Everyone enjoys the privilege of flying without unnecessary rules and regulations, but my point about this so called ‘fluke’ accident is that instead of accepting it as an unfortunate but inevitable consequence of ‘GA flying risk’, it probably could have been avoided. I am not at all familiar with the very busy Hudson River area airspace and, like everyone else, I’ll wait and hear what the NTSB have to say in due course; hopefully, we will learn from this tragedy and there may well be new procedures imposed to help prevent a repetition. From reading the very informative contributions in this thread from those member who are familiar however, it seems clear to me that this was an accident waiting to happen and without some improvement in safety regulations, there is little doubt that a similar accident will happen again, sooner or later.
At the risk of incurring another ‘civil rights’ backlash, surely nobody can disagree that better control in this specific vicinity would be a good thing; it needn’t be onerous and needn’t affect other areas necessarily. There have been suggestions around separate tracks/heights for RW and FW, or a single frequency for all GA traffic, for example. Whatever, I don’t understand why my fellow aviators would rather continue to run the gauntlet than have extra controls introduced, even though these controls could protect them from a similar situation.
Puntosaurus mentioned the London heli routes earlier; these are very accurately plotted both by track and height to provide the safest route possible for single engine machines, and to avoid mid airs between GA traffic as well as with City and Heathrow traffic. The documentation to support these heli routes is extremely detailed and pilots navigating them need to be thoroughly trained by someone with experience. The result (as far as I’m aware) is a faultless safety record. Compare that with the NTSB declaration that there have been 8 accidents in the Hudson River area in the last 14 years and introducing new procedures would seem to be a no-brainer.
TTB