MedEwok wrote:
Interesting. In Germany in particular we have an obsession with academic qualifications and people who have them generally have it easier in almost all walks of life. As many other posters said before, such qualifications do not matter much when piloting an aeroplane. Aerodynamics aren’t going to ask you for your graduation certificate…
Indeed, Germany’s obsession with people called Prof. Dr. Dr. Xyz is absurd. Academic qualifications are meaningful in an academic setting. IMHO there is far too much focus on it in daily life. It has nothing to do with piloting skill and little to do with professional areas where it is arguably relevant based on subject matter.
Peter wrote:
You can however get yourself into a syndicate around something pretty good. Even a group of 2 has a big impact on costs, and tends to work nicely, where larger groups tend to get problems (another big topic).
Indeed Peter, and this seems to me a much more practical and financially viable route. Yet finding compatible people is probably the greatest challenge (another topic altogether, I know).
Dave_Phillips wrote:
I fly helicopters and would say that I’m reasonably current; I don’t think I fit the stereotype.If I took more than 4 weeks off helicopter flying I would be very wary of launching in a 15kt wind. Conversely, I would happily take 6 months away from fixed wing and choose to fly in 30G40. You have to stay current on helicopters, hence the annual Type Rating requirements.
Although I must say if you think that flying a fixed-wing plane in a 30G40 wind situation is easy I am quite impressed. Probably depends on the plane though, and the wind direction. My instructor wouldn’t let me fly 15G25, but that was at a 90° crosswind angle to the intended destination runway. And I didn’t protest for one second, knowing full well how right he was.
New Cirruses get sold to people here and there in the US, with widely-vary sources of funds, but if you go to the airport in 2017 you won’t see a great many people who fit the profile of fancy new factory built plane, little competence.
In the period when US doctors were big buyers for new Bonanzas, resulting in the stereeotype, I think a medical doctor in successful private practice might easily have been making $300-400K gross adjusted for inflation, some more. Now they seem to make half that amount, and for the last decade US entrepreurship (which is what has maintained more recent new aircraft sales) has been relatively repressed. The whole scene changed over the last 30 years and people who want a new plane are more often flying RV homebuilts. That has shifted aircraft ownership to a different more hands on, technical type of person, although there are still hands-off flying doctors around. 
JasonC wrote:
Indeed, Germany’s obsession with people called Prof. Dr. Dr. Xyz is absurd. Academic qualifications are meaningful in an academic setting. IMHO there is far too much focus on it in daily life. It has nothing to do with piloting skill and little to do with professional areas where it is arguably relevant based on subject matter.
Silvaire wrote:
In the period when US doctors were big buyers for new Bonanzas, resulting in the stereeotype, I think a medical doctor in successful private practice might easily have been making $300-400K gross adjusted for inflation, some more. Now they seem to make half that amount, and for the last decade US entrepreurship (which is what has maintained more recent new aircraft sales) has been relatively repressed. The whole scene changed over the last 30 years and people who want a new plane are more often flying RV homebuilts. That has shifted aircraft ownership to a different more hands on, technical type of person, although there are still hands-off flying doctors around.
Germany is notable as well because of the “no speed limit on the Autobahn” policy (actually about one third of all Autobahn has permanent local speed limits, but never mind). This makes wealthy people (including doctors) more likely to just buy expensive cars, which are also much easier to show off on the high street compared to planes while retaining some utility value (which they don’t have in places that have speed limits).
Noe wrote:
Good pilots know how to trim
He he. A person shouldn’t be allowed to call himself a pilot unless he know how to trim. I was thinking about piloting skills. The one needed for aerobatics, extreme bush flying, and probably taken to the absolute extreme at the Red Bull Air Races. I don’t think these kind of skills correlates very much with your daily profession. It is fairly obvious though that the further up the ladder you get, the more this becomes a pure athletic skill.
Then there is airmanship, and I think it correlates in smaller or larger degree with your profession. I think engineers could have a slightly better basis than most others, they are better at continuously analyzing the situation and see which (valid) options are available, and more methodically and thorough in obtaining information, and understanding that information. One the other hand, when hiking in the mountains and for boating for instance, the same kind of skills are needed, so lots of people have this kind of skill from childhood.
Then there is the ability to, single handedly, operate a complex machine in a complex environment. I have no idea really what kind of profession that should correlate to, war time soldiers in an apocalyptic future war? The only thing I can think of is online gaming (I have 3 sons, and it is simply amazing how they shoot, fight, talk, eat, write all at the same time, in what to me looks like complete chaos. How do they even remember the millions of different keyboard strokes?) I’m sure “currency” is THE major aspect though.
It is obvious to me that getting into an aircraft that is too complex for you, is a very risky business. But how risky? Statistics show that for private GA, it’s lack of basic pilot skills that kill. Loss of control in flight account for more than 50% of all fatal accidents. Then comes unintentional flight into IMC as a good number two at about 30% or something (more related to airmanship maybe, or lack of it). Flying in a too complex aircraft doesn’t seem to enter the statistics, unless of course it’s in there together with “loss of control in flight” (presumably due to being pre-occupied with some other systems instead of piloting the aircraft, but it could also be unintentional flight into IMC), then this is nothing but lack of basic airmanship.
Flying in a too complex aircraft doesn’t seem to enter the statistics
From having flown with many people, and talked with many more, I think the reason that a lack of aircraft systems knowledge doesn’t cause many crashes is because the pilots avoid using the parts of the kit they don’t understand.
Many pilots avoid using their autopilot because it does funny things. Maybe it needs to be fixed (which is itself a major problem since the number of avionics shops in Europe that can really diagnose and fix autopilots can be counted on 2 fingers) or they don’t understand [all the] the modes.
I recall one syndicate SR22 which was flown mostly with an Ipad running SD.
Very few PPL-level instructors are of much help with this. I never found any who knew an HSI, let alone the KLN94. This was in 2002.
It’s called “risk compensation” People compensate in terms of both equipment usage and the mission profile. And it makes gathering and understanding data really hard.
In airlines it is very different – crashes like AF447 are directly due to not understanding what the boxes show and where it comes from.
LeSving,
Although I agree with the general thrust of your comments, I think that you are not sufficiently factoring complexity into the sequence that ends with loss of control.
The Dunkeswell tragedy (family of four killed) appears at first glance to be loss of control in IMC (stall, incipient spin, out of the clouds into the ground) but seems to have been caused by the pilot being unable to cope with the complexity of the PA46’s autopilot, which may have put him in IMC in the first place.
Similarly, all those stories of autopilots masking engine power loss, through being in VS rather than IAS mode, resulting in spins in IMC, typically in Bonanza.
Neither of these things is likely to have happened in a C172 with a wing leveller (not least because it would probably wobble its way out of a spin without pro-spin controls anyway.)
The other thing is that lots of power, whether in aircraft or cars, creates its own controllability problems (torque in the TBM and EFATO in the King Air.)
So I would not lay it all at the door of poor pilot basic skills. Complexity plays a big part too.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
Most people I deal with finding airplanes for them are looking in the <100k segment. These are people who have learnt to fly the hard way, saving for their next lesson and afterwards saving hard to get the best bang for the few bucks they have. These are not people who do their PPL out of the petty cash and order their first plane new before they even start.
Doing your PPL/IR e.t.c. on a tight budget and then finding a plane you can use in a long process is different than that scenario, a lot different. It allows more time to learn and to get things right, it also will not involve “new” models where few experience is available. in my experience this excludes several factors which have led to the Bonanza and Malibu disasters. With Cirrus, it is the shute which has saved several such people from becoming a statistic but did not prevent others.
Good explanation. I agree 100% on that.
Peter wrote:
In airlines it is very different – crashes like AF447 are directly due to not understanding what the boxes show and where it comes from.
Arguably that accident exposed a lack of the basics of stick and rudder flying, as to fail to recover from a stall even though there was plenty of height shows some serious lack of feeling for keeping the air flowing over the wings .
Timothy wrote:
I think that you are not sufficiently factoring complexity into the sequence that ends with loss of control.
You are probably right. One has to look into the details of the investigation reports to find these things, sometimes even read what is between the lines, not only look at the basic statistics.
