There is no ADF required for this approach and I'd be happy to fly it with an FAA inspector beside me without an ADF. The missed approach hold point can be identified several different ways, GPS, DME/VOR, LOM along the localizer, or yes, finally ADF. ATC doesn't particularly care how you find it.
One of these days, I'll have to stop thinking like a lawyer. But after 46 years of doing this stuff, it's become a habit.
So you and your buddy the FAA Inspector, and another passenger start into the approach, because you've concluded that the bolded language on the approach plate doesn't apply to you--after all, you've concluded that with your single navcom and your superior skills, you can do it anyway. But you screw up the approach and you have to go missed. In the process of doing your knob-twisting, you fail to realize that you've gotten pretty far off course and mucked up your altitude, and you smack into a rock.
Well, it's true that you don't have to worry about losing your certificate. But there are other considerations besides your now unnecessary certificate. The families of the Inspector and your other passenger want restitution--they've lost their breadwinners. So they sue your estate, for a total of $5 million. It's easy to get the judgment--your negligence was pretty obvious, trying to fly an approach with a clear warning about the equipment requirements, which you intentionally and wrongfully ignored.
Just like you saved all that money not updating your panel, you also saved a lot of money by not buying nearly enough liability insurance. Your insurance company pays its limits into court and gets off the hook that way, although they might have had an insurance defense since you intentionally violated the regs. But they figure that the cost of raising that issue will exceed the paltry amount of liability insurance you purchased, so it's easier to just pay the limits and be done with it.
But that leaves another $4.8 million of the judgment unpaid. So they go after your assets. You and your girlfriend have lived together, along with her kids, for the last 10 years--it's been a great relationship, and you love her, and you love her kids as if they were yours. But you've never adopted them, and while you and she have talked marriage, you've never done it. You've all lived in your home, which you bought before you met her, and it's in your name alone. So are the titles to the pickup, the car, the snow machines, the ATVs, and the 37' cruiser--after all, you paid for them, why have her jointly on their titles?
But you have life insurance, a $2 million dollar policy you took out when the relationship with your girlfriend was new. You didn't name her or the kids as beneficiaries yet, because you weren't sure it would work out. So you named your mom as beneficiary, figuring you'd change it later--but you never did, and mom died a couple years ago. So that policy will pay into your estate.
You never bothered to have a Will done, either. Lawyers cost money, and after all, you must have said at least a hundred times, "I want you to have everything, Trixie, if I ever die." But you never put it in writing, and the only way to do that is with proper estate planning. But you planned your estate as sloppily as you flew that approach--everything you and she have enjoyed together, you own.
So the survivors of your negligent act get your $2 mil policy proceeds, and the titles to your home and your vehicles and boat, which they can sell in order to liquidate their judgment. So Trixie and the kids get nothing, and they have no place to live, no vehicles to drive, only their clothes and the few gifts you gave them.
Do you really think it doesn't matter if you follow the clear bolded language at the top of the approach plate? Really?
Now putting on my pilot hat again, I guess I'm among those who have flown a missed to a hold, not because I had done anything wrong or because I'd failed to anticipate that the weather would be lower than it was (or in your words, because of "a comm failure and a lack of foresight"), but because at the MDA, the airport was not in sight on a non-precision approach. I had expected to see the airport and I expected to land. I didn't, though, so I flew the missed as published and entered the hold, before ATC gave me a further clearance. ATC cleared me to fly the approach again or go to my alternate; I chose my alternate. That was to Rawlins, WY, in 1979. I remember that one specifically, because it was such a surprise, and it was my first "missed for real". There have been others over the years, though admittedly not many.
Bottom line: if the approach plate says you must have certain equipment, you need that equipment, unless the regulations authorize substitution of other equipment. In this case, an approach certified GPS can be substituted for both the ADF and the DME--no handhelds or enroute only GPSs allowed, no triangulating with VORs. Trixie, the kids, and the FAA are counting on you to do it right.
Cary
