Wow. Just listed to the audio on this. At the end the tower radios over to the Fedex crew: "You have our apologies, we appreciate your professionalism".
‘Confirming we are cleared to land?’ Who said what at Austin
101–110 of 402 posts
Re: ‘Confirming we are cleared to land?’ Who said what at Austin
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because adding more technology doesn’t always makes things work better. I like this idea but the problem is you’ve just added another point of failure. Sure it may avoid this situation, but how many aircraft lifted off and landed at airports in the same day? In America I’d hazard a guess at aground the tens of thousands. Any new system has to reduce the complexity or risks of flying and that’s very hard to do. I’m no…
Hard disagree with the notion this adds a degree of failure. From a layman's perspective, it replaces one primary degree (pilot-control coordination) with another (a technological solution) and delegates the staffers to supervisory roles. That is a risk reduction due to the increase of confirmations and the independence between the staff decision and the software's decision.
If you talk about something like aviation, and start with "from layman's perspective", stopping there is usually not such a bad idea.
Re: ‘Confirming we are cleared to land?’ Who said what at Austin
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Why cannot descending plane lay a claim on a runway in some computer system and a cabin in Southwest - blare a horn for pilots trying to steer into a claimed runway? Because you have unions protecting the manual, error-prone job of human operators.
And yet somehow commercial aviation, with its strong unions, ends up safer than virtually any other field of human endeavour.
More or less the only real Six Sigma safe industry humanity managed to create. And still, every incident turns everyone into safety and procedurural experts, even before the official incident reports are done.
As much as this frustrates me, it has always been like that, and always will be like that.
Re: ‘Confirming we are cleared to land?’ Who said what at Austin
#104Listening to that audio is incredible almost chilling. The calmness in the voices. I understand this is how they are selected, trained and ultimately operate everyday moment-to-moment but the gap is so far for me I can't begin to understand it. Genuine question, why is this not fully automated today? Seems like something we should be easily capable of doing given CAT III.
To be honest, recordings from cockpits where pilots aren't that eerily calm (to our amateur ears) typically end with a fatal crash.
It reminds me of a video I saw that explored the crew resource management of a plane, and the good culture of the airline, that led to decision making that prevented a situation caused by the captain's earlier error becoming far worse.
Re: ‘Confirming we are cleared to land?’ Who said what at Austin
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hard disagree with the notion this adds a degree of failure. From a layman's perspective, it replaces one primary degree (pilot-control coordination) with another (a technological solution) and delegates the staffers to supervisory roles. That is a risk reduction due to the increase of confirmations and the independence between the staff decision and the software's decision.
Also once you fix a software bug, it’s fixed forever (generally). Humans introduce all sorts of fun variability every time the program is run.
Expecting mechanical accuracy from humans is a fool's errand.
ATC should be wearing VR goggles, visualizing approach and takeoff routing as it maps to flown with machines spotting the dangers similarly but differently from TCAS.
Re: ‘Confirming we are cleared to land?’ Who said what at Austin
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
The fact that Austin doesn't have ARIS terrifies me. It might not be the busiest airport, but it's not exactly a backwater town.
You're flying in and out of Austin a lot?
No, but I figure an airport servicing a metropolitan area with nearly 2 million people would be using all the best practice risk minimization approaches.
What scares me about this is that I have no idea how common or uncommon this is, and what other airports are in a similar situation.
Re: ‘Confirming we are cleared to land?’ Who said what at Austin
#107Please consider reading Sidney Dekker's books, The Field Guide to Understanding Human Error[1] and Drift Into Failure[2] [1] - https://www.amazon.com/Field-Guide-Understanding-Human-Error... [2] - https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=3123581163...
For those of us who aren’t familiar, can you link something in the book to the OP?
Working my way through it. It starts by talking about the bad apple theory but then debunks it;
> The Bad Apple Theory. It maintains that: • Complex systems would be fine, were it not for the erratic behavior of some unreliable people (Bad Apples) in it. • ‘Human errors’ cause accidents: more than two-thirds of them. • Failures come as unpleasant surprises. They are unexpected and do not belong in the system. Failures are introduced to the system through the inherent unreliability of people.
> • Getting rid of Bad Apples tends to send a signal to other people to be more careful with what they do, say, report or disclose. It does not make ‘human errors’ go away, but does tend to make the evidence of them go away; evidence that might otherwise have been available to you and your organization so that you could learn and improve.
> • Putting in more rules, procedures and compliance demands runs into the problem that there is always a gap between how work is imagined (in rules or procedures) and how work is done.
> Getting technology to replace unreliable people is an attractive idea, and is wide-spread. But technology introduces new problems as well as new capacities. Rather than replacing human work, it changes human work. New technology may lead to new kinds of ‘human errors’ and new pathways to system breakdown.
Re: ‘Confirming we are cleared to land?’ Who said what at Austin
#108> "You have our apologies and we appreciate your professionalism"
For almost killing them that's a light statement. Insane how they sound so calm. Always impressive fromn pilots.
Re: ‘Confirming we are cleared to land?’ Who said what at Austin
#109Reminds me of a time in 1999 when a US Air crew at Rhode Island refused to takeoff in the fog when the controller insisted it was okay. Another aircraft had landed and was lost in the fog about their location, even saying they were on on an active runway and even said an aircraft just took off (over them). Animation + text here if curious: https://youtu.be/qUDFY5qlTSA
One of my acquaintances used to be an ATC (air traffic controller) and has many pilot friends from back then. They all say the same thing whenever they talk about the most important thing in aviation: Have the courage to not take off. Kudos to that US Airways captain for refusing to takeoff and stay put until everyone got on the same page.
Another common thing I hear is about having the courage not to land. It's almost as if the dangerous part is low-altitude maneuvering!
Re: ‘Confirming we are cleared to land?’ Who said what at Austin
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of my acquaintances used to be an ATC (air traffic controller) and has many pilot friends from back then. They all say the same thing whenever they talk about the most important thing in aviation: Have the courage to not take off. Kudos to that US Airways captain for refusing to takeoff and stay put until everyone got on the same page.
> Have the courage to not take off. So many tragedies could have been averted if people just sat the fck down. If shit doesn't feel right, just chill until it does.
Don't just do something, stand there! is my favourite exhortation. If I ran my own company, I would have it plastered all over the office.