midair collision over Tacoma...none dead.

On Nov 22, 9:04 am, C J Campbell
wrote:
On 2007-11-21 20:25:12 -0800, Newps said:

A woman I work with is very good friends with the pilot of the aircraft
that ended up in the water. What basically happened is that the 182
ran over this aircraft, tearing the vertical tail off the aircraft. He
said next thing I know I am spinning. Every rotation of the spin makes
a bigger and bigger arc in the sky due to his inputs. Finally he can
basically get it right side up and with power and aileron he stalls it
into the water. Plane floats a while before sinking. After he gets
his wife out of the plane he notices missing tail. Both spend minimal
time at hospital. Meanwhile 182 jockey is all over the news
saying..."That other aircraft came out of nowhere." NTSB will most
likely fault both pilots for not seeing and avoiding.

Yeah, we wouldn't want the NTSB faulting the real culprit there, would
we? This area has been a chamber of horrors for a long time. Near
misses are very common there. The FAA has so balkanized the airspace
that air safety has been severely compromised, just as the AOPA
predicted when the current airspace arrangement was proposed decades
ago.

What you have is a bunch of airplanes traveling a narrow corridor
through a bunch of class D airspace areas while remaining under a low
class B ceiling. Sure, you could call up Tacoma Narrows, and McChord,
or SeaTac, or Boeing Field, or Fort Lewis, or Renton, and transit their
airspace, but doing so requires you to be constantly looking up the
proper radio frequency from a whole list of different ATC frequencies
and figuring out which one is appropriate to use for your location and
direction of flight, all the while trying to fly the airplane and see
and avoid other aircraft.

Some pilots have made little lists of all the frequencies needed in the
area, but these lists always seem to be missing one critical frequency
or another. So everyone drops down to 1000' and tries to navigate a
narrow corridor that runs through a maze of radio towers and along the
freeway, trying to get from one side of Seattle to the other without
talking to anybody.

Aggravating the situation is that all these towers are busy and they do
not necessarily reply very quickly to aircraft trying to contact them,
so trying to avoid the crowded I-5 corridor quickly becomes an exercise
in frustration. It is not at all uncommon for SeaTac to make you wait
20 minutes or more before transiting the class B airspace. I have seen
aircraft circling over Vashon Island for ten minutes or more as they
wait for Boeing Field to respond to their calls -- another good place
for mid-airs while everyone waits their turn.

Aircraft transiting Tacoma Narrows' airspace are usually restricted to
1500 feet, just 200 feet above the traffic pattern, and they often have
to switch frequencies between SeaTac, McChord, Seattle Approach, and
Tacoma Tower. It is not always clear who you are supposed to be talking
to, either. You might be in Tacoma's airspace, but they might have you
call SeaTac or Approach, claiming that they have some sort of LOA
giving them control of their airspace, or vice versa.

So the FAA has basically created a huge wall, 40 miles long and 10,000
feet high, that is inaccessible to GA, but the wall has a tiny hole in
it. And then they wonder why there are so many incidents there at that
hole. It is like cramming a sixteen lane freeway down to a single lane
and then blaming "bad drivers" for all the accidents and congestion
there. But then again, Washington's Department of Transportation is
entirely capable of pulling stunts like that, so maybe they are not so
different from the FAA after all.

The FAA's attempts to make us safe have ended up endangering thousands
of people every day. So, yeah, blame the pilots.

--
Waddling Eagle
World Famous Flight Instructor

Ronnie sad the PATCO controls "quit" in the 1980's....hmmm