When Rabbit Wont Run

The inoperative table doesn’t cover every possible system failure. Plus, you also need to consider facility outages and equipment failures at your alternate.

stevel

Friday, October 19, 2012 at 12:00 AM ET

Verified

Key Takeaways:

Instrument flight inherently involves trust, but aviation regulations and procedures are designed with the expectation that both airborne and ground-based equipment can and will fail.
Failures of critical components like ILS glideslopes, approach lighting, radar, or local altimeter settings can lead to higher approach minimums, necessitate alternative navigation methods, or even render certain approaches unusable.
Pilots must proactively plan for equipment outages during preflight, carefully review alternate minimums, and practice flying approaches under degraded conditions to build confidence and competency for real-world scenarios.

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Trust is an intrinsic part of instrument flight. We trust ATC to keep other aircraft from running into us, we trust other pilots to know what they’re doing and we trust the instruments themselves. In the bargain, we also expect our onboard equipment—trust is too strong a word—to work and have a similar, positive outlook on electronic navigation resources: GPS, ILS, VOR, etc. But these systems, whether air- or ground-borne, can and do fail. In fact, expecting failure of various components comprising the aviation infrastructure is baked into many of its procedures.