27R has MIRL and REIL
Wimp.
people keep asking this, but have you looked at the chart? it's not a straight in approach it's circling, and it only gets you to 1500' circling minimums basically at the threshold when the field is below 400' msl. if you intend to circle to land on 27R, the RNAV 17 is arguably better
I completely agree. I haven't flown the RNAV circle to land yet, but the first time I flew OKB VOR-A down to minimums was literally an eye opening experience.
Oops my bad
and plenty of people are getting night current, or practice their night landings there, myself included, on VFR nights. Legality aside I would take it as a clue that the approach is going to be more challenging on a marginal vfr, really IFR / IMC night. 3 mile visibility is thin, you pass TOMTY and just barely get the airport in sight.. that's going to be a high workload if you are single pilot with low ceilings, low vis, etc.
No one wants to die, that's a tough audio to listen to. So if you put your blancolirio hat on and work backwards 'up the chain' the decision to take 27R instead of the straight in to 17 started this set of events. Honestly the LOC-D sucks too. SEE is not a great IFR airport tbh, terrain aside, that localizer spits you out monster high, you're going to be circling if it's real IFR
it's not, but someone put the track together above and it certainly looks like he cranked in that base to final turn harder than the plane was willing to give. Maybe it wasn't the mountain, perhaps he just didn't want to overshoot the runway and deal with going around and figuring out a missed approach when you've already cancelled your IFR..
It's really tragic. SEE has had more than it's fair share of accidents this year
We’re talking a Lear 35, specifically a mid-80’s model. Many of these are still equipped with ‘steam gauges’ albeit I’m sure there was some glass in the panel too, but flying on conventional round dials wouldn’t be a stretch.
You are correct.
I don't know if a Lear 35 could legally/safely land on RWY17. The controller who cleared him for the approach wouldn't know either. If the reported weather is VMC and the pilot cancels IFR, what what would you expect the tower controller to do? Would it make any difference if it were a C-172?
I don't know why circling is NA at night, but for argument's sake let's say it wasn't night and you decided to try it for operational reasons, such as a longer runway with, say, a headwind component. How would you plan to avoid stalling your Learjet then?
You might start by crossing over 27R perpendicular to the centerline. After all, why waste all that "S-turns across a road" training?
You might make sure you fly as slowly as safely possible, too, such as Vref+10 (1.3 Vso for the weight + 10 kias) because you don't want to waste all your slow flight training either, do you?
You might also make sure to use full flaps, so you don't stall while trying to fly at Vref+10 kias. This is no place to test your stall training, of course, but it might fly in the face of conventional wisdom learned in simulator training, where approach flaps may have been drilled into your head for fear of an engine failure. But, as risk manager, you must decide which is the more important consideration.
And you won't bank even one degree over 30°, no matter what, for the same reason. (No place to test your stall recovery proficiency.)
And you would make sure to avoid the obstructions by maintaining circling minimums until a "normal descent" can be made visually. With such a high circling minimum as at SEE, IF this were an unfamiliar airport and/or if it were a night approach, the only safe way to mitigate the obstruction risk would be to hold those minimums until within 10° of final approach. That could be a deal-breaker if it requires a longer final than the protected circling area.
Above all, though, you'd have to be super alert for the first indication of any of your parameters straying from perfection, in which case you'd simply execute a missed approach.
If this approach was an ad hoc decision to circle, made out of an approach gone poorly by arriving too high and too fast, I'd suspect the crew didn't have time to consider all of these things. It's the sort of 91.103 alternative planning required before takeoff, if such a maneuver is to be accomplished safely that is.
Maybe it's just an unlit object in the visual segment? Circling minimums at SEE are basically the same as the turbine VFR pattern altitude, so circling under a "low ceiling" would be impossible. Maybe somebody with more curiosity than I have tonight will look up the actual reason for the NA at night restriction? There are lots of mountain airports, like Aspen, with circling minimums so high as to make them impossible to safely descend from within the circling area unless the pilot has intimate local knowledge. Some are approved for night, or at least were when I was actively flying. Banning circling approaches because some pilots aren't maintaining proficiency is a bad idea, IMO.
I bet he was that low because he didn’t want to be in the clouds. I would also bet you a nice bottle of scotch the willingness to cancel and scud run the pattern was a direct result of that familiarity you mentioned.
