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Comment by drzaiusapelord | Hacker News Reader

Christ, what a mess of an accident. You'd think there would be a practical solution to this that didn't involve operators having to worry about each other behaving correctly. Like moving the airport or shipping lane somewhere else so they don't interfere. Or the tower handling this via automation like a laser bouncing across the waterline and triggering an alert if a boat is too close to the shore.

Have you developed a fear of flying over this? Curious about the long term aspects at play here. Who was found at fault here? I'm assuming the boat captain.

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I have many thoughts on all of this.

1. Regarding solutions: This airport does not have a tower, so its up to the pilots to use the radio to announce intentions etc. To me, the core problem is that this does not loop in the boats and so there is no way to communicate. I think having the boats or some third party announce when a crossing is occurring would help. I also think, in response to this accident they moved the runway a few hundred feet further from the channel.

2. Regarding blame the NTSB actually ruled it pilot error, but I think that is myopic and only because there wasn't really anything else they could say since their jurisdiction doesnt extend into the rules of boats. Technically it is pilot error, but there were other errors as well from each side that all combined.

3. In terms of fear of flying, im actually okay. I had to fly twice per week for work for many years following this. Sometimes i'd have some flashbacks or bad thoughts, but overall don't have an issue. I've also been back up in a small plane just to do it. That said, I view commercial airplanes as completely safe and have no real fear with them. With small planes theres just so much can go wrong. The planes are not the issue, they are safe themselves. However, because of many small airports not having a tower, the lack of safety comes from having to deal with many other factors at play. I want to fly again later in life, its amazing and I have a love of planes. At this point though I feel like it would be pushing my luck so don't really do it.

In what way do you (or drzaiusapelord, if you see this) think that the boat operator was in any way at fault? There doesn't seem to be any indication of that in the NTSB report[1], and the newspaper report states that the boat was in the channel.

[1] https://app.ntsb.gov/pdfgenerator/ReportGeneratorFile.ashx?E...

I don't really place blame with any one thing, but a mix of a bunch of factors. For the boat, they were motoring much closer to the side with the runway, instead of the side further away. Its not technically wrong, but if they were exercising any caution at all would have been farther away and likely out of our glideslope. On our side, we should have checked more deliberately that nothing was in our path. On base, I saw nothing, but the time we were on final I guess the boat had moved and was then in the way of the runway and neither I nor the pilot in command saw it.

Mostly though, I think there just should have been much more regulation given the number of parties operating in the same space.

It seems that an exclusion zone could and should have been established in the vicinity of this approach, but to say that the boat operator was not "exercising any caution at all" is quite a stretch. Boats traveling in channels have a set of regulations to follow, which include keeping to the side when not crossing.

It's amazing how little governance there is in the sky for general avaiation - aka small planes flown by private pilot license holders. When I studied to get my PPL it was the one thing I learned that shocked me.

There are NOTAMs (Notice to Airmen) that tell us about new structures that have been erected that could be problematic. NOTAMs also tell us if parts of the sky are off limits, for example if an airshow is on.

Other than that, and I am generalising a lot, there is no air collision avoidance in the majority of private planes here in the UK. Your two best mechanisms of defence are your eyes, and keeping one ear on the radio to get a feel for where everybody else is. If they're not too busy air traffic control will warn you about other planes in your vicinity, but it is not mandatory. There are also TCAS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_collision_avoidance_sy...) systems you can bolt on to your plane, or might come with new planes, but they're not mandatory and I've yet to fly a plane that comes with one.

As for finding fault. That doesn't happen in air accident investigations. Air Accident Investigation Reports (https://www.gov.uk/aaib-reports) are specifically engineered to focus on the problem, and find a solution to prevent a repeat of it. They are not designed to apportion blame, but instead learn from the mistake and build mechanisms for ensuring that the same outcome is mitigated. That's not to say you won't be prosecuted but that's a separate process.

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