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SFO near miss might have triggered aviation disaster

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Re: SFO near miss might have triggered aviation disaster

#221

Post by ajeet_dhaliwal »

schoen wrote: post #113
abritinthebay wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Cashiered”?

It means 'fired' (maybe more common in English outside the U.S.?). https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cashier#English

I've lived 22 years of my life in the UK and 12 in North America and never heard of this before so I don't think it can be particularly common. I've heard of being 'laid off', 'fired', 'let go', 'terminated', 'made redundant', 'purged', but never this. Based on this link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cashiering it might be a military way of saying it so perhaps the poster has some background in that field.

Re: SFO near miss might have triggered aviation disaster

#222

Post by [deleted] »

sigstoat wrote: post #63
desdiv wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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they still use AM because higher powered transmitters (which will generally be the tower) can overpower weaker transmitters (planes). i'm given to understand aviation is enamored of that feature. > Just imagine the economic damage that a single asshole can do with a high-powered transmitter near an airport. the pilots could probably just pull their cell phones out and call the tower. there is much worse trouble singl…

[deleted]

Re: SFO near miss might have triggered aviation disaster

#223

Post by luca_ing »

wfunction wrote: post #66
cyberferret wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, autolanding, or if the pilot was using ILS (Instrument Landing System), then this problem would almost never happen, as they would be aware there was a problem. However, most pilots eschew automation especially on short finals, and prefer the 'hand fly' the aircraft in so that they can maintain complete control over the aircraft. Not a bad thing, and pilots want to actually fly the plane at crucial times. When h…

Fantastic explanation, and the question on my mind the entire time is "but why??"! Surely the copilot can look at a map (when I say map I don't mean a piece of paper -- I mean a digital one with GPS and everything) and see their trajectory while the pilot is landing, right? Like I'm imagining there should be something on the plane that shows them their trajectory and the runway information. If there is, why isn't it…

> Surely the copilot can look at a map (when I say map I don't mean a piece of paper -- I mean a digital one with GPS and everything) and see their trajectory while the pilot is landing, right?

It's not like the pilot doesn't know there is a parallel taxiway. Of course there is. They would be (subconsciously anyway) looking for it to complete their mental map. It just went wrong in this case.

You wouldn't even have needed a fancy automated system to realise you were looking at a taxiway in that particular situation. There were four big aircraft on there, with position lights and taxi lights and everything. And apparently visibility was good. It was just a spectacular brain fart.

While the system you're suggesting might give better situational awareness, it might also be a dangerous distraction in other cases -- or be wrong for some reason. So more tools aren't automatically better.

In this case the existing system actually worked flawlessly: another controlling instance (the tower controller) discovered the error, took appropriate action, and all that happened was a 15 minute landing delay and a good story. Probably happens more often than we'd care to imagine.

> Like I'm imagining there should be something on the plane that shows them their trajectory and the runway information. If there is, why isn't it telling them when they're going the wrong way?

Well, there's the ILS (instrument landing system), but pilots like to land manually. IIRC it's recommended these days, just to remain in training. I suppose it's also fun.

Also, ILS might be wrong somehow (interference, technical defects, the pilot accidentally entering the data for the left runway when he was told to land on the right, etc).

So the truth is this was just human error, and that kind of thing just happens. You know the saying: if you make a system idiot-proof, nature invents better idiots.

Re: SFO near miss might have triggered aviation disaster

#226

Post by gambiting »

anovikov wrote: post #212
ddeck wrote: post #14

Attempts to take off from or land on taxiways are alarmingly common, including those by Harrison Ford: Harrison Ford won't face disciplinary action for landing on a taxiway at John Wayne Airport [1] Serious incident: Finnair A340 attempts takeoff from Hong Kong taxiway [2] HK Airlines 737 tries to take off from taxiway [3] Passenger plane lands on the TAXIWAY instead of runway in fourth incident of its kind at Seattl…

This is facilitated by the fact that in some airports, taxiways and runways are similar and sometimes even used interchangeably (!), i.e. a runway may be remarked as taxiway and vice versa. So it's not 'how can he be so dumb' moment, in some case you have no way to tell the difference unless you just know.

It feels like it could be solved incredibly easily by a row of lights at the beginning/end of both the taxiway and the runway, bright red for taxiway, bright green for the runway. If you are attempting to land on the strip marked red, then you are doing something wrong. In case that the taxiway is legitimately used for landing, change the colours around.

I guess it hasn't been done for "reasons", I'd be quite interested in hearing why.

Re: SFO near miss might have triggered aviation disaster

#227

Post by wfunction »

Piskvorrr wrote: post #207
wfunction wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You know what else Google maps does? It quits working at random times and behaves unpredictably in low precision GPS scenarios. OK, so you're saying airplanes don't already have GPS systems that work better? Or are you claiming I said "Airbus and Boeing should literally install Google Maps in the cockpit"?

Okay, correction. Airplanes don't have GPS systems that work better at the level of reliability required . "It works most of the time, except it sometimes doesn't" might be sufficient when you can stop at the roadside, but doesn't quite cut it in the air.

Okay so let me get this straight: you're telling me that passenger airplanes currently fly by dead reckoning or stellar navigation or ground-based triangulation or something else? When a pilot doesn't know where he is, he doesn't have any kind of certified GPS-based system handy to tell him?

And moreover, even beyond GPS: how the hell can a plane's navigation system be capable of (and certified for!) landing the monster under autopilot, and yet not be able to tell the pilot its own location within the accuracy of a few feet reliably? I literally do not understand how what you're saying makes any sense.

Re: SFO near miss might have triggered aviation disaster

#228

Post by dorfsmay »

cyberferret wrote: post #54
wfunction wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you! That raises the question, (a) why is there no kind of warning system for when you're about to land on the wrong runway (there's a GPS system in the aircraft that knows where you're going, right?) and (b) why is the pilot (or at least co-pilot) never looking at a map on final approach? Is it really that dangerous for anyone to take a quick glance?

Yes, autolanding, or if the pilot was using ILS (Instrument Landing System), then this problem would almost never happen, as they would be aware there was a problem. However, most pilots eschew automation especially on short finals, and prefer the 'hand fly' the aircraft in so that they can maintain complete control over the aircraft. Not a bad thing, and pilots want to actually fly the plane at crucial times. When h…

> most pilots eschew automation especially on short finals

Don't pilots have a legal requirement to manually fly a minimum number of landings per month?

Re: SFO near miss might have triggered aviation disaster

#229

Post by michaelbarton »

mate_soos wrote: post #219

Before crying pilot error, we must all read Sydney Dekker's A Field Giude to Understading "Human Error" (and fully appreciate why he uses those quotes). Don't immediately assign blame to the sharp end. Take a look at the blunt one first. Most likely not a pilot error. Assigning blame is a very human need, but assigning it to the most visible and accessible part is almost always wrong.

I second this. This book has quite a boring cover, and quite boring "clip art" diagrams, but the message is astonishingly useful and can be applied in all situations, particulary in software development.

In hindsight it's easy to say something like "the red light was flashing to indicate the widget wasn't working. The pilot didn't do anything about it, he's obviously negiligent". At the time though the pilot may be dealing with 100s of stimuli and he doesn't know that this single red light is "the one" he should especially be paying attention too.

There's a quote about assigning blame - "Looking for scape goats is like peeing your pants, in the short term it feels pretty good but in the long term it makes you look pretty stupid."

Re: SFO near miss might have triggered aviation disaster

#230

Post by tialaramex »

Piskvorrr wrote: post #216
konschubert wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The moral might also be that automatic guided landing approaches should be mandatory whenever they are available.

And then your Cat-IIIc equipment is offline for whatever reason, and nobody had landed a plane by hand for years at that point. Now what? (In other words, automation has its own set of failure modes)

Right, but a problem with humans is that they tend to seriously over-estimate their capability. So we need to be statistics led on this

Given the choice between "One time in a million a human flies the aeroplane into the ground and everybody dies" and "One time in 10 million the computer flies the aeroplane into the ground and everybody dies" we ought to be hard-headed and take the ten times fewer deaths, but we prefer to say "Ah, but _my_ pilots are better than average".

Now, the reality gets very complicated, because we ask computers and humans to fly in different conditions. A pilot will refuse to try to land an aeroplane into thick fog, the Cat III ALS is happy to try this because it sees through fog. On the other hand when external circumstances are trying, the pilots may choose not to attempt ALS at all. But despite this complexity, we do need to accept that sometimes a smaller risk of automation error is preferable to the risk of human error even if _neither_ is perfect.

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