GypsyPilot
Mohawk Town
Alaska is so crazy big…. This late Spring we took the train from Anchorage to Fairbanks, and then drove to the Dalton Highway sign. It was a ton of traveling, yet we just barely scratched the surface of AK.
DeHavilland Beaver missing Ketchikan
- Thread starter Roger Roger
- Start date
Alaska is so crazy big…. This late Spring we took the train from Anchorage to Fairbanks, and then drove to the Dalton Highway sign. It was a ton of traveling, yet we just barely scratched the surface of AK.
My wife’s from there and we spent a while living in Texas. Had to put them in their place so I got her this
fholbert
Mod's - Please don't edit my posts!
Seems to be a long ways from the ocean. Trying to figure out how my cruise ship got there?
Capt. Chaos
Well-Known Member
VFR into IMC... Controlled or uncontrolled impact remains to be seen.
The reported weather at the time of departure will say VFR, it wasn't even close.
Murdoughnut
Well sized member
For a guy who flies flat land light IFR, help me understand how this happens to a commercial operator when most 172s have some form of terrain avoidance tech.
BobDDuck
Island Bus Driver
Terrain avoidance technology only works when it's turned on. And if the majority of your flying is in scenarios that would trigger the terrain alerts, you tend to turn it off, or just classify every squawk as a nuisance alert, and ignore it.
Roger Roger
Bottom of the list
This is a lot of it. There’s also a huge knot of cultural issues built up around this kind of flying. I’ve elaborated in the past and I’ll probably do so later in here. Although not sure what gear Southeast Aviation is running. As the Chelton paid for by the FAA has aged out operators are going back to • steam gauges and halfass tablet based solutions
Roger Roger
Bottom of the list
And southeast might as well be a different state. In my former life one of my duties was hiring, I’d talk to these grizzled old mechanics who’d lived in vacation spots like Bethel, Kotz, and Nome about moving to southeast and it was like you were asking them to move to the moon.
Cherokee_Cruiser
Bronteroc
Well, after so many crashes and dead people in the past 7 yrs, you’d think they’d learn.
And then there’s the question of experience and familiarity. I remember one Alaska crash, some poor young doctor lady who volunteered a job assignment to some isolated village in Alaska and was being flown out in a float Beaver. The pilot flipped it on landing and both died. Turned out the pilot was from the lower 48, with the bare essential minimum flight hours for float planes (I wanna say it was in the single digits). What an embarrassment. A guy like that from the lower 48 with no time in floats should not have been flying in Alaska.
Roger Roger
Bottom of the list
So, terrain avoidance technology and flying in Southeast.
First, understand for the last 15+ years (I think installations started in 2002?) most of the commercial aircraft in Southeast Alaska have been running with the Chelton EFIS system installed by the FAA. It’s an early generation synthetic vision EFIS with moving map, WAAS GPS, and integrated TAWS. It’s still the best system I’ve flown for hand flying in marginal VFR in challenging terrain. In some ways the very latest Garmin gear may have finally eclipsed it but I haven’t flown that stuff. By the time I started flying in Alaska in 2012 use of that system was pretty well established. At least if you flew with guys like @Capt. Chaos you didn’t get let loose on the line until you proved that if you really got into the stuff you could use the system to safely follow the waterways and intercept an instrument approach into one of a couple primary airports, and fly it to pretty close to ILS mins. If the weather was marginal, you treated it like an IFR flight. You programmed your route from takeoff to touchdown before taxiing out, and you flew that route the same as you’d done a million times on a good day because you knew it was a good route. If the weather closed in on you, rather than going lower and lower and closer and closer to the shoreline to keep visual, you went up and to the middle of the waterway and then determined whether a 180 back where you came from, or continuing straight ahead on your planned route would get you out of the stuff quicker.
Did this mean that people were launching in weather that they wouldn’t have with a 6 pack and a VOR receiver? Well, yeah, but it was still safer than being a good boy and trying to follow the beach. The other key to this was, you had to have your whole company, especially the maintenance department, treat the system like it was in an IFR airplane. That meant as soon as a glitch presented itself (like a GPS receiver showing signs of a weak internal battery, or a pitot-static system gremlin) it had to be fixed. Also, a lot of the newer aircraft that showed up got dual everything so any single LRU failure was a non-issue.
This is where some of the dominoes started to fall. As guys who were involved from the beginning started to move on, some of the new chief pilots and DOs had a philosophy of “these are VFR airplanes and so we don’t need to maintain all this equipment to IFR standards”. Also, everything from the individual LRUs to the wiring got older and needed more maintenance, at the same time as the Churn led to a brain drain of mechanics that knew the system from the days of its installation and how to troubleshoot its idiosyncrasies. Over time, these built a level of distrust in the ability to fly like we used to, which in turn meant that the skills for doing that in the collective pilot group atrophied and weren’t passed on to newer generations. People went back to following the beach and getting as low as they need to to be able to see.
Now it appears we’re in the end game, where a few operators have gone forward technologically with new Garmin stuff, but most are regressing and putting in at best an electronic attitude indicator and a tablet or a Garmin handheld. I’m sure all the old routes and waypoints designed with the purpose of keeping you safely over the waterways haven’t made their way forward into the new stuff, and whatever is out there is what individual pilots have thrown together. I sincerely doubt that the training still holds people to the same standard of demonstrating how to get to a safe harbor if the weather everywhere truly goes in the can.
Meanwhile the newer generations of management have an “abstinence only” approach to VFR into IMC, where people are afraid to discuss it and train on it because they’re afraid it will encourage people to bootleg, rather than recognizing that it’s going to happen to most people and they’re much better off if they’re properly prepared for it. While at the same time, these managers are pushing pilots even harder in the weather than we used to be.
there’s also a crisis of skilled personnel in this part of Alaska aviation. In my belief, COVID saved us from at least one fatal CFIT because many operators lined up a record breaking number of seasonal hires last summer, which was one of the rainiest on record. The last few years of crazy hiring of newbie pilots were in record breaking dry summers and so easy flying.
First, understand for the last 15+ years (I think installations started in 2002?) most of the commercial aircraft in Southeast Alaska have been running with the Chelton EFIS system installed by the FAA. It’s an early generation synthetic vision EFIS with moving map, WAAS GPS, and integrated TAWS. It’s still the best system I’ve flown for hand flying in marginal VFR in challenging terrain. In some ways the very latest Garmin gear may have finally eclipsed it but I haven’t flown that stuff. By the time I started flying in Alaska in 2012 use of that system was pretty well established. At least if you flew with guys like @Capt. Chaos you didn’t get let loose on the line until you proved that if you really got into the stuff you could use the system to safely follow the waterways and intercept an instrument approach into one of a couple primary airports, and fly it to pretty close to ILS mins. If the weather was marginal, you treated it like an IFR flight. You programmed your route from takeoff to touchdown before taxiing out, and you flew that route the same as you’d done a million times on a good day because you knew it was a good route. If the weather closed in on you, rather than going lower and lower and closer and closer to the shoreline to keep visual, you went up and to the middle of the waterway and then determined whether a 180 back where you came from, or continuing straight ahead on your planned route would get you out of the stuff quicker.
Did this mean that people were launching in weather that they wouldn’t have with a 6 pack and a VOR receiver? Well, yeah, but it was still safer than being a good boy and trying to follow the beach. The other key to this was, you had to have your whole company, especially the maintenance department, treat the system like it was in an IFR airplane. That meant as soon as a glitch presented itself (like a GPS receiver showing signs of a weak internal battery, or a pitot-static system gremlin) it had to be fixed. Also, a lot of the newer aircraft that showed up got dual everything so any single LRU failure was a non-issue.
This is where some of the dominoes started to fall. As guys who were involved from the beginning started to move on, some of the new chief pilots and DOs had a philosophy of “these are VFR airplanes and so we don’t need to maintain all this equipment to IFR standards”. Also, everything from the individual LRUs to the wiring got older and needed more maintenance, at the same time as the Churn led to a brain drain of mechanics that knew the system from the days of its installation and how to troubleshoot its idiosyncrasies. Over time, these built a level of distrust in the ability to fly like we used to, which in turn meant that the skills for doing that in the collective pilot group atrophied and weren’t passed on to newer generations. People went back to following the beach and getting as low as they need to to be able to see.
Now it appears we’re in the end game, where a few operators have gone forward technologically with new Garmin stuff, but most are regressing and putting in at best an electronic attitude indicator and a tablet or a Garmin handheld. I’m sure all the old routes and waypoints designed with the purpose of keeping you safely over the waterways haven’t made their way forward into the new stuff, and whatever is out there is what individual pilots have thrown together. I sincerely doubt that the training still holds people to the same standard of demonstrating how to get to a safe harbor if the weather everywhere truly goes in the can.
Meanwhile the newer generations of management have an “abstinence only” approach to VFR into IMC, where people are afraid to discuss it and train on it because they’re afraid it will encourage people to bootleg, rather than recognizing that it’s going to happen to most people and they’re much better off if they’re properly prepared for it. While at the same time, these managers are pushing pilots even harder in the weather than we used to be.
there’s also a crisis of skilled personnel in this part of Alaska aviation. In my belief, COVID saved us from at least one fatal CFIT because many operators lined up a record breaking number of seasonal hires last summer, which was one of the rainiest on record. The last few years of crazy hiring of newbie pilots were in record breaking dry summers and so easy flying.
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DropTank
Well-Known Member
Pilots who got away with flying VFR into IMC conditions reinforced their bad habits and got promoted.
Now said lucky Chief Pilots are pressuring newb pilots into dangerous and illegal practices and crashing like the days of yore.
And going 135 IFR costs too much in training and hiring pilots who have enough time and skills.
Now said lucky Chief Pilots are pressuring newb pilots into dangerous and illegal practices and crashing like the days of yore.
And going 135 IFR costs too much in training and hiring pilots who have enough time and skills.
Roger Roger
Bottom of the list
this is at best a very limited perspective of the situation. Nothing about surviving a VFR into IMC should be “luck” for a part 135 qualified pilot in a properly equipped airplane. I hate to even use the word “survive” because that makes it sound so much more dire of a situation than it should be.
and the FAA has given up on trying to use new tech like LP, LPV, RF, etc to improve the IFR infrastructure and is letting industry bear the expense and risk of developing things like custom approaches.
Roger Roger
Bottom of the list
All of the above is from a perspective of mostly A to B flying. That operators are pushing this hard on tour flights seems on the face of it ridiculous, what are your pax going to flightsee at 500/2?
Capt. Chaos
Well-Known Member
Put into words better than I ever could. This should be amended to ever NTSB CFIT report from the 00M on.
Capt. Chaos
Well-Known Member
@Roger Roger is spot on with his assessment.
People hitting hills with a synthetic vision EFIS is all about a lack of training. Fresh newbs from the lower 48 or a life long float driver it doesn't matter it's a skill that is vital for safe flying up here. Getting into IMC conditions will happen here... Sorry just a fact of life given the terrain and fast changing weather. The stats between the companies that put the time and effort into training pilots to deal with that event vs the ones who just tell pilots don't go IMC speaks volumes on which method is effective.
CFI A&P
Exploring the world one toilet at a time.
Not to mention, they're tourists. They're taking photos. Photos that will remove any doubt on the conditions at the time of the event. Hell, they might even be taking photos of the instrument panel too.
alaskadrifter
Landing gear operator
Inaccurate Wx reporting seems to be endemic. It’s like FSS or whoever doesn’t want to deal with the hassle of IFR or they think they are doing everyone a favor by reporting better than actual conditions or delaying updating the wx to IFR. I always make a point to check the wx cams before I depart so I know what I’m about to get myself into.
Each region really is like it’s own state with often vastly different Wx patterns. I’ve gotten fairly comfortable where I’m at in SW but if I had to go up to the Slope, SE AK, or somewhere else I’d be like a fish out of water.
Roger Roger
Bottom of the list
This has definitely come up in several recent accidents. The Chelton screens have also been useful in reconstructing the “what” (if not necessarily the “why”) but stuff like iPads and Garmin handhelds aren’t going to record nearly as much relevant flight data.
Specifically, pulling data from the screens let’s the investigators see if all the relevant subsystems (air data, attitude/heading, and GPS) were functioning properly which is always nice to silence the “I bet he was flying on the boxes and GPS went out!”people
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