UPS cargo crash near Birmingham AL

[PEI_3721]

Altitude vs Range

Capn’, horses for courses
The objective is to encourage people to think and to aid cross checks during the procedure descent, thus promoting the highest level of safety.
I prefer not to overuse ALT SEL; it has great safety value in setting up an approach procedure and after a missed approach. However, when proposing to use it elsewhere the safety value has to be balanced with increased workload / distraction – another thing to be forgotten, which if depended on (automation dependency) might have serious consequences.
I am further biased by some older systems which resulted in hazardous situations of inappropriate ALT capture during go around (slight dip below ALT SEL).

Perhaps your technique is more focused on conducting the (NP) approach – ‘how go’s it’, correct for accuracy; whereas my view is more of a gross safety check, which in some circumstances (see previous link) requires an immediate climb to a safe alt / profile.

Safety isn’t necessarily ‘easier’ . The debate is like questioning ‘how can we do this’ vice ‘should we be doing this’.

If in this accident the procedure was commenced at an incorrect range, which resulted in being consistently low (assuming a constant approach), the error might have been detected by an intermediate check of altitude and range. This method has some consistency with crew activity at MDA where altitude must dominate.
When and where the error could be detected depends on the choice and number of alt/range entries, which in this case was 2, BASKN or IMTOY, where the latter might have been too late.

With rwy 18, the FAA could have considered the safety aspects differently. If a procedure is judged not-safe at night what makes it safe by day (cf BOAC comments)?
Whereas day operations might be judged sufficiently safe (acceptable risk with mitigation), is a VGSI mitigation sufficiently acceptable at night – lack of ground plane and textured surface for peripheral altitude checks; not ‘how’ but ‘should’ a night approach be authorised.

Of course it’s easy to question history with hindsight, but the annoying aspect is that in this area of aviation, history keeps on repeating itself; thus what do we require in order to learn from history?
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