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Old 20th Jul 2014, 21:44
  #575 (permalink)  
Easy Street
 
Join Date: Apr 2009
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In the light of apparent scant understanding of SAM capability and its implications for overflight of conflict zones, could there be a case for ATPL knowledge to include some very basic stuff about the differences between MANPADS and radar SAMs, and an overview of some unclassified "Jane's"-type performance figures? At least that knowledge would give pilots an insight into why their company's minimum flight level over Afghanistan is X, or why they need to avoid Eastern Ukraine by Y miles. Surely that knowledge would be more useful than a lot of the other stuff in ATPL....

For the earlier poster asking about why FL320 and below were considered higher risk... 24000ft is about the max capability of state-of-the-art MANPADS, of the type that you would expect only major militaries to have (but who knows?). Add a 33% safety margin and you get 32000ft. The performance of these things falls away very rapidly outside their envelope. In all likelihood you'd be perfectly safe at 300. So there is no need to add a further margin onto what was already a generous safety factor - for a MANPADS.

The moment it looked likely that radar SAMs were being thrown around, that whole calculus should have been thrown out. The appropriate question was then "how far do I need to avoid the area by"? There are a couple of radar SAMs that can be overflown safely at 300+, but the SA-11 isn't one of them.
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