Aircraft: Beech Bonanza. Injuries: 2 Fatal, 1 Serious. Location: Correctionville, Iowa. Aircraft damage: Destroyed.
What reportedly happened: The commercial pilot was in cruise flight at night and receiving flight-following services. The airplane was instrument equipped and the pilot held an instrument rating.
He advised air traffic control that he had the airport in sight. The controller acknowledged the transmission and told the pilot that radar services were terminated.
The airport had an unimproved grass runway and lights. Two witnesses who lived next to the airport said thick fog quickly enveloped the area shortly before the accident. Another witness said that visibility had dropped to less than 1/4 mile when he heard the airplane fly low over his house, but he could not see the airplane due to the fog.
The airplane crashed in trees about 1/4 mile northeast of the airport and caught fire.
Probable cause: The pilot’s failure to perform a go-around after encountering thick fog at night.
NTSB Identification: CEN13FA082
This December 2012 accident report is provided by the National Transportation Safety Board. Published as an educational tool, it is intended to help pilots learn from the misfortunes of others.
If you can’t simply use a sectional chart and a hand held GPS to line up with any runway and maintain a safe altitude all the way to touchdown you have no busines flying except on sunny days. The FAA’s idea is you have to have a complicated approach plate and this gives a very bad false impression on inexperienced instrument pilots that if they “follow the FAA rules” they will be safe. The problem is when they lose track of where they are and become confused, panic, and don’t have a “basic” understanding of their 3-D position and have the confidence required there then becomes a disaster because when the chips are down the FAA can’t help you – you are toast.
I don’t think this accident demands a technological fix. It highlights a need for judgement. This pilot appears to have fixated on his “mission”… I.e. To land at this airport. He or she delayed too long in recognizing the mission had changed. It was no longer to fly from kxxx to kyyy (this lighted grass strip) it was to find a suitable alternate. Whether RNP or other technological fix would have speculatively made a safe landing possible is irrelevant. “Mission mindset” is a well known root cause of aviation accidents that has continued to plague us since the Wright Brother days. How much technology have we added to our cockpits, and yet the failure of judgement persists?
This accident and unexpected fog is just one more reason why RNP based procedures are needed to every runway end, even those used by GA aircraft. ILS can’t do it for both economic as well as deployment technical reasons… and RNAV(GPS) criteria doesn’t work,… and WAAS and LPV don’t even solve the problem either… It is ONLY RNP that can provide a safe 3D path to any runway end, anytime, all the time. GA could have already have been doing this kind of RNP procedure right now (probably including that Bonanza), even for the smallest and least expensive airplanes, down to LSAs. Further, in Australia a B737 even recently had to make an emergency landing in Cat III conditions with an FMS using an RNP based procedure, ….and it was entirely safe and successful, because RNP provides a safe path all the way to the runway TDZ, all the time. It can even do it for grass fields. It is just a matter of using modern criteria, and eventually abandoning both TERPS and Pans-Ops, which now (just like the 3rd class medical issue) have actually become an impediment to meaningful flight safety advances.