skher wrote:
First,I'm commending rather than questioning the men's courage under fire.
It takes the rarest of rare grit to do so considering others over one's own life.
When the plane is about to crash,perhaps GPS,Cartosats and SATHIs could help find the most nearby clearing(uninhabited of course) faster-maybe even instantaneously.
That's all I was suggesting.
If we have a real-time sub-meter resolution capability over the subcontinent- one of its first critical applications could be in flight safety.
Not doubting your intention, but questioning your logic.
May I ask if you have actually spoken to any aviators to ask them if this is what they would urgently want when faced with a dire emergency? I put it to you that I suspect you have not done that and that your are misrepresenting the situation that a pilot finds himself in when there is a dire in-flight emergency.
Even if you put yourself in a plane and are faced with an emergency - the last thing you want to do is to ask "Where can I crash this plane? Let me consult my GPS,Cartosats and SATHIs which wil tell me instantly where I can do that""
The first and foremost thing is to keep the plane flying if at all possible.
If the thing refuses to fly and has decided to come down, it may or may not be possible to actually steer the plane towards a convenient location. The stricken aircraft may not have the energy or control or altitude to be steered. Obviously if that much leeway is available the possibility of "steering" to a convenient belly landing or crash landing site may be contemplated. But if those conditions are not present and the plane is going down - but still gliding - the maximum that can be done is to try and find a clearing directly ahead (or wherever the plane is heading) and hope the plane has the energy and altitude to reach such a clearing.
In the worst emergency none of these may be possible - the plane may be going down uncontrollably. Real heroism is the ability to use whatever little control that remains to suicidally crash into any visible clearing rather than into populated areas. This is what seems to have occurred in the case of the Saras.
While I do not question the utility of GPS, Cartosats and SATHIs, their utility to find a clearing in an emergency when the plane is likely to remain in the air literally for seconds is severely limited. Pilot workload is heavy even in a normal landing approach. In an emergency the pilot is overloaded with work. Getting the equipment to tell you where a clearing is may sound great in theory - but in practice in an emergency there may be no time to even use instantaneously available information.
Another thing that is often missed is that for every crash that we hear about we miss out and never hear about 20 other instances in which an accident was possible, but was avoided by some factor.
A complete database of all emergencies and what action/equipment avoided the emergency needs to be collated and analysed along with the data about all crashes and what could have prevented/caused the crash to arrive at the optimum action, or equipment or training that is most useful and contributes the most to flight safety.
I put it to you that while GPS,Cartosats and SATHIs would certainly feature high up in the list of standard safety equipment, they would feature very low down in the list of things that are useful in a dire emergency when a plane is within seconds of a disaster.
