The Fatal Slippery Slope.
I think I am seeing what I think might be the beginning of a fatal slippery slope leading to an increase in CFIT accidents. It is due to the increasing sophistication of glass cockpit systems that are not certified and that have fairly sophisticated autopilot capabilities.
my evidence is patchy, I admit. It consists of continuing wish list requests on support forums for vertical guidance capabilities to be added from non certified GPS sources plus one or two anecdotal admissions from pilots of experimental aircraft fitted with sophisticated but not certified systems and without an IFR rating that they occasionally "push the VFR envelope" for want of better words.
I've also idly thought about how I might try to get in to my local strip in marginal wx so I am tempted too - at least until I thought more about the hills and power lines in the area and the idea of trusting a computer, albeit with synthetic vision, terrain alerting etc with my life and without training at a strip which does not have a designed instrument approach.
clearly there is much more to this IFR caper than I know, but I am not sure if there aren't people who might be sucked in by the technology and get away with it ...up until they don't.
I don't think CASA is likely to be a source of leadership here except to ban VFR aircraft from being equipped with this stuff.
anyway, over to you. What do you think?