M1 said:
Terrain avoidance - I just look out the window, and it seems to work pretty good to me.
M1
Yep. And if you can't look out the window and see the terrain, you shouldn't be there. I'm assuming the accident Cliff refers to is this one:
http://www.ntsb.gov/ntsb/brief.asp?ev_id=20040818X01248&key=1
GPS is not the answer. the answer is to not push into deteriorating weather until you can't see and hit a mountain. This may sound harsh, but that's the long and the short of it. If the pilot in question had turned around while she still had visibility, she'd still be alive.
There seems to be a disturbing trend toward believing that if you have a GPS with a moving map display, it's OK to poke your nose into conditions which don't allow you to see the rocks, or towers, or whatever. I won't dispute the value of such a system as a *backup* to a solid, well thought out, and professionally executed plan for keeping from hitting something you can't see. But that plan, whatever it is, should be sufficient by itself to keep you from crashing. The GPS is an additional layer of safety What I can't agree with is using the GPS map, not as a
backup to that plan, but as a *substitute* for that plan. If a moving map display is your primary means of not hitting something, you really need to be rethinking what you're doing. Technology is not a substitute for basic airmanship.
Here's two pilots and some passengers who came to grief precisely for relying on technology rather than airmanship:
http://www.ntsb.gov/ntsb/brief.asp?ev_id=20050718X01044&key=1
http://www.ntsb.gov/ntsb/brief.asp?ev_id=20021106X05441&key=1
Both bet their lives that technology could keep them from hitting something. Both misunderstood the limits of the technology that they were betting their lives on. One lost, and the other got pretty badly hurt.