I can say this too. When you look at the cost of running a pressurized twin by yourself vs. the cost of owning half of one of these. You get to thinking....

I'm thinking about buying one just to drive Ciholas nuts. :D

We could probably pull 10 people together for that purpose alone. Remember back in the good old days when all we had to deal with was JC going off?

Then why don't the stats back up what you say? The reason there's no SFAR for the Pilatus is 1. They rarely crash 2. When they do crash, it's not for the same exact reason over and over. There's no glaring design flaw in the Pilatus (for example) that forces anyone to do mandatory training to overcome.

Be careful about wishing a full TR for TP planes. That's exactly what they have in Europe - you have to have a TR for any turbine. And it has to be through an ATO, with a published syllabus and approved by CAA. This all works smashingly for very common types, but it completely falls apart for the rarer types because no ATO is going to maintain an instructor or a syllabus and deal with CAA inspections and onerous BS for a plane that might get a student come through every 3rd year.

What it means is that you simply can't get training on the likes of Extra 500, or the Dornier DO-28, or a Pacific Aero 750XL, or Kestrel, Air Tractor, Lancair, or Legacy etc, etc. Sometimes the local CAA accepts a US type rating course, but most of the time they don't. So if you have an exotic type, you have the bare all the cost of setting up an approved syllabus, train instructors so they can train you etc. It's a huge mess and adds huge costs to you which only means people will shy away from rarer types and the status quo is maintained and no innovation or new players will come to market.

Now, if you could say, sure let's do a TR course, but it can be done with any CFI that has experience in type in your own plane without the involvement of an ATO/training facility, then by all means I'd be all for it. But we all know that's not how it's going to go down if it got implemented here.

Not in the eyes of the FAA.

The jet will be subjected to the Flight Standards Board, the FSB. They will define and then approve the checklist, the training regimen, and the standards for getting a type rating. The FSB does that for every type rating, and even the MU2 SFAR.


Sorry, logic doesn't win this one, the FARs say different.

It is kind of like the stupendously arbitrary inspection thing, SETP get an annual, METP requires an inspection program. Absolutely no logical basis for that. This also is a difference between TBM and SF50, the later gets a program, too.

Mike C.

The ones that did NOT fly the same path?

We have the FDR. It gives us the intensity of the turbulence. The issue was icing, not the storm per se, though the turbulence obviously didn't help matters, despite being light.


If they entered a mature storm at FL350, the turbulence would have been far greater.

Mike C.

A couple of chute failures/accidents will do the opposite.

The percentage of the operating envelope the chute covers is obviously FAR less than the SR series, hence the "chute by wire" setup where the AP is expected to put the airplane in a small corner of the envelope where the chute won't fail. This feels like a hack to avoid a substantial weight increase in the chute system to strengthen it for more general deployment parameters.

Still no answer to the question of how "chute by wire" works. Lots of potential for the safety coverage to be compromised here.

It is not clear to me the chute has the same market impact on a jet versus a piston.

Mike C.

A couple of chute failures/accidents will do the opposite.

There is no glaring design flaw in jets, either, but they require mandatory type rating and training.

Mike C.

Yes, every flight instructor. They spend all their time on the bad stuff.

Such is training.

Mike C.

The ones that did NOT fly the same path?

We have the FDR. It gives us the intensity of the turbulence. The issue was icing, not the storm per se, though the turbulence obviously didn't help matters, despite being light.


If they entered a mature storm at FL350, the turbulence would have been far greater.

Mike C.

There is no glaring design flaw in jets, either, but they require mandatory type rating and training.

Mike C.

Robinson R22 and R44 helicopters. Even more invasive than the Mu2.

My understanding is that no aircraft flew the exact path of AF447, others diverted in other ways, typically to the east.


Those can happen many, many miles from the storm itself. In the report it said the Captain noticed St Elmo's fire, not the copilots, and he was off the flight deck for 10 minutes before the incident started, or about 80 nm. So we know St Elmo's fire started well before the incident occurred.


It doesn't seem like they did given the relatively light turbulence.

0.75 G to 1.25 G is really not that severe, and that was the maximum they were subjected to.

Any storm that reaches FL350 or higher would likely produce much higher turbulence if you are actually in it.

We do not have the radar images the crew saw. We do know they looked at them, and they did make a heading change based on what they saw. Given that, I do not expect gross incompetence that they flew into an area of strong returns.

Mike C.