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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

#371

Post by dmitrygr »

mikeash wrote: post #346
adrianN wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Digital only require better signal if you want high data rates. With analog signal the human has to do the error correction, i.e. extract the signal from the snowy picture. Digital signals can use error correcting codes to get the same result. The more bits you have for error correction, the better your recovery can be.

I hate aircraft radios. I'm sure the guys in big planes have better equipment and don't suffer from this as much, but when I fly small planes, it's a complete mess of wildly different volume levels (it's fun to turn up the volume to hear a quiet person, then get blasted by the next transmission), interference, and irrelevant transmissions from a hundred miles away. Don't get me wrong, they get the job done and any ch…

even KY-97A from decades ago handles this for you

Re: SFO near miss might have triggered aviation disaster

#372

Post by shuntress »

rconti wrote: post #341
oasisbob wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Things like this are being tried. SeaTac airport has a taxiway which is large, parallel, and frequently (enough) mistaken for a runway. > SEA-TAC personnel have been very proactive in trying to reduce the problem, including the installation of an unlit, nonreflective elevated lighted X at the threshold of taxiway Tango; broadcasting a notice on the Automatic Terminal Information Service (ATIS) not to mistake the para…

"...including the installation of an unlit, nonreflective elevated lighted X at the threshold of taxiway Tango..." Unlit lighted X. Right.

My assumption based on nothing in particular is that one (of unlit/lighted) means 'Lights contained within the X illuminating it from within' and the other means 'Lights external to the X illuminating it from without'

Re: SFO near miss might have triggered aviation disaster

#373

Post by [deleted] »

dgoldstein0 wrote: post #231
gambiting wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

[deleted]

Re: SFO near miss might have triggered aviation disaster

#374

Post by cmurf »

briandear wrote: post #239
gambiting wrote: post #235

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.

No you just get a night flying and color signals proscription on your certificate if you're a monochromat or dichromat (full color blindness); if you merely have a color discrimination problem by being an anomalous trichromat, you might pass the test, or fail it but then get an exemption (reversal of the prior failure) by later passing a more involve series of tests.

Re: SFO near miss might have triggered aviation disaster

#375

Post by kevan »

goblin89 wrote: post #299
kbutler wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someday, perhaps computer programmers will start applying this principle.

Perhaps not all tech companies care to push past human error in each postmortem (or even have a proper formal process at all), but some are known to do just that. Etsy and Google are among the well-documented cases. > This idea of digging deeper into the circumstance and environment that an engineer found themselves in is called looking for the “Second Story”. In Post-Mortem meetings, we want to find Second Stories t…

Amazon is pretty strong on this front too, the most recent public example is the S3 outage and postmortem[1].

>Unfortunately, one of the inputs to the command was entered incorrectly and a larger set of servers was removed than intended.... We have modified this tool to remove capacity more slowly and added safeguards to prevent capacity from being removed when it will take any subsystem below its minimum required capacity level. This will prevent an incorrect input from triggering a similar event in the future.

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/message/41926/

Re: SFO near miss might have triggered aviation disaster

#376

Post by michaelmrose »

jon-wood wrote: post #293
wfunction wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can "upload" something from your iPad to the autopilot system without any kind of certification?

I have a feeling by "upload" they mean the iPad can display all the numbers that need to be manually punched into your autopilot.

This is actually kind of terrible. A compromised ipad could either compromise the planes actual vital systems for one, any time 2 systems are in communication a compromise is possible, and for two it could introduce a subtle numerical error.

I can't imagine a scenario where this ought to be allowed.

Re: SFO near miss might have triggered aviation disaster

#377

Post by michaelmrose »

Piskvorrr wrote: post #277
amelius wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When the GPS in my car shows two lanes, it clearly marks whether I should take the left or right one.

...but it sometimes detects your position as being in the other lane than where you actually are (or even a block away).

We can use gps to guide munitions moving at a very high rate of speed to very small targets. I'm guessing missiles and planes have better gps than your phone.

Re: SFO near miss might have triggered aviation disaster

#378

Post by mikeash »

lisper wrote: post #362
mikeash wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The recording is edited for highlights. The LiveATC archive has a ~40 second interval between "go around" and "flew directly over us" and even that archive is edited to remove silence, so the real interval may have been even longer.

Can you post/link the unedited version? I can't find it. Notwithstanding the timing on the tape, the AC jet could not have been very far away because the fact that he was lined up with the taxiway was first noted by a plane on the ground. That would not have been evident unless the plane was very close.

There's a less-edited version here:

http://archive-server.liveatc.net/ksfo/KSFO-Twr2-Jul-08-2017...

The action starts at about 14:45. I suspect there isn't much silence removed in this particular area, so 40 seconds may be close to the actual time.

I haven't been able to find a pure unedited version. They may not be saved.

Re: SFO near miss might have triggered aviation disaster

#379

Post by khazhoux »

theGimp wrote: post #114
tmsh wrote: post #92

The moral of this story for me is: be that "another pilot." To be clear, "another pilot" of another aircraft. Not as clear as it could be just like the title of this article is ambiguous. The moral of this story for me is: call out immediately if you see something off. He's the real hero. Even if the ATC controller immediately saw the plane being misaligned at the same time - that feedback confirming another set of e…

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 wonder how many people have died throughout history due to embarrassment, or (similarly) going against your instinct. The number exists but is unavailable to us.

- Not having that dark mole near your privates checked out.

- Not wanting to turn the car around.

- Not walking away when those shady guys walked in.

...

Re: SFO near miss might have triggered aviation disaster

#380

Post by anigbrowl »

blhack wrote: post #368
anigbrowl wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

One of my hobbies is shooting fire effects at big music festivals. We're shooting huge flames in front of 10s of thousands of people. I think that is pretty safety-critical. We have a very rigid communication protocol that I designed based on my experience as a pilot and all the time I've spent flying with my father, who is a very experienced pilot. The communication protocol and operational checklists are there spec…

It's your 'miss is as good as amile' attitude that I don't agree with. The people who are pointing this out as a problem aren't clueless passengers who happened to be in the airport and were surprised to see something they didn't understand, but aviation safety professionals.

your basic claim here seems to be that journalists took an unremarkable everyday incident and wrote it up in sensational style to make it look bad. I don't think that's the case.

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