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Cessna P210 N731MT down at Hohenems LOIH

cpt_om_sky wrote:

that he confused going out 05 or 23 is very, very, very unlikely !

But most probably that happened… unfortunately…

LDZA LDVA, Croatia

cpt_om_sky wrote:

that he confused going out 05 or 23 is very, very, very unlikely !

Or he knew exactly what runway he was on, i.e. 05 but he still had the mental picture of a 23 departure in his head, and without the visual cue of the mountain, hangers, tower, whatever etc, his mind did not pick up these two incompatible facts. Particularly when someone is stressed or task saturated they often focus only on things that matter at the time, i.e. tunnel vision, they forget the bigger picture.

Last Edited by Ted at 15 Nov 14:10
Ted
United Kingdom

counterarguements:

- loih is pilots homebase for many years (coroborated)
- conditions were (look at the picture of the takeoff) (coroborated)
- plane was ifr equipped (coroborated)
- pilot had ifr rating (coroborated)

Last Edited by cpt_om_sky at 15 Nov 15:16
Austria

- loih is pilots homebase for many years (coroborated)
- conditions were (look at the picture of the takeoff) (coroborated)
- plane was ifr equipped (coroborated)
- pilot had ifr rating (coroborated)

Unfortunately none of these facts can be confirmed as an argument when confronted to aircraft’s trajectory. It’s more likely that @Ted provided better explanation above.

Last Edited by Emir at 15 Nov 15:24
LDZA LDVA, Croatia

@cpt_om_sky Come on, this is no counterargument. Of course you can mentally mix up your T/O direction any time if you’re not constantly focused. And it is even more probable if it’s your homebase, because one might lower the awareness there. What adds to it is that in aviation different things are labelled with the opposite direction. Northerly wind comes from the north, but on Runway 36 you fly into North. For me that feels like the opposite direction. And although I am into aviation for my whole life (literally) I still find myself in the situation that any time I plan a takeoff or landing I think about whether I REALLY understood the constellation wind/runway in use correct. I’ve watched it a lot of times being mixed up by others, and I nearly mixed it up myself several times. This is why I keep thinking that this might have happened here.

Nobody even knows how many of these departures have been made prior to this flight by the pilot, so he might have felt confident – thus raising this threat where I’ve forgotten how it is named in the TEM model.

Last Edited by UdoR at 15 Nov 15:31
Germany

UdoR wrote:

However, this is not sufficient to say, that the visibility amounts to that value. It’s “more than 120 meters”, next trees wich could be visible in the webcam are close to 400 meters.

Sure – to be valid as proof in front of a court it might not be sufficient. However, the distance from the webcam to the shed that is slightly left of the airplane is 220m – the other shed that can be very faintly seen right of the airplane is 283m away. Based on that it is pretty clear that visibility is below 300m.

Peter wrote:

However, he obviously lifted off just fine so this is not relevant to the accident.

I would strongly argue against it. Even if successful, a low visibility departure is a quite mentally challenging situation for Pilots. Not to see the end of the runway (and therefore not to see any obstacles that might come beyond it, loosing visual reference to the ground pretty quickly after liftoff, etc. is something one needs to get used to.
It might well be that one of the contributing factors of this accident was exactly the fact that after a high stress takeoff in too low visibility the pilot was “so relieved” that he forgot to apply the same diligence to the next phase of the flight and by that started the devastating chain of events.

Germany

The fact that a wrong trajectory was followed post-takeoff strongly suggests that the route was not programmed into the GPS, which suggests the pilot didn’t know how to do it.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Malibuflyer wrote:

Even if successful, a low visibility departure is a quite mentally challenging situation for Pilots. Not to see the end of the runway …

Boy, departing on a 600 meters runway in such conditions would scare the shit out of me. The 210 gets a bit quicker into the air than a Comanche, but nevertheless it’s a high adrenaline situation, yes, definitely. I was mentally trying to visualize this. Would be of course a lot easier on an IFR field with a defined departure route and so on, best on a 2000 meters runway where you even could land straight ahead in the first seconds of flight.

Germany

Malibuflyer wrote:

Even according to EU law it is illegal to take off from a VRF only airfield in IMC.

Can you point me to where this is stated?

ESKC (Uppsala/Sundbro), Sweden

Peter wrote:

suggests that the route was not programmed into the GPS, which suggests the pilot didn’t know how to do it.

So your suggestion is that the pilot tried to navigate to Memmingen in IMC by ??? ? Without programming something in the GPS, the flight would have clearly been impossible.

My best guess would be, that the destination has actually been programmed in the GPS and the autopilot in the beginning did exactly the right thing: Flying almost straight ahead to Memmingen.
The pilot, however, was completely disoriented and thinking that he departed in the opposite direction and thus waiting for the AP to turn right inbound destination. As the autopilot did not do this after some seconds (which might have felt much longer to the pilot in such an intense situation), he decided that his gut feeling is better than the autopilot and manually initiated the right turn.

Could be an example for the two hardest things you need to learn when training for the instrument rating:
1. To accept that if your feeling is in conflict with the instruments, in 98% of cases the instruments are right
2. To identify these 2% …

Germany
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