Cloud blamed in fatal plane crash

[ShyTorque]

The departure climb must end at an altitude that provides 1000ft separation vertically from terrain within whatever navigational accuracy each side of track you can manage and this must be maintained as well as full VMC during the flight. The only exceptions being clearances in controlled airspace and low level corridors where operation at minimum level can be normal.

If you can not maintain 1000ft above terrain within Xnm each side of track then you divert.

Why, where is this laid down?

[DFC]

Originally Posted by ShyTorque

Why, where is this laid down?

In the "I have not had a CFIT in more hours than you can shake a stick at" book.

I hope you get to read it some day.

Following that advice will help.

Common sense is Law.

Try doing something that you know is stupid. Kill someone doing it and await the court case.

Regards,

DFC

[ShyTorque]

DFC,

Thanks for the insult; rather an arrogant reply simply because I asked a question; especially as you have no real idea of my experience or my attitude.

Your use of the word "must" makes your post sound like you are quoting from the ANO, which you are not. You are applying IFR minima for VFR flights. If you choose to do that you will be safe enough but it's not mandatory to do so.

[scooter boy]

took van instead of plane today

This morning I checked the TAFs and METARs at 0600.
The Wx looked really crap (fog at destination) so I decided to drive from my home in Cornwall to Gloucester instead of flying.
I have an IR and am current.
Lots of pressure on to get the plane to its annual etc... which was booked to start today.
As it happens the weather would have been OK but I had no way of being certain at my decision time.
But I drove.

It appears that the guy mentioned in the thread took a chance, not only with his own life but with the lives of others and a passenger died.
He now has to live with that (as well as being wheelchairbound).

SB

[Fuji Abound]

Every pilot is made abundantly aware of the dangers of inadvertent flight into IMC.

I guess a very small percentage continue into IMC because they are arrogant or stupid.

I suspect far more do so because they commit a cardinal error of judgment - the greatest reason for any pilot induced accident.

It is constructive to consider the events that lead to such a cardinal error. I suspect we can all construct more than one scenario.

However the point comes at which events over take the pilot. For example, the aircraft has been forced low, giving the pilot little time to assess and position for a forced landing, compounded by the lack of attractive sites if the aircraft is over inhospitable mountainous terrain.

In these circumstances rapid and decisive decisions are required to avoid CFIT or inadvertent entry into IMC.

The ability to take these decisions in these circumstances should not be under estimated.

The maturity and experience that hopefully enables us to break the string of events earlier in the sequence comes with time.

The true cause of the accident is not the inadvertent flight into clouds but the failure of the pilot to recognise that he was being overtaken by events which would lead him to believe he had run out of alternatives.

To that extent, each to our own level of experience, do we all dance on the head of a pin.

[Contacttower]

"Inadvertent" entry into cloud is practically total bo11ox. Considering modern met data availability and the mobile telephone etc etc not to mention those nice big windows fitted to the aircraft.

In the "I have not had a CFIT in more hours than you can shake a stick at" book.

DFC you are of course right....but personally I would stop short of saying what you've said. Reason being that it sounds to much like saying "this will never happen to me".

Call me superstitious but I can just see it now...I say on PPRuNe this guy's an idiot, how could he have been so stupid and then I go and do something equally stupid. Not because I'm a bad pilot but because we are all human and can't assume that our judgement will always be good and that our decisions will be rational.

All we can do is learn from the misfortune of others (or think a bit more about safety, we don't need accidents to make us safer) and hope that will make us safer pilots.

[ShyTorque]

CT, I agree - that's why there is an investigation after air accidents.

Unfortunately, human factors will always play a part in accidents to humans. This pilot has learned a very severe lesson, one that has been learned many times before.

Having said that, flight from VMC to IMC and back to VMC can be safely managed but the time to plan it is on the ground, with a chart on a desk, not halfway up a rising valley in an aircraft not well equipped for the job.

[drauk]

Lots of pressure on to get the plane to its annual etc... which was booked to start today.
As it happens the weather would have been OK but I had no way of being certain at my decision time.
But I drove.

I agree that driving instead when the weather is bad is sometimes a wise choice, but generally less so if you're going for an annual, don't you find?

[waldopepper42]

Hmm, 1700' cloudbase, informed that the Menai was negotiable underneath the cloud until Bangor where the cloudbase rose to 3000' and no IMC rating.

Yet still a direct track drawn from Caernarfon to Colwyn Bay.

Accident waiting to happen?

[S-Works]

Classic case of get home-itus. The cloud is not to blame, the pilot in command is clearly to blame and his stupidity cost the life of his passenger.

Common sense should have dictated that in the conditions a VFR only pilot should have sat it out when he stopped for fuel. Instead he chose to push on with the inevitable consequences.

IO is quite right in highlighting the outcome as cold hard pointer to us all.

I have no idea what he learnt on his IR had to do with it unless it was just an opportunity to slip in the point that he has one (even if it is of the "foreign" variety)

[radicalrabit]

unqualified to add but..

In Diving we would call this a spiral of disaster. As many of you have acknowledged, he chose to put himself in danger. "Being late in this world is better than being early in the next" is something I learned a long time ago, and I hope when I am qualified to fly over mountains in marginal weather Ill remember to think again and stay on the ground. Just as a matter of interest a friend of mine and I watched a helicopter going up Glossop in Longdondale last week in light drizzle and found the clouds had rolled down off Crowden and Kinder and boxed him in. But he was in a helicopter and could find a field to set down in. A Cessna OR ANYTHING ELSE at that altitude would have been in a hopeless situation other than to risk climbing into the traffic inbound to Manchester and calling for assistance.
Sad for the loss of life but really was this the best choice given the wx at the time? How ever well qualified he might have been, even 15000 hour pilots have been known to make bad decisions.
Thanks for the continued insight into GA . I find learning from other peoples mistakes coldly effective.

[Kirstey]

"It is very easy in cloud to lose sight of the ground.

Was my favourite part of the BBC article!

All this talk of a "proper" pilots only forum.. how about a "w@nkers only" forum for the likes of *** to strut their stuff?

[QDMQDMQDM]

Hmm, 1700' cloudbase, informed that the Menai was negotiable underneath the cloud until Bangor where the cloudbase rose to 3000' and no IMC rating.

Yet still a direct track drawn from Caernarfon to Colwyn Bay.

Accident waiting to happen?

Clearly so. This is a pilots' forum and if you can't call a spade a spade here, then where can you?

[IO540]

There is nothing wrong with departing (unless departing into obviously daft conditions, like OVC002 with embedded CBs and no radar ).

The key is to keep escape options open and execute them before they run out.

Once airborne, weather forecasts are not really useful - if one staked one's life on a weather forecast one would be dead within the first year, without any doubt whatsoever.

[scooter boy]

Lots of pressure on to get the plane to its annual etc... which was booked to start today.
As it happens the weather would have been OK but I had no way of being certain at my decision time.
But I drove.
"I agree that driving instead when the weather is bad is sometimes a wise choice, but generally less so if you're going for an annual, don't you find?"

I have another month of legal flying before the annual runs out so will try to get it done at next opportunity. It is very typical though that the minute I decide to drive I can almost guarantee the destination will be clear (and vice-versa).
Sod's law,

SB

[drauk]

Bose-X wrote:

IO is quite right in highlighting the outcome as cold hard pointer to us all.
I have no idea what he learnt on his IR had to do with it unless it was just an opportunity to slip in the point that he has one (even if it is of the "foreign" variety)

hahahahha. The moderators of PPRuNe have a "quote of the week" thread to keep them amused. If they had a "Pot/kettle incident" thread this would be pinned permanently to the top of it!!!
Excellent!

[IO540]

One of the most difficult flights I've ever done was trying to get the plane back to the dealer for an Annual scheduled before the two year warranty ran out.

Had I missed the deadline by even 1 day, any defects discovered would have not been covered by the warranty. So it was critically important. The autopilot alone was a £20,000 repair job.

It was a low level IFR flight in Class G, in something like OVC006, solid IMC, turbulence, rain, the whole lot.

It had been delayed by about a week due to poor weather every single day, but in the end I decided to go as the weather was technically flyable.

It was uneventful but quite busy, no autopilot.

In the end, the plane sat at the dealer for a couple of weeks before they started on it because all their staff was off to some exhibition or training...

I don't like the "get home itis" concept. People should be trained to make go/no-go decisions based on technical data before them, and continue making the decisions when in the air.

Instead, we have the PPL sausage machine which uses stupid sayings like "better to be on the ground wishing you were in the air than the other way around" to excuse what is a very limited training relative to the privileges. The limited training concept is supported by many people who never want to go anywhere to start with e.g. aerobatic pilots who currently do the same PPL but really they should do a different course entirely.

[Fuji Abound]

It seems to me some are very quick to dismiss the actions of this pilot.

In Flying each month they write a usually interesting analysis of a recent AAIB report.

I have assisted the AAIB in an accident report (I was not involved in the accident). It is noteworthy the lengths to which their investigators go. It is also noteworthy how difficult it is to distinguish between provable factual evidence and conjecture. Understandably they are very careful to exclude as much conjecture as possible.

American bulletins often take the form - “the aircraft impacted the ground causing the death of the pilot. A factor may have been inadvertent flight in IMC”. In one sense this tells us the obvious, but little about the factors that led to the accident.

This report tells us the pilot was 60 years old and had 116 hours flying experience. We do not know when he passed his PPL. Nor do we know if he had an IMC rating, but we can assume he did not. We do know that he appeared to have flown regularly - after all he had 6 hours in the last 28 days and 12 hours in the last 90 days. It is possible on that basis that he had recently qualified as a PPL. We also know he was 60 years old. That might suggest that he was a man of maturity that comes with age.

We do know he had prepared a proper PLOG and had checked the weather before leaving, including noting the MSA. We also know that the pilot had decided to route via Colwyn Bay following his assessment of the weather. He was therefore visually familiar with the exact same route by which he chose to return. The pilot reported the weather on their our bound leg as good at 2,500 feet. It would seem they had flown the sector from Colwyn Bay to Caernarfon at 2,500 feet.

In fact if you draw a direct line between the two at 2,500 feet they would have been below the highest ground for a very short section of the route. If the route were to be adjusted very slightly to the north the margin would have been considerably greater. For example a very small deviation and the highest ground is less than 1,500 feet.

This would suggest to me that either they had climbed to a higher altitude on the out bound route or they had indeed flown a course that took them a little further north of the high ground than the direct track.

When they decided to return the fact that the pilot aborted the first attempt would suggest to me that he was more than prepared to turn back due to poor weather. We don’t know if he refueled because he needed to, but this is possible otherwise he might well have flown back to the overhead and then resumed on the northerly route. We know he departed at around 1605 and he received a weather report immediately before departure suggesting a cloudbase of 3,000 feet at Bangor. It would seem the report was very current as the aircraft concerned “had recently departed”. We also know that 6 minutes after take off the pilot was in VMC at 1,800 feet.

So at that point in time the pilot knew the cloudbase to the NNW was at least better than 1,800 feet and also believed that further north west (at Bangor) it was 3,000 feet.

He had successfully flown the same route earlier that date at 2,500 feet maintaining VMC.

A close look at the chart would suggest that literally a few miles to the north of the crash site the ground sharply fell with peaks of 1,000 feet or even 500 feet. The contour lines also suggest an outcrop that extended out over the lower ground.

The report suggests the base was 1,700 feet in the immediate vicinity of the crash site.

In short had the pilot deviated only to a very small degree further north he would have been able to maintain VMC with at least 700 feet if not more separation from the ground.

Only a very few further miles north and he would have been over the sea.

So, in attempting that route to Colwyn Bay was his judgement so poor in the first place? How many of us based on the very current weather reports that he had would have considered making that journey given that we knew we had a very good out to the north?

To me what is far more interesting is why he ended up hitting the ground.

The visibility it would seem was very good - the report suggests better than 10K. Hardly conditions in which a pilot might think this all looks a bit iffy - I had better re-consider my route. A person at the scene at the time reported the cloudbase at 2,000 feet . The site of impact was at 1,970 feet. This would suggest the pilot was very close to the base. We don’t really know whether the aircraft had entered IMC a while before the accident but it would seem this was unlikely and the suggestion is the aircraft was still in level flight at the point of impact. We don’t know how the pilot was navigating and there is no mention of a GPS. Often the AAIB will attempt to recover the route from a GPS if found so this would suggest that he was relying on DR and visual navigation. This would seem to be supported by the radar track which deviates about the actual track perhaps more than you might expect some one hand flying with a moving map GPS.

So it would seem somewhere just SSW of Bangor the aircraft continued into an obscured mountain side that rose up immediately in front of his track with obscured ground rising to maybe 700 feet above his cruising level and then falling away again sharply, and with ground to the north well below his cruising height.

Why did he plough on at that point when there would appear to have been no need to do so?

I cant help feeling it might be revealing to fly the track on MSFS with the cloudbase and wind set to the conditions we know existed at the time.

Personally I don’t see any obvious explanation for what seems to me to be a case of CFIT which falls outside the usual scenario.

[englishal]

Pilot error contributed to by weather ( as we can't blame the weather) is the biggest single killer of SEP pilots....But some PPLs just don't seem to learn (or they learn the hard way).

My get-out route is climb to a safe altitude and continue IFR. If you can't do that and the weather is marginal, stay on the ground.

Pilots have a responsibility to their passengers, it is ok say me taking a risk on my own life but I would not expect my life to be risked by someone else if I were a passenger unless I fully understood the risks.....I would never scud run just below cloud without a get out plan, it is asking for trouble. Add some mountains in there.......

[Fuji Abound]

Englishal

I fully appreciate your comment but have you read the report and considered the circumstances fully?

The reason I wrote a lengthy post is that I dont think this is justified criticism of this pilot.

On balance, the actual weather reports seemed more than good enough for the planned trip. He was very familair with the route as he had flown exactly the same route earlier that day. There is no evidence to suggest he was "valley flying". He almost certainly had very good vis. below the base and ground immediatley to the north of his track that would have given him a healthy margin between the base and the ground. Even on the track he took there was only one short section were he was below the terrain which he should have seen coming well in advance. Most importantly he had a very safe out to the north, unless the weather reports were totally inaccurate.

I think there is moe to this than some suggest.

Come on chaps - give the pilot a break - if you can see a genuine flaw in his planning or why things went wrong in an informed way that would be revealing but I dont think this was such a simple case of CFIT due to poor planning and poor airmanship - although I appreciate that was the ultimate cause.