commercial airliners don't crash into mountains any more, but small civil aviation craft do with some regularity, particularly when sightseeing and entering into or flying "up" canyons, ravines, etc. The optics can be deceptive, and the sides close in, and, running out of room, they can't turn tight enough or gain altitude quick enough. Also, at a higher altitudes and in hot weather, the less dense air provides much less lift, and the propulsion is less effective, and higher altitudes and nice weather is generally the meeting place for flatlander sightseers and mountains.
Commercial airliners crash into mountains even with the ground proximity warning actually.
Out of my memory, in Nepal alone all of the following happened despite ground proximity warning Tara Air 197 in 2022, Paki 268 and Thai 311 are some I can think of but I'm sure there's more.
Problem is: even if GPW is activated pilots may not be trained correctly to handle the warning, they may distrust the warning due to it being active concurrently with other malfunctions, lack of spacial awareness, puzzlement/stress, etc.
I flew from Ramichaap to Lukla (Nepal on Tara Air) earlier this year and GND PROX was flashing on the screen the entire time. I thought it was funny and took a photo. The terrain and flight path don't really get you to a safe altitude above the ground.
> Commercial airliners crash into mountains even with the ground proximity warning actually.
Yeah.
Hearing ATC repeatedly calling in and receiving no response is a gut wrenching experience.
And maybe I just watch way less news than two decades ago, but reporting of the air incidents is way lower, especially if it happened somewhere elsewhere.
I find it crazy that GA piston planes aren't using more modern engines with FADEC and turbo-charged as a matter of fact. The 1960s engine situation with GA planes is crazy to me. Having to care about carb ice, fuel mixture, and low performance ceilings in 2023 is mind boggling. Sure there's planes that have modern powerplants but they're expensive and plenty of new planes are built without any of this stuff included as a requirement for certification.
Kinda related: "The $20 an hour Cessna 172 experiment (2020)" [0] with an 2022 update [1]
> I wondered if the same process could work for aircraft engines, and began the experiment of designing and modifying a V8 aluminum marine engine to meet FAA Part 23 and 33 requirements, then install it onto a Cessna 172 airframe
What's amusing to me is the juxtaposition of this old tech in the engines vs. the sophisticated avionics and surface controls in these aircraft. The Cirrus aircraft I fly have advanced garmin avionics, including terrain maps, airspace maps, ADS-B integrations, GPS navigation, autopilot, etc. Yet there I sit, fiddling with mixture, ensuring alternate/backup inputs are available in case something goes awry, and dealing with dumb non-linear responses in the throttle because the engine is using tech that's literally decades old and hasn't changed (much) in the last 50 years. There's an upside to this, I guess: I have a number of levers (literally) to pull if something is out of whack, and it creates a kind of weird redundancy/safeguard system to manage various failures. On the other hand, because all these things have to work together, it's entirely possible for weird failure modes to occur that cascade/build on each other unrecoverably.
I can't wait to get my hands on the new jet powered plane coming to the club I fly with.
My litmus test is this: in 1960/70/80, it wasn't uncommon for a car to break down in the middle of a road trip, and to hear horror stories of people stuck in the middle of nowhere. Cars were more hackable but they also weren't reliable at all. Nowadays cars just work, for the most part. GA engines should be the same.
My experience is that GA engines also “just work”, particularly if you reference them back to the automobile equivalent of total motive energy produced per mid-trip breakdown.
My airplane makes about 225 horsepower during cruise flight, for 3-4 hours on a typical leg. My car makes 25-30 horsepower in cruise.
Take the airplane engine that has done 1950 hours of weight-off-wheels time so far (including some takeoff/climb, but also some descent), turn that into x8 the auto hours and give an average speed of 40 mph and you get an implied 600K miles worth of total cumulative motive energy produced.
Most cars will need significant maintenance on the road to 600K miles or on their way to 2000 hours of operation at 75% of rated power (as do airplanes on their way to 2000+ hours of operation, of course).
Airplane engines are quite reliable. As easy to operate as a modern auto? No, but I’m not sure they need to be that easy, since pilot training and certification is quite a bit more rigorous than it is for autos.
Cars and planes took different paths to reliable engines. Cars made new, better, reliable engines. Planes took the old engines and made them super reliable. The plane approach does require a lot more maintenance and certification.
Also, planes use engines differently. They basically run flat out for hours, while cars only use peak power when accelerating.
>Also, planes use engines differently. They basically run flat out for hours, while cars only use peak power when accelerating.
This is often said but isn't really all that true if you dig in. Most planes have a cruise power setting that is below that used for takeoff, often 65-80%. Further, engine are often de-rated so that max throttle means something like 80% of the engine's max horsepower. Those two factors along with variable pitch props on some planes which act like gears, mean that even planes often cruise at closer to 60% rated engine horse-power rather than 100%.
The GA engines in the aircraft I've flown (all Cirrus) do "just work". I have had trouble starting one once, but it was already hot and I had to fiddle with the mixture and throttle during and immediately after turnover. I have yet to encounter engine issues in-flight (but I don't have a ton of flying hours, either).
There are two SF50s based on my home field. I’ve talked with all three owners (one is sole owned and one in a two-person partnership) and all are thrilled with their choice. One had upgraded from two different Eclipses and the other from a 340 then a C90.
The cost of certifying new engines is high, which discourages advancement.
Even more discouraging is the extremely backwards way of thinking that the old farts in GA have. There is nothing that the barnacles who cling to the walls of the FBO hate more than change, and they're the ones buying stuff.
But it's crazy that people die left and right like flies. The fricking SVP of the AOPA who was narrating videos on GA accident reviews... died in a GA accident 2 months ago. In other high risks sports, people tend to blame lack of skills over hardware failure for being the primary cause of accidents (scuba diving, climbing, sailing - all tend to blame improper skill over equipment). But in GA... very safety minded people like Richard McSpadden Jr. die _because_ of the hardware, as far as I'm concerned. It's a crazy situation.
I do a lot of scuba diving and have read many incident reports. While improper skills are usually the primary cause, equipment is usually a contributing factor. Not so much equipment failures but just bringing equipment that is poorly designed or unsuitable for the conditions.
Most of that equipment selection problem can be traced back to poor quality instruction and conflicts of interest in the industry. Unlike flying, there is no legal licensing process for diving. Training is mostly handled by a few different private agencies which set course curricula and certify instructors. Some agencies have minimal quality standards and will give an instructor card to almost anyone. And then most training courses are run by dive shops which also sell equipment, so instructors are pressured to not criticize anything the shop sells even when it's total garbage.
There is also a demand issue aside from change-hating curmudgeons. There simply isn't a large enough market for GA planes for companies to justify the cost of research and development, and even though planes aren't cheap GA plane purchasers can still be fairly cost sensitive.
This isn't (just) a regulator issue: it's a market issue. There just aren't many new engines produced every year, because there isn't demand for it. Owning an airplane is expensive, even on the lowest GA end. It's a hobby for the affluent and wealthy. The market just isn't that big. On the extreme side--private jets for the ultra-wealthy--it may be different (I wouldn't know; I'm a lowly 7-figure net worther, barely "rich" by this standard, and owning a private multi-engine jet is well beyond my means).
I think the market is shrinking because the prices are going up because innovation is impossible (compared to alternative transportation tech) because of insane certification costs which creates a reinforced monopoly on existing players and erodes incentives to change and improve. The market ossifies, costs keep going up and so demand keeps shrinking. It's a feedback loop that ends with the annihilation of GA. The regulatory agency is suffocating the segment.
It's not the 'certification cost' that is the root problem, it's the liability cost of an accident, which will only ever increase in the future.
The 'certification cost' is just the threshold at which the FAA is fine with all the liability being offloaded on to them, for engines made and maintained to spec at least.
i.e. For this cost to actually decrease would require an entirely different society, one that doesn't settle things through the judicial/administrative system whatsoever. But then costs may increase somewhere else.
MentourPilot doesn’t do timely deep-dives into specific events. Blancolirio and Pilot Debrief are basically general aviation news channels. MentourPilot covers generic (commercial) aviation concepts.
MentourPilot does good documentaries on historical crashes, but not so much breaking aviation news, i.e. covering small private plane crashes the day or week they happen. I definitely recommend all of the above
The former is more into the science of air safety, they do case studies of crashes as well as go over technique, pitfalls, and pilot psychology. The latter is an active airline pilot, similar to mentourPilot just with a less refined and more relatable (to me at least) style. He does "reaction videos" - but in a good way - where he analyzes aircraft incidents from a perspective of a commercial pilot. And he regularly debunks ticktock misinformation.
I was in school, and during one of the holidays of India’s Independence Days, on a fateful afternoon, one of my uncles said, “That one ain’t right. Turn on the Radio.” In that small village flanked by ranges of the tapering Himalayan mountains, in one of the most remote corners of India, it was new, rare, and always customary to look up when the Aeroplane flew overhead.
A plane crashed into the mountains[1], which must have been the only one in history of that region. Local songs were written, movies were made, and stories were told. Everyone knew about that.
It has always left a scary impression on me, especially whenever I visit my hometown, “if I die in a plane crash, it will be because it crashed into one of the mountains.”
Bateman’s Enhanced Ground Proximity Warning System
A combination of radar altimeter (radio signal to ground return time) delta monitoring (how fast is terrain clearance changing) and early coarse GPS positioning combined with Russian DTM map data ... (purchased when US data was secret but USSR data was on the market post breakup).
The lesson I took from this is that just because nobody else seems to be working on the problem, and just because some people think it isn't a problem, doesn't mean that it isn't a problem worth solving. When an idea is sufficiently advanced, it can often look impossible. The trick is to make it possible, and then make it available. He struck gold in that regard, both in lives saved and in monetary compensation.
The last image of the display of the color coded map has a scary caption: "Aircraft software hosted in a Windows environment". <shudders> Nothing as scary to me as running critical software with Windows as the OS.
It’s a simulation of the avionics. I was working at Boeing’s ASL when this was being integrated into Boeing’s commercial offerings. While there were times when you wanted the actual hardware, we would also run simulations where one or more systems were completely software.
Pretty nice content, but what I am genuinely impressed at is the level of functional brokenness this website displays. It is simultaneously able to be accessed, making it more usable than some site behind a paywall, but at the same time completely unreadable and unusable. Impressive
It's always fascinating to see some of the largest companies on the internet with websites so thoroughly broken that it's clear that not one single set of eyeballs was laid on it by any human working for them.
The site fails to render, barfs random elements over the screen, I haven't seen the broken jpeg placeholder in years. It's like seeing a picture of an old steam locomotive that exploded. It's utter destruction is almost art in itself.
CSS is amazing. Can't run text over text with just tables. (When I read it, the left menu hadn't loaded properly, all the menu items were shown as large text attached to top of the viewport, and the articlw text was rendered underneath; reader mode worked though)
I've been watching a lot of plane crash youtubes.