The thread has moved a long way from a useful 'accident learning' thread, which is disappointing
It's a bit frustrating as there are clearly people reading this and the "other" forum who heard the radio exchanges, but who are now saying nothing.
Until certain things are clarified, we cannot even be sure the pilot was asking for an
IFR clearance. All we have is this one-liner
forward vis was 0 due to the mist. Jimaskedto climb and change airways joining point and was asked to stand by.
He may have been on a 100% VFR flight. Look at how many UK PPLs call the French Class E "airways". It is also possible this pilot did not have a JAA ME IR.
For me this is the most interesting aspect, how do we quickly make these decisions (correctly) and what can we do to help reduce the probability of needing to make these decisions.
The issue I see is that if you are flying OCAS and without a radar vectoring service, you are on your own (legally and practically) when it comes to obstacle clearance, so the only "proper" answer is to always maintain VMC.
Yet we must agree this is not feasible, in a situation where, post-departure from a non-IFR airport, you need to collect an IFR clearance at some stage. Even if you could get one on the phone, that still doesn't solve the situation unless you are tracking a published SID (which you won't be doing in any non-IFR airport scenario).
So no means of clearance delivery is going to make the issue go away entirely.
I rarely if ever combine low level sightseeing with a Eurocontrol-filed IFR flight, so I work out (pre-departure) which way to fly and during this time I will be working furiously to collect the IFR clearance. I have not yet had a situation where was in IMC among significant terrain (the southern UK doesn't exactly count) while waiting for the clearance, but I can imagine a departure from
Locarno into say OVC020, without a topo moving map, would be interesting... I probably wouldn't do such a flight because of the possibility of losing GPS reception in between the ~ 9000ft mountains.
For a coastal airport, such as in this accident, a climb over the sea has to be the safe way (or perhaps just flying around at 900ft, on autopilot, until you get the IFR clearance) but for some reason it was not done - presumably because the pilot was not aware of the terrain and/or did not have a GPS moving map showing him where he was.
An apparently last-minute (relative to how long ATC might be reasonably expected to take to come up with it) decision to ask for an IFR clearance may be be a common thread in CFITs, but I don't know what one can do about that, short of binning the sightseeing option totally and going straight for a max-performance climb on a carefully preplanned track (which is what I do).
I say this because the time to get the IFR clearance can vary massively. I don't recall if I posted about a case in Greece but I flew a very long distance there before I got it, apparently due to sleepy controllers, and the terrain below was hills to ~ 5000ft so quite significant. Vis was very poor. And even then it was apparent that they had never found my flight plan, and the terminology used did not make it clear they had me on radar..... In N Europe I've had the clearance in anything from an immediate returned radio call (Lille Radar IIRC) to half an hour (London Info / London Control) to absolutely never (e.g. flying N to S across the UK and trying to get a route above a load of cumulus, say FL100+, with any entry into Class A being deliberately frustrated by Manchester Control asking for airways joining points in a manner ensuring that none of my choices would meet their requirements).
And we all know of cases where arriving GA traffic gets dumped by London Control 50-100nm before the destination, forcing it to hack under the LTMA at 2400ft etc. This is really no different to a pilot doing the same distance at the start of the flight, in solid IMC. The reason the "system" gets away with it is because southern UK is mostly pretty flat. and somebody happy to fly IMC at 2400ft without any service is going to be fine.
So I think there is no great solution, apart from a GPS which shows you where you are on a terrain-depicting map.
But it may be relevant to mention that all of the recently discussed "big" accidents here involved flights which were a mixture of
extensive low level flying (probably for sightseeing) and IFR.
Very few GA CFITs seem to happen on straight IFR flights. I recall reading about a TB20 crash some years ago where the pilot turned left instead of right, on a SID, into terrain, but this is very rare.
Flying through this sort of airspace in and out of clouds is not a safe way of flying, therefore I perfectly understand our regulations.
Is that supported by mid-air statistics? I don't think so. Emotionally it is very powerful but the numbers never prop it up.
those who never flew in IMC at low level have never hit terrain or obstacles...
and neither have those who never flew
Actually there have been lots of CFITs in "legal VMC" too, in poor vis.
Which means that from most uncontrolled airfields in Germany you can legally depart with a Z flightplan when you have 1500m visibilty, few in 500ft, scattered in 1500ft and broken in 3000ft. Which is completely different from CAVOK...
OK, but that presumably assumes that you avoid all the FEW bits and avoid all the SCT bits and avoid all the BKN bits, if there is terrain above 3000ft, else you have to just sit there orbiting. Germany has plenty of bits > 3000ft.
It's one thing to point out, correctly, that the CFIT risk may be more significant than the mid-air collision risk during certain phases of flight, including a low-level transition from VFR to IFR. It's quite another to dismiss the mid-air collision risk entirely.
I recall you having very extensively posted on this topic, saying that mid-airs are so rare.
And they are. Terrain is orders of magnitude more dangerous than other traffic. It's a lot bigger, there is a lot more of it, and it hangs around in the same spot for a long time
By far the biggest reason we have any mid-air stats at all is because the way aviation works, a lot of traffic is concentrated into small areas.