Eaglewit
http://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/5...ml#post7931616
I do not understand why people would even fault the airport for not having the ILS fully functioning.
A pilot should be able to fly without it. Shouldn't we expect a professional pilot to be able to safely land his aircraft if THE AIRCRAFT'S NAVIGATION SYSTEM IS DOWN.
Do these guys train in the SIM for a raw data single engine hand flown approach? If the airplane is capable of doing it, then the pilot flying it ought to be capable of doing it.
Had the ILS GS been in service this crash would not have happened. I am sure you could land asymmetric on limited panel - so why to we need two engines for and full instruments?
There has been a lot of 'grandstanding' here on the capabilities of pilots to land with no aids. Whether you like it or not aids are used by many air carriers as the normal approach. Remove or limit their availability and you have taken away a layer of cheese.
In London Centre today they had a failure of the Conflict Alert system. Controllers should all be able to control and separate traffic without automation support.... but severe flow control was imposed due to the lack of a layer of cheese.
Whether you like it or not - that layer of cheese would have prevented this accident. Yes the pilot should be able to fly a VFR approach with no aids. But the airlines (that _you_ work for) do not allow for that. How many training flights without SLF have you done for VFR approaches?
I would expect one of the outcomes of this inquiry will be ILS should not have been OTS for so long.