to them. We then had to fly south 7 miles sideways at 5000 ft to another searchlight beam which was also pointing vertically upwards, all the time keeping our searchlight on the LHR groundstation. It was February and –13C at top of climb. B****y cold going sideways with the door open!! Needless to say with the lack of any groundspeed info we fell out of the sideways manoeuvre many times. Ah! youth – where did it go……
Tech is quite right about shallow approaches over unlit areas at night – it’s too easy to cock it up, no matter how much experience you have. The “black hole” phenomenon when approaching a lit landing site at night over unlit terrain is well documented. There were photos posted on the PPRuNe R & N forum some months ago of a 707 that flew into the water on a visual night approach over Lake Victoria (I think). Bristow Australia lost a Puma some years back on a night VMC approach to an offshore rig – a very experienced crew flew into the water half a mile from the rig.
In my own case about 20 years ago, with about 30 miles to run to destination, with another experienced pilot as co-pilot, we started a long slow clear night VMC descent in a S76 from FL 50 to the Montrose platform in the North Sea and only realised at about 300ft that we were going into the water about half a mile from the platform. From that moment on, whenever similar descents were envisaged I levelled at 1000 ft for at least a minute before continuing the descent. This seems to break the visual brain pattern that nearly ended in a ditching that night. The problem on a “black hole” approach – especially a shallow one – is that you can be quite convinced that nothing is wrong and that the approach is fine, even with two pilots on board.
[This message has been edited by Speechless Two (edited 09 January 2001).]