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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

#241
I wonder why on 35R they wouldn’t have the taxiway to the left of the runway. Then the “right” is always the runway. Same for the left. Basically have parallel taxiways on the opposite side of the R/L designation of the runway. So at SFO, the parallel taxiways would be inside the two runways.

However, approach lighting is pretty clear, but at dusk, I agree with another comment that it can be rather hard to distinguish depending on angles. I think that approach would be landing into setting sun, so that could have some bearing.

Re: SFO near miss might have triggered aviation disaster

#242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this sounds like the start of a good idea, but we should choose something that works for colorblind people and red/green colorblind people too.

Stupid question - can you be certified as a commercial pilot if you are colourblind?

No, you can't. A friend of mine couldn't become a commercial pilot because he has some kind of colourblindness.

However, I remember him trying for some time and even campaigning for colourblind people to be admissible as commercial pilots because for the actual flying colourblindness doesn't seem to matter.

So, perhaps ridiculous as it may sound taking colourblindness into account when proposing such an improvement isn't such a weird idea after all.

Re: SFO near miss might have triggered aviation disaster

#243
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like a very good argument for autopilot landings.

You might enjoy this classic video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pN41LvuSz10 Just be sure to make a note of the video title so you can find it again -- copies of it tend to get taken down, since American Airlines got in some trouble after other parts of this training course were blamed for the crash of AA flight 587: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Airlines_Flight_587

> American Airlines got in some trouble after other parts of this training course were blamed for the crash of AA flight 587

More specifically, the pilots manipulated the rudder on that airplane so aggressively that it sheared off in flight. They were trained to react aggressively in the "Advanced Aircraft Maneuvering Program", which this video is a part of. (There are also related videos that I'm going through now that are more relevant to this particular incident; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfNBmZy1Yuc, etc.)

BTW, if AA is indeed DMCA-ing these videos, that's pretty interesting. Copyright was designed to incentivize the progress of science and the arts -- not to make large corporations look less bad after they unintentionally kill a few hundred people. Oops.

Re: SFO near miss might have triggered aviation disaster

#244

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.

Adding to that, "Normal Accidents" by Charles Perrow is a great read.

Re: SFO near miss might have triggered aviation disaster

#245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 interes…

This already exists. Runway is lit up in white, has a green strip of lights at the close end as you look at it, and instrument rated fields have a chase strobe that points right to the end of the runway. Taxi ways are blue.

Re: SFO near miss might have triggered aviation disaster

#246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this sounds like the start of a good idea, but we should choose something that works for colorblind people and red/green colorblind people too.

Stupid question - can you be certified as a commercial pilot if you are colourblind?

Actually, airline pilots (and pilots generally) are not the only people you need to take into account here. Many other potential users of the runways and taxiways would need to be taken into account, including ground staff and maintenance staff. Since I doubt that all of these are ruled out on the basis of colourblindness, it makes sense to construct a system that is impervious to ambiguity due to colourblindness.

Re: SFO near miss might have triggered aviation disaster

#247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good observation. If you're wrong, you suffer a brief moment of embarrassment. If you're right, you might prevent a disaster. Speaking up is a no-brainer.

I don't mean to be a downer, but you could certainly cause an accident by calling out an observation which was faulty. I agree with the sentiment that you should speak up when you see something amiss, but let's not kid ourselves that, like every decision, it comes with inherent risk.

Making an aircraft go-around can never cause an accident - the missed approach path for any landing aircraft is always kept clear.

Re: SFO near miss might have triggered aviation disaster

#248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mons…

Automatic landing systems rely on ground support by way of microwave signals from transmitters installed near autoland-capable runways. There's no general position information, and the airborne part of the system can't operate independently of the part on the ground.

Civilian GPS signals are limited in terms of position accuracy, too. I believe the CEP is ten meters. That's not bad, but it's not good enough to land an aircraft. Altitude information from GPS is (IIRC) either nonexistent or severely limited, too. About any aircraft with a glass cockpit is going to support a moving map display, and those do see use - but, as a couple of professional pilots in this thread have noted, during final approach the main concern with regard to aircraft position is relative to the glide slope and the runway, and a moving map has nothing to do with any of that.

On a more general note, it is remarkable to me that so many otherwise apparently sensible software engineers seem to regard aviation as a problem trivially susceptible of perfect solution - every time we here on HN discuss any sort of mishap even peripherally involving any aircraft, the same suggestions invariably arise around automation, various schemes of runway lighting, cockpit lighting, instrument augmentation or replacement, pilot augmentation or replacement...

One would tend to imagine that the history of our attempts to perfect our own craft - including those attempts which we who build and maintain software make anew every day - would give us cause for humility on the subject of fields other than our own, about which in the main we know next to nothing.

Imagine five hundred airline pilots confecting an ad-hoc, long-distance postmortem of the recent us-east-1 incident! You'll have to imagine it, because it did not happen - and it is rare at best in my experience for pilots, because they are skilled in one highly complex and technical field, to imagine they can speak authoritatively in the context of another. Perhaps we might profit by their example.

Re: SFO near miss might have triggered aviation disaster

#249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stupid question - can you be certified as a commercial pilot if you are colourblind?

You can’t even be certificated as a Private Pilot if you are colorblind.

Not true at all.

https://www.aopa.org/go-fly/medical-resources/health-conditi...

Re: SFO near miss might have triggered aviation disaster

#250
AFAIK (not that I follow the issue closely) the problem of radio interference that ended the last-chance attempt to prevent the Tenerife crash has not been addressed [1]. If so, then it may be very fortunate that only one person called out that the landing airplane had lined up its approach on the taxiway, and not, for example, the crews of every airplane on the taxiway, simultaneously.

[1] http://www.salon.com/2002/03/28/heterodyne/

TL;DR: At Tenerife, both the Pan-Am crew and the tower realized that the KLM aircraft had started its take-off roll, and both tried to warn its crew at the same time, but the resulting radio interference made the messages unintelligible. The author states that a technical solution is feasible and relatively easily implementable.

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