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Another crash - Helicopter I-EDIC vs Jodel F-PMGV in Italy

Peter wrote:

The Mooney is a slow piston plane from the 1950s. 10 years older and it would be from WW2. It is slow. Just like all civilian SEPs. It isn’t an F16. Look at any of my flying videos from the Alps. 150kt GS. Not much is happening and certainly nothing is happening fast. And being on autopilot means you have loads of time to look around.

How dare you Peter , ok 99’ Mooney, 180TAS@16GPH on 65% power, 197kt GS at 3kft !

Not F16, but I am using it to start “the TAS/GPH SEP war”…

Last Edited by Ibra at 30 Apr 19:17
Paris/Essex, France/UK, United Kingdom

172driver wrote:

Have you got a reference? I have never heard of anything like that.

https://www.avweb.com/aviation-news/bridge-stunt-leads-to-ads-b-revocation/

LSZH(work) LSZF (GA base), Switzerland

A Flying Magazine columnist, ex-FAA employee and pilot examiner flying under a bridge does tend to attract attention Especially so given her habit of mildly belittling FAA practices in print and given that they removed her DPE in 2016 after a minor accident. I wouldn’t call it a witch hunt, but I’d guess she has some enemies. If she regains her Private Certificate and writes about it she will again have the last laugh over authority, which is obviously what she likes to do, and what they dislike.

The Italian incident continues to impress me as an example of a national government taking advantage of a well publicized accident to harshly demonstrate its authority, without any benefit to anybody else. In doing so they make themselves look emotional, unprincipled, incompetent and untrustworthy, which must be the opposite of their intent. As far as I understand it, nothing in the peripheral violations that occurred had anything to do with the accident, and the involuntary murder prosecution is ludicrous. It was an accident.

Last Edited by Silvaire at 30 Apr 20:42

@Silvaire, the problem is that if laws could be written so that they were black or white, then we wouldn’t need lawyers.
Italy’s and France’s legal systems are very different to those in the UK and USA in that they are non adversarial.

France

Mooney_Driver wrote:

172driver wrote: Have you got a reference? I have never heard of anything like that.

https://www.avweb.com/aviation-news/bridge-stunt-leads-to-ads-b-revocation/

OK, I hadn’t heard about that one (and I don’t read her columns), but that’s a pretty extreme case.

gallois wrote:

Italy’s and France’s legal systems are very different to those in the UK and USA in that they are non adversarial.

Which should make this case even less likely to be prosecuted! The only thing the French pilot did wrong in a legal sense was the non-filing of a flight plan. That’s it. Hardly cause for a murder or even manslaughter prosecution, let alone conviction. Ridiculous.

Yet he was and the decision has been upheld on appeal but with a reduced penalty.
Going forward this could be quite serious for GA in that part of the world. Remember even without the aggravating circumstances eg the lack of FPL there would more than likely have been the conviction of "Multiple involuntary homicides ".

France

they are non adversarial.

What does that actually mean in reality?

conviction of "Multiple involuntary homicides ".

Given the circumstances, and to anyone who knows anything about aviation, here that is called a kangaroo court

This is also a good one

Hence my earlier Q is whether any of the deceased had high level political connections, or something like that. The further south one goes in Europe, the more that becomes a factor.

To get a few years in jail here in the UK, you would need to be drunk. And that assumes a completely useless defence lawyer – basically a randomly chosen local street corner guy who plays golf on Sundays with everybody else in the courtroom.

With a good lawyer, anything is possible, despite the UK’s “adversarial” system

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

The difference with a non adversarial system is that you don’t have things like cross examinations of prosecuting a defence witnesses by opposing lawyers.
The non adversarial system is a bit more like Judge Judy than Perry Mason.

France

Reading this and this it seems to me that the major weakness of the inquisitorial system is that a bent judge can get whatever result he wants unless the case is cut and dried on very obvious evidence.

This is funny:

Peter Murphy in his Practical Guide to Evidence recounts an instructive example. A frustrated judge in an English (adversarial) court finally asked a barrister after witnesses had produced conflicting accounts, ‘Am I never to hear the truth?’ ‘No, my lord, merely the evidence’, replied counsel

and that is usually true, since there are 3 sides to most stories: one side, the other side, and what actually happened. And the presumption of innocence is crucial.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom
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