I can understand how low visibility will cause a crash during landing or take off. I can also understand how it could lead to collisions with tall structures like masts and trees. However, in many of these cases it doesn’t seem like they collided with anything. They seem to drop out of the sky “due to low visibility”.
In: Other
They don’t ‘drop out of the sky due to low visibility’ – they hit things they didn’t know were near because they lose track of their location and assume it’s somewhere else.
Aircraft are unique (along with perhaps submarines) in that they’re a vehicle which can travel in absolutely zero visibility and still be able to travel safely if they are making good use of their instrumentation and it is in good working order, their training is adequate, and errors are not made.
If any one of these elements fail, a crash can occur.
Imagine if I told you to drive your car to work in absolutely impenetrable fog at night – you can see absolutely nothing out the windows at all.
Your job is to navigate and drive safely using nothing but the compass on the sat nav and the odometer to work out your mileage.
It would be very difficult, if not utterly impossible, because the instruments aren’t accurate enough and your planning couldn’t be detailed enough to work out every road, corner and junction, nor could you predict other vehicles, pedestrians and objects on the road.
Well, aircraft *can* do this because the sky is, generally, very empty. As long as you know where you are and where other aircraft are, you have the potential to fly safely.
But this means you need impeccable, flawless planning, operation, technology and so on. When one or more of those elements fails, crashes can occur.
Bad weather and low visibility doesn’t make an aircraft crash, but it makes that crash much more likely.
Latest Answers