777 almost hit San Gabriel Mts Friday

Greg Bockelman said:
So, wouldn't getting a vector towards a mountain without any sort of further acknowledgement from ATC not set off some warning in a pilot's mind? "Uhh, hey. You have us pointed at this mountain. How long are we going to be on this heading?"
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Dumb question.. assuming IMC, how does a 777 pilot know they are headed towards a mountain?
 
The 777 would hopefully have synthetic vision in the avionics that shows terrain in some sort of TCAS warning system. Even Garmin 430/530 have option for this. If I was flying a lot of hard IFR, I would want to have this in my airplane.
 
Most modern glass cockpits have TAWS(Terrain Awareness) and EGPWS(Enhanced Ground Proximity Warning). I believe, but not sure, that part 121 aircraft require some variant of both, in addition to TCAS. Not sure how this info is displayed in a 777, but i'm sure it's there somewhere. There were multiple failures in this case, both with the crew and controller. I think it is very fortunate that we are not reading an article about a 777 with 350+ SOB splattered on the side of a SoCal mountain.

ETA: part 121.354 lays out the requirements for TAWS
 
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F01LA said:
Dumb question.. assuming IMC, how does a 777 pilot know they are headed towards a mountain?
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Terrain displays on the Primary Flight Display, Area Charts, Local Knowledge. If you are flying in the LA or SFO area you have to know there are Cumulo Granitus in the area.

BTW, the avionics in a 777 aren't as advanced as most people would like to think, but the information is there in some form or another.
 
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Blueangel said:
The 777 would hopefully have synthetic vision in the avionics that shows terrain in some sort of TCAS warning system. Even Garmin 430/530 have option for this. If I was flying a lot of hard IFR, I would want to have this in my airplane.
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Synthetic terrain FTW! (San Gabriel mountains pictured, headed southwest over Apple Valley)

I'm strictly VFR, but this would come in veeeeerrrry handy if I ever had an inadvertent excursion into IMC.
 
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SoCal RV Flyer said:
View attachment 50059

Synthetic terrain FTW! (San Gabriel mountains pictured, headed southwest over Apple Valley)

I'm strictly VFR, but this would come in veeeeerrrry handy if I ever had an inadvertent excursion into IMC.
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I'm not so sure about that. From that display, how far away are the mountains, and how high are they?
 
TAWS or synthetic would have helped. TAWS will highlight in yellow and then red, giving plenty of time for action. Velocity vector on SVT will show if your present course will clear terrain or not.

Radar altimeter helps for some stuff also. Not sure with a terrain rise this steep it would be of much value though.
 
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MAKG1 said:
I'm not so sure about that. From that display, how far away are the mountains, and how high are they?
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It shows terrain 10 miles out. So that foothill right in the center is approx. 5 miles. Push one button on the moving map GPS page and you get a plan view of terrain that's color coded: red = at or above your altitude.

How high? I don't care at this point...see and avoid! But if you must know, Mt. San Antonio (Baldy) is a little over 10,000 ft.

White line at top of display depicts your current altitude against the mountains, so it's pretty obvious if a particular peak represents a threat. Pretty slick.
 
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SoCal RV Flyer said:
It shows terrain 10 miles out. So that foothill right in the center is approx. 5 miles. Push one button on the moving map GPS page and you get a plan view of terrain that's color coded: red = at or above your altitude.
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Plan view in the lower half of the Aspen is my standard setup. The actual synthetic vision is lousy for nav around terrain imnsho. As you note the color coding is just the ticket.
 
RalphInCA said:
They can get terrain on charts.
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Probably not. They only see some elevations at best on an ifr chart and absolutely no terrain as you are used to on a vfr chart.
 
Timbeck2 said:
<looks at phone lines on the console> Lets see now, airfield ops, fire department, tracon supervisor....nope, no administrator phone line. :nonod:
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Reminds me of working on that conference call system for FAA back in the old days. There was a conference call that if it wasn't calling the Administrator, it was calling someone very close to that level.

Funny thing: Nobody wanted to test that one at 1AM Eastern Time at the end of the maintenance window, even though it was listed as needing to be tested on the test plan. I always marked down "not tested" and made the GTE guy and the FAA guy initial next to it at each site we did.

I assume they eventually tested those to check for number/routing typos in the system at a more reasonable hour of the day, but ultimately didn't care. I was on an airline headed home by then.
 
Velocity173 said:
Just because MSAW is alarming in the background doesn't mean terrain separation has been lost. Just like when CA is blaring doesn't mean aircraft to aircraft separation is lost either. They both are on set with certain parameters to provide a buffer. You could probably have a few hundred go off any given day with no loss of separation...a bit annoying really.
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I figured that - plus - I slowed down too - gave the controller more time -

I was at 5000 east bound from Kwang - so I would have been roughly at the same altitude as the ILS arrivals vectored to 08 @ BUR. There was about a 15 nm wide patch of clear air over the valley - so I could see the arrivals I was being vectored away from -
 
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