351–360 of 435 posts
Wouldn't the word be "near hit" instead of "near Miss"? If you were close too missing, you'd hit something...
I love George Carlin, bless his soul, but this is one thing he got wrong.
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Seems like a design flaw. Do any taxiways have markings etc. to make them more distinguishable?
They do. They have different lighting systems/colours etc. to differentiate them. Taxiways generally have green lights along the centerline to guide aircraft rolling on the ground, but runways usually have white (bright) lights along the edges . There are times when even THAT causes confusion, because sometimes the taxiway centreline lights can look like the edge lights of the runway - especially if the light is refr…
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If there is fog you do not fly by hand. You use an automated landing system (ILS) in that case.
SFO's ILS isn't always functioning. It was turned off for months when Asiana crashed (June 1st - Aug 2nd)[1]. [1] http://www.popularmechanics.com/flight/a9124/what-went-wrong...
If there was fog, they wouldn't have been using 28L.
People "could" run their cars off of bridges every day, but they don't because they can see, and because roads have signs warning them of curves. This sounds like a story of how well the aviation system works more than anything. The pilot is in constant communication with the tower. The system worked as intended here and he went around. It seems like a non story.
Comment like that would put me off hiring you for any sort of mission- or safety-critical project. The approach for Asiana 214 looked fine until it wasn't; that was less than 4 years ago. Maybe you should stare at the video of that crash for a while and consider the large consequences that can ensue from a small error of judgement made a little too late.
Asiana wasn't a small error of judgment, it was a fundamental failure of training and over-reliance on automation which resulted in a pilot who didn't really know how to land.
I am just a passenger, but this looks very over-blown. A pilot aligned with the taxiway, that's bad. But no pilot would ever land on a runway (or taxiway) with 3 planes on it. Just search the Aviation Herald for "runway incursion". And indeed, he spotted them, communicated, went around. Aviation safety margins are so wide that this does not qualify as a near-miss.
I'm a private pilot who has flown into SFO once, and flies over SFO on a regular basis (I'm based at Palo Alto airport). This is not being overblown. If you listen to the audio tape, the tower orders the go-around at the 33 second mark, and United 1 reports that "Air Canada flew directly over us" 16 seconds later. That is a breathtakingly close call. Safety margins are wide when pilots don't screw up. But this one di…
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Yeah. When reading about modern air disasters, you often hear that five different things had to go wrong at once for them to happen. In this case, one or two things went wrong, the rest of them went right, and everything was fine.
This is spot on. The strength and weakness in doing something as complex as safely landing an airliner full of people is all in the capability of the human mind to use technology. Especially in flying, I think (I did this for a career, a whole other career ago) it's easy to have everything going smoothly, then some "minor" thing be out of expectation, but hey things are going smoothly, so dismiss the minor thing beca…
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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 i…
You can become color blind later though.
[1] https://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/headquarters_offices/av...
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Assuming the liveatc audio in the article has not been edited, it sounds like there's about 10 seconds between ATC giving go around and the United pilot saying they flew right over. With instructions given to Air Canada in between so it might have been seconds earlier. Based on that, it was seconds away from a collision. It seems like a near miss when considering aviation safety margins.
I would assume it was edited. He only joins the frequency about 30 seconds before it happens. That means tower only took control once he was 60 seconds before landing. I don't know the procedures at SFO but that seems too short.
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(pilot here) Yes, they are very well shown on maps, but it can be hard to map your diagram to what you're seeing, especially if it's raining or if it's at night, and even more if you're tired. I never made the mistake, but can see how somebody in bad conditions would.
Thanks! But why do you even have to map your diagram to what you're seeing? Isn't there a GPS system that shows you exactly where you are on the map and where you are going to go in the next few minutes? It doesn't seem like there should be any mental or visual processing to figure out that you're heading toward the wrong runway, right?
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic. [1] Is it just me or is this blatantly off-topic? Or is anything major happening in the bay area automatically on-topic for Hacker News? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelin…