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Comment by danielschonfeld | Hacker News Reader

While some base to final stall accidents are as simple as you make it sound a good chunk of them happen when you try to come OUT of the turn at an already slow speed increasing the angle of attack on one wing alone. The stall and subsequent spin catches the pilot entirely surprised unaware of why they’re even stalling and with very little escape bandwidth.

The FAA has been trying for better angle of attack instrumentation but what I described above isn’t an easy fix with technology.

When you talk to pilots who inadvertently stall spin and lived to tell the tale most of them will tell you they didn’t even recognize that they were in a stall. That’s where the problem starts.

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The FAA also has the NTSB investigate every crash and accident, and if it was something as simple as "change the airport patterns to be larger and faster" or "make more airports straight in" it would have already been done.

Fancier aeronautics has a way of letting the plane get ahead of the pilot even faster.

That makes a lot of sense, interested to learn more about this, any statistics you’re aware of on this topic?

I don’t have those I’m sorry. Not that much into it.

If you need a better understanding look for a video of a pilot I think in South Africa or Australia who took a cameraman and his wife and stalled shortly after takeoff.

It’s interesting to see how many warning signs throughout the whole video are glaring at him yet he keeps flying all the way into the crash. What’s also interesting is that that’s it. Just warning signs but if you really try to put yourself in his shoes it’s entirely hard to accept the warnings as everything on surface level understanding seems normal, controlled and flat. Very very very flat.

I think the biggest problem with real life stalls as compared to training world ones are that they are either more benign or entirely out of left field and believing you’re about to go into one doesn’t even begin to enter the pilot’s mind let alone correct recovery techniques.

Thanks, by the way if that’s the same video I’m thinking of the problem there was gross incompetence - he tied the door wide open to the wing strut!

Another piece of statistics I recently learned is that most stalls occur on departure or go arounds, and classic base to final are relatively rare. Maybe those have been successfully trained out.

Right but I don't know of any GA stall/spin warning system that takes into account pilot input. Even simple sensors are lacking, for example accelerometers are nearly free yet GA planes give you no warning that you're in a skid.

Similarly given yoke input, bank angle and speed you could warn of an impending stall well before it actually happens with a few position encoder sensors. As you point out, the current system relies on pilots recognizing a stall which is a foolish thing to rely on and almost all GA stall warning sensors are only on one of the wings and require actual airflow disruption to work. In many cases that is already too late or the other wing could stall first. The calculation doesn't even have to be perfect since most pilots want plenty of margin of safety on a base to final turn. I'd much rather have a false alarm + go-around than an inadvertent spin.

The collision thing is also ridiculously irrational. The FAA requires drones over half a pound to continually transmit their location yet somehow considers it sufficiently safe for planes to fly without a radio nor transponder around most of the airports in the US relying only on pilots looking out the window.

It's just disappointing that the vast majority of GA accidents could be completely avoided with slightly better avionics.

> the vast majority of GA accidents could be completely avoided with slightly better avionics.

Reading accident reports or the annual summary McSpadden Report (previously called the Nall Report), I get a different view: if pilots would keep fuel in the airplane and flowing to the engine(s), not fly into weather beyond the capability of the airplane and crew, and divert or not takeoff at the onset of signs that an aircraft is not airworthy, would reduce serious accidents by half or more. Better avionics has relatively little to do with that (other than the proper use of a fuel totalizer or better).

Complacency kills more pilots than weak avionics.

Most cars give you significant warnings that you're about to run out of gas and as a result very few people do.

Improved avionics could warn you that you're flying into a storm or that the airplane is not airworthy or that you are converging with other traffic.

Complacency kills because it sneaks up on pilots, but it doesn't have to be that way. We should not accept that the FAA's answer is an IMSAFE checklist. Pilots should not have to die simply because they didn't realize they were feeling slightly stressed or emotional prior to takeoff and forgot to check a single one of the 40+ items on the preflight/runup/takeoff checklists.

Of course good pilots should check it all anyway but just as NHTSA requires safety warnings for cars, we could save many more lives if we required low fuel warnings, terrain warnings, gear warnings, speed warnings, etc. in aircraft avionics.

>Most cars give you significant warnings that you're about to run out of gas and as a result very few people do.

You will see accident reports where the problem is that the pilot just completely failed to put enough fuel in the airplane and then flew it until it ran out; but that's not the typical thing.

What's much more common is that the pilot takes off with what seems like ample fuel, gets halfway there, discovers weather that is worse than expected, has to fly lower than planned, burns a lot more fuel as a result, discovers that they will have to refuel, can't find an airport with good weather at which to land, and ends up flying a graveyard spiral into a fatal crash caused by disorientation in conditions for which they are not trained.

The majority of accidents are traceable to poor planning or decision-making once airborne; and I tend to agree with the other poster that improved avionics are not going to make a really big difference.

Improved avionics should help with all of those aspects:

1) Continually recalculate fuel remaining upon landing at destination based on ground speed and burn rate. Warn if getting anywhere near reserves.

2) Show nearest filtered airports (those with runways that satisfy both airplane and pilot requirements (max x-wind). If IFR, further filter by approach preferences and if available current wx data against approach minimums.

I agree with you that what you describe is a common accident scenario but imagine a PPL could just hit a single button if they inadvertently enter IMC and the avionics provides a route and vnav profile to make it safely to an airport with low minimums? The most difficult part of flying IFR is that it takes a ridiculous number of button presses on most systems to accomplish that all while trying to also keep the plane straight and level.

I'd be fairly surprised if most (say 75+%) GA airplanes regularly used for purposeful travel lack a moving map GPS and fuel-flow enabled engine monitor. (The moving map is probably well over 90% and it's the engine monitor equipment rate that may drag it down.)

In every airplane I've been in that is equipped with both of those, the pilot has access to both projected* fuel remaining at destination (in minutes and in gallons), has an ability to get a warning if configurable thresholds are violated, and with just the moving map GPS to have a filtered (usually by minimum length, paved vs soft, and sometimes lit vs unlit) and to have the nearest ("NRST") button present a list of airports, distance, and direction with a single button push.

There are things that could be done to make it better, but I wonder if you're imagining a lower/lesser level of equipment in typical GA traveling aircraft than is currently the case. (To the extent that equipment is already installed that provides 90-95% of the proposed functionality, providing that last 5-10% probably isn't going to be the missing piece of the puzzle.)

* Based on current groundspeed.

If you’re about to run out of gas in a car it’s usually not a big deal - you find the nearest gas station and go there. Usually. There are exceptions like driving 100 miles of desert with no gas stations in sight and forgetting to put enough gas in. If that was the common driving scenario I’d bet way more people would run out of gas, and no warning light will help.

Flying a plane is often sort of like that - planning mistakes tend to become problems with large time windows where a warning light is way too late to affect the outcome. Flying into a long narrow canyon is another example where your fate can be sealed minutes before you actually fly into the mountain.

All of this can and should be made better with technology, but a lot of flying hazards are more complex than “warn the user about something happening in the next few seconds”.

Why does the warning have to happen in the next few seconds? Electric vehicles warn you at the start of your trip if you won't make it to your destination.

I used to have a super old handheld aviation GPS that would warn me something like 15 minutes out if my flight path was going to intersect either with terrain or B/C/D airspace. I guess foreflight somewhat recently added the feature but it still defaults to something like 3 min.

> Electric vehicles warn you at the start of your trip if you won't make it to your destination.

Road navigation is relatively simple and even then there are unexpected road closures and stuff like that. If running out of gas was an emergency in a car you’d never rely on this warning alone, you’d do more careful planning and fuel monitoring. And then cars don’t have to deal with unexpected headwinds, weather (maybe occasionally), closed runways, the list goes on. It’s just a much harder forecasting problem.

People run out of gas all the time (there are a lot of drivers, probably most never will in their lifetime, but that still leaves a lot that do). However in a car running out of gas is much easier to recover from - most of the time you can safely and easially coast to the side of the road. In an airplane there rarely is an airport nearby to coast into, so you end up looking for a place that might or might not be a good option - roads have power lines that you won't see until it is too late, fields sometimes have large holes (wet spots) that if you into at landing speed will flip the plane.

Low fuel warnings wouldn't really help in an airplane - from what I can tell most who run out of fuel know they are low for a while but are unable to get someplace to fill up.

I agree there is room for improvement and smarter airplane equipment is undoubtedly part of that.

I do not believe that “slightly better avionics will completely avoid the vast majority of GA accidents.”

Civilian drones are fairly new. There are century old GA aircraft still flying around. I'm sure the FAA would love to require them all to carry radios and transponders but it's technically and politically difficult to impose new requirements on old certified aircraft. Some owners can barely afford to fly as it is so they'll resist any new mandates.

This is a common argument but makes little sense because the accident and loss rates of GA is so incredibly high. The cost of an ADS-B receiver for example is only $200. Full transceivers are a few thousand.

Aircraft owners are already paying well over that as insurance rates yearly because of all the accidents, so total cost to fly would likely decrease by mandating things that actually move the needle on safety, especially ADS-B and fuel alerts.

> GA planes give you no warning that you're in a skid.

"The ball" will show you that you're in a skid.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turn_and_slip_indicator

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