The worrying thing about all of this speaking as someone who is considering taking his PPL next year is that no one seems to know what the score is. Or should I say everyone knows what the score is but it's different to everyone else...I've noticed this in several threads, everybody's opinions seem to differ on what seems to me to be quite important safety subjects. Does anyone in GA actually have a handle on what goes on?
There just is very little standardisation of operating procedures in IFR GA. The airlines have done it, and the (mainly) western ones have used it to achieve a very high standard of safety, but in GA there is a lot of variation.
Aircraft technical capability varies a lot. E.g. I can fly an ILS on the autopilot down to 200ft (legally) but the AP will not capture the LOC or the GS if you are flying a
diverging trajectory (laterally or vertically, respectively) at the moment you engage it in the APR mode. This is apparently not unusual, I am told, even in airliner autopilots. If you get vectored above the GS, you may have to do some aggressive hand flying (towards the ground) to get established.
IR training is very basic and mostly still stuck in the 1960s or 1970s. It is done by banging a few well worn routes (true for both FAA and JAA) and you train for the lowest common denominator in avionics etc.
Different pilots develop different preferences. Some like to land with only half (takeoff) flap if the runway is long enough. Nothing wrong with that, except that (on mine) not using landing flap disables one of the two gear-up warnings (the throttle position being the other one) and a good number of Americans (where they have long runways) have indeed landed a TB20 gear up.
And ATC don't always get it right.
Re the Amsterdam crash, I am not going to read all 228 pages (having read a lot of it previously) but was ATC really relevant to it? As the main cause is clearly
The crew failed to recognise the airspeed decay and the
pitch increase until the moment the stick shaker was activated. Subsequently the approach to stall recovery procedure was not executed properly, causing the aircraft to stall and crash.
i.e. the pilots were barely inside the cockpit. The ATC angle is given as
A turn-in, whereby interception takes place at between 6.2 and 5 NM, with no instruction to descend to an altitude below 2000 feet is in deviation of the International Civil Aviation Organization guideline specifying that the aircraft must be flying level on its final approach course before the glide slope is intercepted
which is interesting nevertheless and I wonder how many countries have filed a difference on this, to enable CDA approaches
Due to the fact that the localizer signal was intercepted at 5.5 NM from the runway threshold at a altitude of 2000 feet, the glide slope had to be intercepted from above. As a result, the crew were forced to carry out a number of additional procedures, resulting in a greater workload. This also caused the landing checklist to be completed during a later moment in the approach than standard operational procedures prescribe.
...
As a result of intercepting the glide slope signal from above, the incorrect operation of the autothrottle was obscured for the crew.
Do they mean that if the aircraft was forced to level off, prior to GS intercept as usual, the pilots would have noticed the AT failure? I am not so sure, as they were not paying attention to anything much.