Pilot and Anchorage surgeon Dr. James Eule talks about the death of two colleagues Alex Stack and Aric Beane and how " Ifsar later measured the final ridge 263 feet higher than Stack’s GPS would have shown that day. The plane slammed into rock about 300 feet below the ridgeline, rescuers said — close enough to suggest the bad map may have made a difference. Stack, 38, and Beane, 33, died on impact........ "
The president of an Anchorage based mapping agency named E-Terra is quoted as saying:
" Mars is better mapped than the state of Alaska "
Here is the link:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/ ... story.html
Some of the more interesting portions of the article include:
Alaska, it turns out, has never been mapped to modern standards. While the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) is constantly refining its work in the lower 48 states, the terrain data in Alaska is more than 50 years old, much of it hand-sketched from black-and-white stereo photos shot from World War II reconnaissance craft and U-2 spy planes.
Errors abound. Locals tell of mountains as much as a mile out of place. Streams flow uphill, and ridges are missing because a cloud happened by when the photo was taken.
“Mars is better mapped than the state of Alaska,” said Steve Colligan, president of E-Terra, an Anchorage mapping firm that specializes in aviation safety. Thanks to the Pentagon, the wilds of Asia and the Middle East are better mapped, too.
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Because Alaska is so badly mapped, the project kicked off there in the summer of 2010 using ifsar, which is slightly less accurate than lidar but cheaper and able to penetrate clouds. Within months, however, Republicans had won the U.S. House and begun squabbling with President Obama over government spending. The 3-D program has since struggled to gain a toehold in the federal budget as gridlocked policymakers have repeatedly rubber-stamped old spending priorities in quickie budget bills, known as continuing resolutions, or CRs.
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Alaska pilots are 36 times as likely to die as the average U.S. worker, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The state has few roads, so everything and everybody has to travel in small planes capable of landing on remote runways. Alaska has roughly six times as many pilots per capita as the rest of the nation.
And they are usually flying in conditions that are inherently dangerous. The weather is brutal and hard to predict. The rugged and badly mapped terrain leads to a particularly deadly kind of crash called “controlled flight into terrain,” which in Alaska means the pilot has flown a perfectly good plane at full speed into the side of a mountain.
It is an interesting article for sure. Bush Pilot Lars Gleitsman, a geologist is also prominently mentioned. I majored in geology myself so I can say " Go LARS !! " .
In the final analysis, at least for now, maybe that glass panel still needs to be viewed with a bit of caution...at least in the Aloha state of Alaska. Fly into terrain due to bad GPS terrain data and it is Aloha to you.
I've tried that a couple times. The pipeline runs up the hill into the fog and gloom, and you sit there in your aeroplane and ponder, "I wonder how far I can poke my nose into this before I whack something?"
