Any VFR pilot even if not IR rated should at least practice approaches into IR fields as much as possible and should know how to activate the autopilot if there is one.
But unfortunately the typical VFR pilot has no chance to fly a complete approach in IMC, let alone with three kids on board, which puts such an enormous pressure on a person, I don’t even want to imagine. Other than that: Even if a typical Cirrus cam fly an RNAV or ILS approch with only a couple of keystrokes you have to be on top of things and have practiced it. There’s so many things you can do wrong.
The above case: The pilot should have flown to better conditions on a straight line, and when he realized that he was losing control of the airplane he should have PULLED the handle. It’s really hard to listen to that radio recording, knowing that he COULD have saved them all.
well he could have just landed at DuPage, don’t you think ? When it was still possible ?
@Medewok- I meant the video
Yes, from what I heard in the video it probably would have been possible. He could have gotten a vector to get him on the final track and below the clouds … but i have no idea how bad the weather really was … was it 1500 ft not only at the field but around the field aswell? Obstacles?
He also should have known how to fly it on autopilot. A typical Cirrus can do a lot … but you have to know how it is done,
I think that my point is made. Some of us think that an old Archer over the Channel in intense VFR traffic is safer, others feel safer in a twin in cloud.
We are all intelligent, knowledgable, engaged pilots. We disagree.
How can we possibly expect a passenger to work it out. They have to depend on us, and that places a great responsibility on our shoulders.
All we can do is to be like the surgeon the day before the operation. We explain the risks and mitigations and we advise and let them consent or not.
All we can do is to be like the surgeon the day before the operation. We explain the risks and mitigations and we advise and let them consent or not.
Without casting aspersions on the good work of all medics, one daughter is a medic, but I think it was Kahnemann who indicated that visiting a doctor in the 18th century would probably be a 70% harmful decision, by the early 20th century, the odds of the medic not harming you had improved to 70%, but the profession, by its very nature, will always be in a different category to commercial air transport.
but the profession, by its very nature, will always be in a different category to commercial air transport.
Yes that is true. Safety in medicine is learning from CAT and CRM and such are nowadays big buzzwords in my field like they were in aviation 30 years ago. Still the risk will always be higher because a doctor does not fully control the patients body which is an infinitively more complex “machine” than anything mankind ever constructed anyways.
But I bet to you that most doctors are better at assessing the risks of their various alternative approaches to treating the patients than pilots are at assessing the risks their passengers are under at any given time.
Timothy wrote:
How can we possibly expect a passenger to work it out. They have to depend on us, and that places a great responsibility on our shoulders.
Exactly, and that’s how it should and probably always will be. It’s not appropriate or reasonably possible to ‘protect’ an adult passenger from their decision to delegate their risk management to a certificated pilot, and to do so would be removing basic freedoms that government has no right to remove.
He also should have known how to fly it on autopilot. A typical Cirrus can do a lot … but you have to know how it is done
When somebody buys a Cirrus but has not bothered to learn how to use the autopilot, all discussion of passengers understanding the risk goes out of the window… There will always be complete muppets in any human activity and GA is no exception. One slight difference to some other activities is that entry into GA requires the passing of some exams, but with the application of enough money you can lubricate that process sufficiently.
It’s not appropriate or reasonably possible to ‘protect’ an adult passenger from their decision to delegate their risk management to a certificated pilot, and to do so would be removing basic freedoms that government has no right to remove.
Exactly.
The presumption that passengers can assess the risk is the only viable one, IMHO.
Cobalt wrote:
In my experience, most passengers of light aircraft take convincing that it is NOT risky.
Risk assessment is something humans are singularily incapable of, unless they really put a lot of effort into it. Those who do, usually desist and simply refrain from doing whatever they research to death. People can scare themselfs of everything, yet then end up doing stuff inherently more dangerous than what they talked themselfs out of.
Flying is one of those things. A lot of people won’t even fly in airliners, they suffer claustrophobia (no wonder given the seat pitches these days), anxiety of loss of control, and many things more. Funnily, some who educate themselfs about it and read sites like Avherald regularly, appear to drop some anxieties even though they can see how much is going wrong every day, but they also see that the majority of “incidents” are just that, major or minor inconveniences.
As for private flying, also there the risk assessment so to speak that people go through has not much to do with science, at least not statistical science but rather psychology. The first thing is that flying still is something a lot of people see as inherently hazardous, even though it is not more so than other things they do without even thinking. The second bit is about trust into the pilot: strangely there people tend to trust people they don’t know more than people whom they are close to. Why? Because they can see spouses hit their fingers with a hammer trying to put up a picture, they have seen them fail to put together an Ikea furniture, they have seen them failing in other things, criticize their driving back and forth and then wonder how that bumbling idiot should safely fly a plane. If they don’t know the pilot, then they assume he (or she) must be ok, otherwise they would not have the license… but this does often not go for close people. Is that reason? No. It’s emotional, nothing else.
I have two friends who both have been in massive motorcycle accidents and still ride hot rods, but won’t step onto even an airliner. Rational?
One of the best presentations on the subject of irrational risk assessment i ever heard was by a German behavioural scientist a few decades ago, I forgot the name. He actually used the imho very good example of two fictional characters to explain this: Kirk vs Spock in Star Treck. The Vulcan, who has no emotions vs the human who does. And had us figure out how Spock or his fellow Vulcans would react to a bunch of scenarios given? It looked funny at the time, but I recently found I am not the only one who remembers this one, as it really showed how most of our decisions whether something is too dangerous or not to do has nothing to do with the statistical probability or any other science or rationale, it is purely based on emotion and preception.
So the question whether pax understand the risk? No. Most probably, if they would actually read up about this, they simply won’t fly at all. Not because the statistical risk is so abundantly bad but because they scare themselfs due to information overload they are not qualified to quantify. Yet when they confront information about something they DO know about they will either thoughtfully react to it (maybe change their behaviour) or simply disregard it because they feel it doesn’t concern them! (Well, my cousin 4 times removed died at 105 despite being a chain smoker / I am now driving for 30 years so an accident will not happen to me) e.t.c.
When I have passengers who are anxious and start talking about the risk, I do tell them that it all boils down to the question whether they do trust my ability to deliver them back to terra firma in one piece or not. As I am not the typical suicidal maniac but rather a scare rabbit myself (which most of them know…) I make a point of telling them that as they do know me, would I do something I considered dangerous? And then I leave them to make up their own mind. But no, I will not actively tell them before each flight that statistically there is a 1/x chance that we won’t survive today. We are not that far that we have to put accident pics on planes or cars and even if, do we really want that? Do we want to turn into a generation of chickens because there is always someone who will tell you how dangerous everything is?
A bit the same thing which is widely used by scaremongering interest groups: Overload people they like to influence with information they do not understand and by this scare them into submission.
The more I read this, the more I wonder why the heck I am flying. 
