ppragman
No pasa nada.
The concept of personal minimums irks the hell out of me. There are several things that bother me about it. Frankly I think that it discourages actual judgment from being built by budding aviators, and misses the point of what minimums are leading to future confusion. Additionally, if you can't fly an approach to minimums, what the hell are you doing flying in any IFR weather to begin with?
First and foremost, the concept of a personal minimum is arbitrary to the max. The personal minimum takes an arbitrary value and adds that to approach minima without really understanding what a minimum is there for in the first place. The federales don't give a damn about how proficient you feel when they design an approach. Actually, the whole purpose of an approach is to get you down to a minimum safe clearance altitude at a particular point in space to see the runway. Now, if your personal minimums are something as asinine as "add 500' to every non-precision" or "add 300' to every precision approach," then you're missing the point of the minimum. Each approach has minimums that are specific to that approach, you can't simply slap an additional couple-three hundred feet to an approach and suddenly expect it to be safer! If anything all you've done reduce your chance of making it in (which means that now you're going to have to go missed unnecessarily) and reduced your options if you adhere to your own minimum. Why would you arbitrarily reduce the utility and practicality of your operation and put your self in a position where you're going to have to bust your own minimums when you get to your destination one day with less fuel than you thought? You haven't learned a damned thing about judgment, you haven't learned anything about thinking for yourself, all you've learned is that your minimums were arbitrary, and if your minimums were arbitrary, why not other minimums... Its a slippery, wasteful, and arbitrary slope that misses the point of minimums. The published minimums are the minimums. Everything else is in your head.
That doesn't mean that you can't go missed early if you're uncomfortable with the approach, or something isn't right, but don't plan on going missed early, plan on going missed right where you should, at minimums. The problem with going missed early has other ramifications as well. On an ILS do you level off at your personal minimums and then continue to the DME fix where you should go missed and then initiate the missed? Or do you immediately go missed early? What if the approach says that at minimums you're supposed to "make an immediate climbing right turn, climb in maintain 4000'?" Do you start that immediate turn early? Basically, you end up winging it for the last mile or so to comply with regs, or just saying screw it.
The point of a minimum is to develop a standard procedure that is to be adhere to by all pilots. All pilots from the point of the instrument rating on should be able to descend safely to minimums on any approach required. If they can't, then they shouldn't be flying that approach in the first place. That doesn't mean that they must go on every trip, quite the contrary, they should use their judgment to determine when they can launch in the first place, and when they should (if they have to) go missed early and get the hell out of dodge.
Some pilots go a step further. They come up with "VFR minimums" or "enroute IFR minimums," as a sort of cheap replacement for conscious thought. They say things like, "well, if I don't have at least 3000' Ceilings and 4 Miles of visibility I won't go VFR," or even better, "I won't file when there are lower than 3500' ceilings in the winter." This misses the point of flight planning in the first place. Deciding whether or not you're going, or rather making your "no no-go" decision isn't as simple as "it meets the minimums." First thing a person should think about is, "is it safe?" Or does it pass the hairs-on-the-back-of-your-neck test with you. What's safe for one pilot may not be safe for another, and if the pilot planning is uncomfortable with anything in the flight, that should be a critical point of focus during the planning phase. First and foremost, is the flight safe? Second thing the pilot should be thinking about is "is this going to be legal." As we've seen in plenty of other threads, ascertaining the legality of a particularly situation isn't necessarily easy, but by and large, most of these situations are cut and dry. For those that aren't, if a quick reference to the FARs isn't sufficient to clear up the area, do a little research before you blast off, and maybe delay the trip. With any luck, the weather or conditions resulting in these complications will go away. An arbitrary decree of "never" isn't judgment.
The problem is that there are plenty of flights that can be safely and legally completed in conditions that are at minimums - and I mean the legal minimums. There are flights that are patently unsafe but that will be within a budding pilot's "personal minimums." A personal minimum doesn't imply any higher level of safety than does an actual minimum. All a personal minimum does is obscure and make more complicated the actual process of decision making; personal mins don't effectively prevent pilots from taking off in conditions that are unsafe, it simply limits the times when pilots can takeoff. Safety (whose lack is sometimes used as an epithet - in my experience often by the proponents of the personal minimum) in the decision making process isn't enhanced by anything arbitrary, rather safety goes hand in hand with judgment.
First and foremost, the concept of a personal minimum is arbitrary to the max. The personal minimum takes an arbitrary value and adds that to approach minima without really understanding what a minimum is there for in the first place. The federales don't give a damn about how proficient you feel when they design an approach. Actually, the whole purpose of an approach is to get you down to a minimum safe clearance altitude at a particular point in space to see the runway. Now, if your personal minimums are something as asinine as "add 500' to every non-precision" or "add 300' to every precision approach," then you're missing the point of the minimum. Each approach has minimums that are specific to that approach, you can't simply slap an additional couple-three hundred feet to an approach and suddenly expect it to be safer! If anything all you've done reduce your chance of making it in (which means that now you're going to have to go missed unnecessarily) and reduced your options if you adhere to your own minimum. Why would you arbitrarily reduce the utility and practicality of your operation and put your self in a position where you're going to have to bust your own minimums when you get to your destination one day with less fuel than you thought? You haven't learned a damned thing about judgment, you haven't learned anything about thinking for yourself, all you've learned is that your minimums were arbitrary, and if your minimums were arbitrary, why not other minimums... Its a slippery, wasteful, and arbitrary slope that misses the point of minimums. The published minimums are the minimums. Everything else is in your head.
That doesn't mean that you can't go missed early if you're uncomfortable with the approach, or something isn't right, but don't plan on going missed early, plan on going missed right where you should, at minimums. The problem with going missed early has other ramifications as well. On an ILS do you level off at your personal minimums and then continue to the DME fix where you should go missed and then initiate the missed? Or do you immediately go missed early? What if the approach says that at minimums you're supposed to "make an immediate climbing right turn, climb in maintain 4000'?" Do you start that immediate turn early? Basically, you end up winging it for the last mile or so to comply with regs, or just saying screw it.
The point of a minimum is to develop a standard procedure that is to be adhere to by all pilots. All pilots from the point of the instrument rating on should be able to descend safely to minimums on any approach required. If they can't, then they shouldn't be flying that approach in the first place. That doesn't mean that they must go on every trip, quite the contrary, they should use their judgment to determine when they can launch in the first place, and when they should (if they have to) go missed early and get the hell out of dodge.
Some pilots go a step further. They come up with "VFR minimums" or "enroute IFR minimums," as a sort of cheap replacement for conscious thought. They say things like, "well, if I don't have at least 3000' Ceilings and 4 Miles of visibility I won't go VFR," or even better, "I won't file when there are lower than 3500' ceilings in the winter." This misses the point of flight planning in the first place. Deciding whether or not you're going, or rather making your "no no-go" decision isn't as simple as "it meets the minimums." First thing a person should think about is, "is it safe?" Or does it pass the hairs-on-the-back-of-your-neck test with you. What's safe for one pilot may not be safe for another, and if the pilot planning is uncomfortable with anything in the flight, that should be a critical point of focus during the planning phase. First and foremost, is the flight safe? Second thing the pilot should be thinking about is "is this going to be legal." As we've seen in plenty of other threads, ascertaining the legality of a particularly situation isn't necessarily easy, but by and large, most of these situations are cut and dry. For those that aren't, if a quick reference to the FARs isn't sufficient to clear up the area, do a little research before you blast off, and maybe delay the trip. With any luck, the weather or conditions resulting in these complications will go away. An arbitrary decree of "never" isn't judgment.
The problem is that there are plenty of flights that can be safely and legally completed in conditions that are at minimums - and I mean the legal minimums. There are flights that are patently unsafe but that will be within a budding pilot's "personal minimums." A personal minimum doesn't imply any higher level of safety than does an actual minimum. All a personal minimum does is obscure and make more complicated the actual process of decision making; personal mins don't effectively prevent pilots from taking off in conditions that are unsafe, it simply limits the times when pilots can takeoff. Safety (whose lack is sometimes used as an epithet - in my experience often by the proponents of the personal minimum) in the decision making process isn't enhanced by anything arbitrary, rather safety goes hand in hand with judgment.
. But in a multi engine turbine powered airplane, if there are close alternates that could be used nearby I'd have no problem with it if the crew was proficient and didn't think that the safe completion of the maneuver was ever in doubt. Now, there are factors at play here that are more complicated than just equipment, what's causing the low vis? What's the nearby topography and weather conditions, how are is the runway lit, etc? Now, personally, I don't think that I would be doing it in a piston single, but I can invision situations in which it could be safely done with minimum risk. Like all things, it depends.
