Page 37 - Visual Flight Rules News Today

Insurance menation. how long do pilots use auto pilot to land a plane? >> very common. most jets have auto pilot that can land a plane itself and its mandated if the weather is bad, bad visual flight rules, that they have to use the auto pilot. i have a friend who currently flies the 777 and he says when there is visual flying, he always lands the plane himself but if he wanted to, he could put the information in the computer, sit back and watch the plane land and watch the plane stop. >> fascin...

Microbursts and apparently that happens when there are thunderstorms in the area and there were none at the time of the crash, correct? >> yes. that is an intense down draft. microbusts typically happen with a thunderstorm in the area. and at this time there were no thunderstorms in the region. weather will be a factor in the investigation, but from all of the information that i received and i have gone on web sites and national weather service as well, it seems to me that weather was not an iss...

Distance he or she is above the ground. >> have you heard of any incidents involving this runway in particular before? >> no. no. no known incidents that were aware of, but thats what the ntsb will do. i have a lot of questions. i want to make sure that all of the ground instruments were working creablghworking corrects these pilots, once they get to about 3,000, 2000 feet, theyll twitch from auto pilot to manual controls and glide the plane in themselves. the black box, the flight data recorder...

I dont know how many critical at this time. >> reporter: what do we know at this point about malfunction or anything at all that might have gone wrong? >> no. i think they are all excellent questions that you are asking, but you have to remember that we got the call here at 11:34. so its just a few hours after. ntsb will be coming in and working with the fbi. so those will all be answered. but its unrealistic at this time to be able to give you the answer to that. >> reporter: what can you tell ...

And accident forgiveness if you qualify. see what else comes standard at libertymutual.com. liberty mutual insurance. responsibility. whats your policy? before there was a modern air traffic control system, the burden of maintaining separation between commercial aircraft fell mainly on pilots. they kept their distance using whats called visual flight rules, otherwise known as see

range. more on that to come. there is no good place for a medical emergency but antarctica is especially bad. a medevac mission at the bottom of the world. first as investigators dig into wade michael pages past, pages ex-girlfriend misty cook was taken in on a weapons charge. cooks arrest was part of a joint investigation between police and fbi. we should learn more details about cooks arrest and really the investigation into page at this news conference. you are looking at live pictu...

We dont know how many of those 29,000 hours were spent in this area. but if we zoom in, one of the other obstacles to kind of help put this in perspective for you, there you can see the lake where they were at. take a look at this. theyre all over the place. you know, its a valley, and youll be flying, you know, dozens of miles, maybe, and then all of a sudden here is a hill. and then all of a sudden here is a hill. right? and he was flying under a visual flight rules, meaning he wasnt using his...

Not great. so obviously, that could be a contributing factor. jon: yeah, that certainly is going to be one of the things they will investigate, janice. hard to believe that given the weather youre describing in the area at the time this plane went down, its hard to believe that a pilot would undertake visual flight rules, flying in those conditions. >> and i should ask you a question, would the restrictions -- or learning how to be pilot, would they be different in this area, would they be going...

The ceilings of the cloud cover was 1,000 feet. so this plane was very close to the bottom of the cloud cover because of the lifting condensation level and as it flew from lake nerka to dillingham, and possibly making a stop. we dont know where this plane was going there. is no flight plan. doesnt have to be a flight plan, because it is a dfr, and visual flight rules, and they have been there hundreds of times and planes like this take uf and land thousands of times a day in alaska, but yesterda...

And there is still a lot of near collisions where people are following visual flight rules. for example, everyone remembers the mid air over new york with the helicopter and fix the wing over the hudson. they were following visual flight rules. meaning they were seeing avoiding. that doesnt work. the airport is still most dangerous part. but once youre in the open skies, there is a lot of room for our nations 239,000 airplanes. the problem is they try to funnel into 460 airports that are commerc...