Originally Posted by
aterpster
The BE1900 crash at Dillingham, Alaska was a freighter as well. But, no government attention on that one. Not even a docket so far. It happened 5 months before UPS.
But, the NTSB is taking up the UPS accident because the pilots likely screwed up. OTOH, at Dillingham it was a gross, fundamental screw up by a government employee; the controller.
Naw, the NTSB isn't subjective or biased.
Aterpster,
A couple of observations about that:
It's is also true that a accident with a part 135 plane full of mail flying into the side of a hill Alaska will get a lot less attention of all kinds than a Part 121 Airbus crashing rather spectacularly and publicly in a place accessible to the national media. I doubt that many people outside of Alaska and outside of the aviation community were even aware of the Dillingham crash, but I'm pretty sure most people in the US with a television set knew about the UPS crash within a few hours of it happening. That also will have a influence on how much attention an accident receives.
I haven't seen an actual transcript of the communications, but the NTSB preliminary report certainly seems to suggest that the controller issued a clearance below the minimum applicable altitude, so I don't disagree with your claim that the controller screwed up. But I will say that even if that all is true, the pilots dropped the ball pretty badly. This was a non-radar approach and the plate pretty clearly shows that 2000 ft MSL was below the minimum altitude both for the TAA arrival direction and to hold at the IAF. If they had the plate out and were following it, they wouldn't have flown into the hill.
That's something I've been preaching is that if your operating in a non-radar environment, you'd better have a rock solid plan for not flying into a hill, without ATC's help. Not to say that you should abdicate this responsibility within radar coverage, just it becomes even more important outside of coverage. I have had ATC clear me to descend to an altitude which would have placed me below the terrain for that route segment. It's better to think of ATC as providing no terrain separation services and only separation from other traffic. My observation is that teaching about non-radar operations is something that flight training does really poorly these days.
I think that most IFR training takes place in areas of good radar coverage, and is conducted by instructors who really don't have any experience outside of radar coverage themselves. As a result, we're getting pilots who are depending on ATC for terrain clearance and are lost when they're outside of radar coverage.