There you are, driving along in your car on a nice long straight road with no other traffic around when all of a sudden the throttle sticks in its current position and your brakes fail at the same time.
Since the road ahead is straight and there’s no other traffic around you dial 999 and calmly seek assistance. You explain your predicamant and add that you have zero familiarity with the road layout ahead.
What actually lies ahead is a fork in the road, the one left goes downhill towards a cliff edge and the one right goes up hill towards some sand dunes.
If the emergency call handler advises that you take the left fork and you plummet to your death instead of advising you to turn right so that your steadily decaying speed would lead you gently into a sand trap, would you consider the emergency call handler to be at fault or would you consider the driver to be at fault for not maintaining his car correctly because as it happened the car did not have a valid MOT?
May I raise a question about national psychology to add to the questions? For me, the UK has always been a place with great thinking minds, an individuality boarding on eccentricity at times. Always free thinkers who don’t always tow the line to authority.
Or at least so it may seem, because in my experience, this seems to go out the window when it comes to aviation.
This kind of ATC behavior that was a factor in this accident, is endemic in the UK, where they’re always catering to the over-lords, the military, the big airlines, constantly groveling and giving them the service, trying their best to get the small “riff-raff of GA” our of the way from the “real pilots”. Read the transcription and you can see the utter contempt for the little man in each sentence. It’s so un-British and out of character. This kind of behavior you’d expect in my own home country of Sweden or perhaps Germany, or Spain (where they were Generalissimo Franco’d for generations) and where people are used to bowing to authority. But not the UK.
How did it become so sycophantic in UK aviation? What is the explanation?
AdamFrisch wrote:
d of ATC behavior that was a factor in this accident, is endemic in the UK, where they’re always catering to the over-lords, the military, the big airlines, constantly groveling and giving them the service, trying their best to get the small “riff-raff of GA” our of the way from the “real pilots”. Read the transcription and you can see the utter contempt for the little man in each sentence. It’s so un-British and out of character. This kind of behavior you’d expect in my own home country of Sweden or perhaps Germany, or Spain (where they were Generalissimo Franco’d for generations) and where people are used to bowing to authority. But not the UK.How did it become so sycophantic in UK aviation? What is the explanation?
From discussions I have followed on other forums, I have to agree with you that you can really see the antagonistic attitude towards GA from UK ATC. If you point out that (eg) you have a joined up, radar equipped FIS available across Europe but not in UK, you typically get someone from UK ATC pointing out that we in GA don’t PAY for this service, CAT do, that we should be grateful for any crumbs they deign to offer us – in short: “Peasant, hold thy tongue, know thy place.”
The fact that we pay duties on Avgas / Mogas escapes them – after all, for what are these duties being collected for? In motoring, fuel duty is supposedly for the upkeep of the infrastructure – roads, etc. In Aviation, what infrastructure do we have? Airports fund themselves therefore this fuel duty should be used as the funding to provide ATC services for ALL air users…. However, it is obvious that some in UK ATC believe that as we don’t directly fund them, we should shut up and be grateful they take the time to even acknowledge us….
Stickandrudderman wrote:
If the emergency call handler advises that you take the left fork and you plummet to your death instead of advising you to turn right so that your steadily decaying speed would lead you gently into a sand trap, would you consider the emergency call handler to be at fault or would you consider the driver to be at fault for not maintaining his car correctly because as it happened the car did not have a valid MOT?
A rather contrived analogy, but… I assume that the emergency call handler was aware of the fork? (Otherwise (s)he would hardly have offered any advice about it.) I would say (s)he was at fault. Definitely.
ATC was much less at fault than D&D in this accident. The pilot was VFR on top, worried, and he contacted the resource he had been taught to contact. He did as they said, and entered IMC. Unlike ATC, emergencies are their main job.
In the other AAIB report I quote in my Post 31 above, they took 2 1/2 hours to contact the rescue service after the FISO contacted them. The report says that often aircraft are found at airfields.
I have seen many coast searches by lifeboat, helicopter, and Coastguards where the response to a phone call by a member of the public was fast. The D&D guys appeared to be unaware of the urgency of an aircraft in water or on hills in winter.
(I don’t think D&D is part of the privatised UK ATC.)
Pig wrote:
If you are up there and in trouble and you cannot, cannot under any circumstances, just abrogate responsibility and have no plan.
This is of course correct, but at the same time we have to accept that task saturation, and “dummy mode on” happens when things go wrong, and with the best will in the world pilots will make these errors, fail to see the wood for the trees, and end up having to depend on ATC to help them out their predicament.
On the other hand, practical measures this or any pilot in the UK in this predicament can take. Imagine you’re stuck on top in an aerobatic plane with 1.5 hrs fuel endurance, at 7,500 ft.
1. Wind your watch if you have one. An airline pilot once told me the first thing you should do if you have some emergency in cruise is just wind your watch. It is incredibly rare that an event at this altitude requires an immediate instinctive reaction. Often you have the luxury of at least some time, so this action just gets you to calm down and think before doing anything rash.
2. You have really good VHF line of sight at 7,500. You don’t need the internet, you just need to look at ATIS frequencies in Skydemon or whatever your GPS app is. Line of sight at 7500 feet is just over 100 miles (the VHF horizon slightly more still). You can therefore get the ATIS for any reasonable sized airport in this range without having to ask anyone. Yes, you might have to turn off the squelch for some distant ATIS stations transmitting with low power, but you can still read them. When flying cross country I routinely use ATIS broadcasts of airports near my route to check nothing unexpected has happened to the weather (and also get QNH to avoid vertical airspace busts). I spent a lot of money on my radio so I’m going to try to get the most use out of it I can!
3. I’ve never personally had an issue getting wx info out of London or Scottish info. That’s what they are there for.
alioth wrote:
When flying cross country I routinely use ATIS broadcasts of airports near my route to check nothing unexpected has happened to the weather (and also get QNH to avoid vertical airspace busts). I spent a lot of money on my radio so I’m going to try to get the most use out of it I can!
There are also the VOLMET stations. London and Scottish VOLMET together give weather for about 30 UK airports. Of course reception range is limited at GA levels.
Just watched the above mentioned video.
It is very well done.
First thing which struck me was the completely bizzare altitude profile
Then, completely inept ATC behaviour asking the pilot to descend into IMC. UK ATC are going berserk on the UK GA chat site defending their handling, and they aren’t happy that someone suggested that the 2 year delay was due to the ATC angle.
Interesting that the Flying Reporter disabled comments on his video due to (as he puts it) the risk of litigation.
First thing which struck me was the completely bizzare altitude profile
There are few things that are not detailled in the report,
I doubt these are likely coïncidences?
What he did in 1) was a smart good call, his planned return route was over land but as he encountered weather he went over open sea, what he did in 2) was very daft especially with very low ceiling
Would anyone fly to his farm strip from SRA with 600ft ceiling over Exeter? and 300ft over water?
There was lot of “get there itis”: not diverting to Bodmin (or other big airports), no precautionary landing in fields or beaches, no intention to land at Exeter (costs?)…
Would he have been VMC at 300ft over the sea? I reckon so. Then just fly towards land (any northerly heading will do) and land on some beach. This typs can land anywhere.
This whole thing looks like a totally incompetent pilot exposing totally incompetent ATC.
