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My grandfather was almost shot down at the White House (2018)

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Re: My grandfather was almost shot down at the White House (2018)

#21

Post by krisoft »

knodi123 wrote: post #8

> "Airline pilots are the best at what they do and have spent years honing their craft." And apparently one of those rare and vital skills is filling in the gaps when talking to air traffic controllers who are not competent to communicate life-or-death information.

No the rare and vital skill is to get a map and look at it and figure out which way you are going to go. How come this person didn't know if they have to turn left or right? How come they didn't know from the top of their head the airspace structure around them (including restricted airspaces, especially). This is 101 level stuff.

Re: My grandfather was almost shot down at the White House (2018)

#22

Post by NordSteve »

blamazon wrote: post #9
knodi123 wrote: post #8

> "Airline pilots are the best at what they do and have spent years honing their craft." And apparently one of those rare and vital skills is filling in the gaps when talking to air traffic controllers who are not competent to communicate life-or-death information.

Why are we still doing air control with competitive real time voice radio anyway? Can we not engineer in some queued delay of planning? (I know nothing of the vagaries of air control)

Same reason there's party chat in your FPS game - puts a sense to use for a real time information channel. Most of the time voice ATC comms are boring, but when they are not they're super useful.

Set a calendar reminder for the afternoon of July 23, 2023 in UTC-5, and go listen to the audio channel for the north ATC sector for AirVenture arrivals at KOSH. You'll get what I mean.

Re: My grandfather was almost shot down at the White House (2018)

#23

Post by thepasswordis »

pivo wrote: post #18

I've just finished reading, "Zero Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service" by Carol Leonnig [0]. In that book the author describes an incident on September 12, 1994 [1] in which a pilot landed a small plane in front of the white house. Secret Service members she interviewed were dumfounded that they were asked there to run to the white house roof with rifles to protect the building, and that there were no such…

>The book makes it clear that the Secret Service is constantly underfunded and sorely lacking in modern technology, with agents sometimes having to use their personal car to transport the people they're protecting because their official cars aren't working.

Maybe the answer is to cool it with the idea that government officials all need to have large personal protective details. Isn't that the job of the police? And aren't they all just citizens of this country? If it's not safe for various politicians to walk around in the streets, then maybe they should do something about that because it means that it is unsafe for everybody.

Re: My grandfather was almost shot down at the White House (2018)

#24

Post by colonwqbang »

pivo wrote: post #18

I've just finished reading, "Zero Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service" by Carol Leonnig [0]. In that book the author describes an incident on September 12, 1994 [1] in which a pilot landed a small plane in front of the white house. Secret Service members she interviewed were dumfounded that they were asked there to run to the white house roof with rifles to protect the building, and that there were no such…

Yes, it seems unlikely. How many civilians would be in danger by the debris raining down on central DC (or the white house itself, if he really was right over it). Not to mention the risk of a missile missing the target and instead exploding somewhere down on the street.

Re: My grandfather was almost shot down at the White House (2018)

#25

Post by godshatter »

Shouldn't the dispatcher have given more precise directions than "follow the river"? If they had said "take a right and follow the river", this wouldn't have been a problem. I suppose they were used to professional pilots knowing what was meant, but they were already working to fit a small plane into a larger system presumably filled with mostly larger jets from commercial airlines that flew in and out of that airport regularly. Although I do agree that the pilot should have had no-fly zones at the top of their mind when flying in or around D.C.

Re: My grandfather was almost shot down at the White House (2018)

#26

Post by cjbgkagh »

Overtonwindow wrote: post #11

The FAA representatives terrible attitude aside, I sense there's something that is being left out. When the author states "I filed a visual flight plan and we were on our way. " that would seem to indicate that he looked at a chart, saw the restricted airspace, and planned his takeoff and turn appropriately. From the information given, I think the FAA rep was a douche but the author clearly did not plan his route pro…

The FAA rep is not just dissuading the pilot but any others who may hear about it. Also given the era it was much easier to get away with such bluffs as people couldn’t jump onto the internet to look for corroborating evidence.

Re: My grandfather was almost shot down at the White House (2018)

#27

Post by otikik »

One of the things that surprised me when I flew (as a passenger) a practice flight on a coworker’s Cessna was the constant radio chat between ground and all the airplanes. There were like 4 planes doing practice runs like us. It was constant chitchat.

I can’t imagine the noise in a big comercial airport.

I am sure there’s many good reasons for that system, figured out by people smarter than me with much more experience.

To me the whole thing felt too … manual. Imagine a bunch of train operators trying to avoid head-on collisions by all of them talking with a single control guy on a shared channel. But the trains move in 3D, one order of magnitude faster, and if they run out of fuel, they explode.

Re: My grandfather was almost shot down at the White House (2018)

#28

Post by fh973 »

godshatter wrote: post #25

Shouldn't the dispatcher have given more precise directions than "follow the river"? If they had said "take a right and follow the river", this wouldn't have been a problem. I suppose they were used to professional pilots knowing what was meant, but they were already working to fit a small plane into a larger system presumably filled with mostly larger jets from commercial airlines that flew in and out of that airpor…

Actually no. The fact that to the left was a restricted airspace (that the pilot must be aware of) disambiguates the instructions already. Obviously the pilot did not do their flight preparation, was it includes being familiar with any airspace restrictions.

Re: My grandfather was almost shot down at the White House (2018)

#29

Post by GTP »

krisoft wrote: post #21
knodi123 wrote: post #8

> "Airline pilots are the best at what they do and have spent years honing their craft." And apparently one of those rare and vital skills is filling in the gaps when talking to air traffic controllers who are not competent to communicate life-or-death information.

No the rare and vital skill is to get a map and look at it and figure out which way you are going to go. How come this person didn't know if they have to turn left or right? How come they didn't know from the top of their head the airspace structure around them (including restricted airspaces, especially). This is 101 level stuff.

But at the same time, ATC told him to follow the river, while in its trajectory he was crossing it. Did he do a wrong maneuver that made him go in the wrong direction form the start? Or was ATC that didn't give the information correctly?

Re: My grandfather was almost shot down at the White House (2018)

#30

Post by NelsonMinar »

Technology has made this problem better: most pilots these days are flying with a GPS enabled moving map. Little airplane icon, big scary boxes around restricted airspace. Yes all this stuff is optional and a good pilot will have other ways of knowing where they are. But in normal operation most pilots have something simple now. That wasn't the case years ago.
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