Midair over Everglades

Lots of airplanes flying down that way. I'm surprised there aren't more. RIP to our prospective Airmen.
 
Bad week for aviation.....we had a fatal at my homedrome on Sunday...light experimental with two fatalities...notice a few others on Kathryn's Report. Prayers for all involved
 
CNN is reporting both planes are from the same flight school, Dean International.
 
That’s combining two of my three worst aviation fears: a midair and crashing in the Everglades. Prayers for all concerned.
 
Talk about a bad day,may they Rest In Peace .
 
Wow. This is a very popular training area, everyone training out of TMB uses it, including me. This seemed to happen right on the approach into the airport.

This is unsettling, to say the least. RIP to those involved.
 
Sad deal. Prayers for all the families.

From what I hear from friends down that way, they avoid that particular practice area, calling it "the Wild West". I'm sure that there are plenty of folks that feel differently, but I would personally probably find another area.
 
The area west of Miami Exec is the scariest airspace I've ever flown in. I've been in there twice, both times IFR in VFR conditions. There were lots of students, many of whom didn't speak enough English.

On my first visit there was one who was not responding to ATC and just doing circles and wandering around in the approach path.
 
I haven’t seen TMB this quiet since our last TFR. Dean appears to be closed for the day. Still some traffic in and out but nothing close to a normal day. Things will rebound with time I suppose...
 
I flew out of TMB last night. Dean International is already hated by most flight schools down here and the FAA is there all the time. Hopefully they pull their 141 certificate. No reason for all these accidents and forced landings due to maintenance issues from this one school.
 
DesertNomad said:
The area west of Miami Exec is the scariest airspace I've ever flown in. I've been in there twice, both times IFR in VFR conditions. There were lots of students, many of whom didn't speak enough English.

On my first visit there was one who was not responding to ATC and just doing circles and wandering around in the approach path.
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East of Miami executive isn’t much better. Flying the shoreline northbound everyone is staying under the Bravo at 1,000 feet I am shocked there aren’t more accidents there by South Beach.
 
Ralph Knight who was killed in this crash was a DPE. Wonder if the FAA will do anything now with Dean! Two DPE's in recent months. Terrible.
 
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Tragic. Wonder if they had ADS-B In/Out. “See and Avoid” is the VFR law and must be a priority especially for students but it’s not perfect. Much of Florida has extremely high traffic. ADS-B used correctly can sure help. Stay safe everyone!
 
old cfi said:
Ralph Knight who was killed in this crash was a DPE. Wonder if the FAA will do anything now with Dean! Two DPE's in recent months. Terrible.
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I was seeing the rumors of that until it was confirmed today.

If nothing else in the current hectic rush for piles and piles of new certificates, the DPEs down there must have a sense of wondering if there’s a target painted on their backs.

Old airplanes, densely filled training skies, little margin for any sort of mistakes... maintenance, visual scan, whatever.

It gets busy enough around here on weekends that I wonder about the utility and safety of cramming multiple aircraft into arbitrary “practice areas” we have here. There’s a lot of sky further east onto the plains, and an extra ten minutes of flying will get you there.

Not sure Florida has as many open spaces as we do, but the “practice area” concept is at least a tiny bit “busted” when it comes to picking the safest course for a particular flight when a school has lots of aircraft and all of them head to the same general areas all the time.

One big school here used to publish a nicely done “practice area map” and I’ve noticed it’s gone off of their website. It had one benefit, there were recognizable names for multiple areas on it that could be used on air-to-air and students and CFIs easily knew where the other aircraft were.

I wonder if they realized the liability they created by being the publishers of that map that everyone used when there’s 200+ miles of nothing from here out into Kansas and beyond.
 
I heard from early reports that this was a head-on collision. Nothing confirmed so far but if it was, at least two pilots failed in see-and-avoid.

I did all my training and instructing in central Florida back in the 80's. Wasn't as much traffic back then but since I've been flying with my son while he works on his ratings, I have sure seen a tremendous increase in training areas. ADSB, I think, is the only answer and needs to be mandatory for these flight schools. NOW! It won't be perfect but at least it's better than nothing. ATC up here does a pretty good job of keeping "strangers" out of harms way but work load being what it is, its also not perfect.
 
old cfi said:
I heard from early reports that this was a head-on collision. Nothing confirmed so far but if it was, at least two pilots failed in see-and-avoid.

I did all my training and instructing in central Florida back in the 80's. Wasn't as much traffic back then but since I've been flying with my son while he works on his ratings, I have sure seen a tremendous increase in training areas. ADSB, I think, is the only answer and needs to be mandatory for these flight schools. NOW! It won't be perfect but at least it's better than nothing. ATC up here does a pretty good job of keeping "strangers" out of harms way but work load being what it is, its also not perfect.
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If true, I can only say from my experience that head-on is tough for see-and-avoid...I've several times had aircraft that came head-on, that I only saw AFTER they went by.
 
I am glad I had no designated training area and had been signed off on multiple airports in our area. Sounds like some of those training areas are accidents waiting to happen.
 
I've been in a head-on situation before - was in the back seat of a Cub and the student thankfully asked "what are we supposed to do if there's an airplane in front of us" just in time. Pretty scary, and I could NOT have seen him from where I was.
 
See and Avoid is soooo limited. ATC does their best (usually) to separate VFR traffic around airports, but REALLY BUSY and/or BIG TRAINING airports often leave the controllers overloaded and/or exasperated and/or the good-faith traffic call-out is just too late.

I’m not blaming the controllers in any way.
See and Avoid is the VFR law but ADS-B can save lives... the sooner the better!
 
1RTK1 said:
I am glad I had no designated training area and had been signed off on multiple airports in our area. Sounds like some of those training areas are accidents waiting to happen.
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I trained in a much quieter environment, but the way the 'practice area' was handled is that approach used it to keep everyone out of each others hair. If there was more than one plane maneuvering in the practice area at a time, they issued instructions to both, usually in terms of DME distances or altitudes. Of course, if you have 30 planes training at a time, that's going to be difficult to do.
 
We have a ton of airline-academy flight training out of several airports around the Phoenix area. The schools, indy CFIs and the FAA have a working group to try to coordinate the activity as much as possible. They've set up frequencies for position reporting in the various practice areas, and have published a chart overlay listing them.

That's all well and good, and very helpful. But I was based here for several months before I even heard about this (thanks to a FAAST seminar). Pity the poor transient pilot who bumbles through the area without knowing the secret handshakes. :eek: o_O
 
Pilawt said:
We have a ton of airline-academy flight training out of several airports around the Phoenix area. The schools, indy CFIs and the FAA have a working group to try to coordinate the activity as much as possible. They've set up frequencies for position reporting in the various practice areas, and have published a chart overlay listing them.
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That map makes the DC/Baltimore Class B, SFRA, FRZ complex look simple.
 
I sold my C-152 to them about two years ago....
I owned that airplane for about 20 years. Would make me ill to see anything bad happen to it...so far so good.

My transactional experience with them was above board and I can’t say anything bad about it.
 
Pilawt said:
We have a ton of airline-academy flight training out of several airports around the Phoenix area. The schools, indy CFIs and the FAA have a working group to try to coordinate the activity as much as possible. They've set up frequencies for position reporting in the various practice areas, and have published a chart overlay listing them.

That's all well and good, and very helpful. But I was based here for several months before I even heard about this (thanks to a FAAST seminar). Pity the poor transient pilot who bumbles through the area without knowing the secret handshakes. :eek: o_O
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No kidding. I did some additional training and a flight review with a CFI based at KCHD maybe 3 years ago, and the practice area we used was pretty nuts---though there were "standard" frequencies for air to air within the practice area, which we don't have in Tucson (or I'm not aware of them).

Around here there's so much empty desert around in most directions I don't see the point of putting all the students near each other...
 
Trevor3431 said:
I flew out of TMB last night. Dean International is already hated by most flight schools down here and the FAA is there all the time. Hopefully they pull their 141 certificate. No reason for all these accidents and forced landings due to maintenance issues from this one school.
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Why would the FAA pull their certificate because two aircraft collided?

I fail to see how a midair collision reflects on the maintenance operation of a flight school.
 
Word today is that Dean is closing down.

The FAA might pull the 141 because it's a school designation, not maintenance. Enough incidents might well have the FAA in proctology mode.
 
I hate being a pessimist but why do I think he is shutting down because he wants to get away from legal problems and in a few months from now will be operating a new school, in the same spot, under another name.
 
jallen0 said:
I hate being a pessimist but why do I think he is shutting down because he wants to get away from legal problems and in a few months from now will be operating a new school, in the same spot, under another name.
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Not really any different than any other American business in that regard. Bankruptcy car wash, start back up, a new DBA name... moving right along....
 
jallen0 said:
I hate being a pessimist but why do I think he is shutting down because he wants to get away from legal problems and in a few months from now will be operating a new school, in the same spot, under another name.
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I had the same thought.
 
ACFI on one plane. FAA examiner on another. Can’t imagine they didn’t have adsb. How does this happen??? Very sad. I’ll never forget when I was training out of Daytona. We would fly back and forth to Flagler. That was where it was dangerous. Not a lot of great English. Someone heading back from Flagler and we were heading into area. Heard guy on radio but hard to understand. Looking looking looking. Calling callin g calling. Can’t understand a word this guy is saying. Finally we break right And see he was headed right for us!! Probably less then 2 miles. Scary. He was right on that horizon line just couldnt pick up. This was pre ADSB days
 
Our eyes/brains are built to detect relative motion, especially in peripheral vision. We tend to miss targets without relative motion.

I'm not "shocked" there aren't more mid-airs, there or anywhere else. Our planes are pretty small, and it's a rare event in any case. Two miles is a real long miss. Not at all convinced ADS-B will move the needle much at all, at least fir GA.
 
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