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‘Confirming we are cleared to land?’ Who said what at Austin

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Re: ‘Confirming we are cleared to land?’ Who said what at Austin

#131

Post by hef19898 »

EdwardDiego wrote: post #106
hef19898 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you are not involved directly with any of that professionally, it is better to treat it the way non-developer treat the OS. Assume it will work as intended because loads of highly trained professionals take care of it. Added benefit ehen it comes to aviation: strict and sensible regulation (the MAX disaster notwithstanding).

Re: ‘Confirming we are cleared to land?’ Who said what at Austin

#132

Post by kqr »

MPSimmons wrote: post #26

Please 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...

And the CAST Handbook by Nancy Leveson is really good in the sort of area of systems theoretic accident analysis. (It's available for free online.)

Re: ‘Confirming we are cleared to land?’ Who said what at Austin

#133

Post by Boltgolt »

JuniorBalleg wrote: post #122
catminou wrote: post #46

Reminds 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

[flagged]

This comment started off well and then just took a nose dive at the end all of a sudden

Re: ‘Confirming we are cleared to land?’ Who said what at Austin

#134

Post by hef19898 »

defrost wrote: post #115
hef19898 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> four dimensions You're sure about that?

They likely mean { X, Y, Z, T } three spatial dimensions and time which are four orthogonal dimensions. That said, it makes the "moving in" redundant and is shy a few dimensions if you want to go full descriptive phase space diagraming given velocity and acceleration in each spatial dimension are missing.

It is still just changing vectors and speed in three dimensional space so...

Re: ‘Confirming we are cleared to land?’ Who said what at Austin

#135

Post by hugh-avherald »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #57

Could the Fedex plane have caused wake turbulence for the other plane in this scenario?

Yes, and you've reminded me of a very similar example[1] captured by my favourite planespotting channel. At Perth Airport, a Singapore Airlines 777 was slow to take-off, the (I'm guessing trainee) controller ordered a landing Qantas 787 to go around, froze momentarily, causing her supervisor to intervene to hold the Singapore 777 whom the trainee then held for wake turbulence.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdZpPikptP4#t=3m25s

Re: ‘Confirming we are cleared to land?’ Who said what at Austin

#136

Post by EdwardDiego »

hef19898 wrote: post #131
EdwardDiego wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you are not involved directly with any of that professionally, it is better to treat it the way non-developer treat the OS. Assume it will work as intended because loads of highly trained professionals take care of it. Added benefit ehen it comes to aviation: strict and sensible regulation (the MAX disaster notwithstanding).

Well, I'm fucked if I assume that it's working as intended, and fucked if I don't, because as you say, I'm entirely reliant on professionals doing their job correctly when I'm flying.

And that professionalism seems to have failed in parts in this circumstance. (And has been well noted to have failed in many other circumstances with often tragic consequences.)

All that aside, I still want to understand why the Austin airport doesn't have ARIS? Cost/benefit? Not mandated by the FAA?

I'm afraid that "shush, and leave it to the professionals" isn't a very compelling argument.

Re: ‘Confirming we are cleared to land?’ Who said what at Austin

#137

Post by awiesenhofer »

rflrob wrote: post #69

Seeing other comments fault the Southwest pilot for not starting faster, but it’s not obvious to me that there was any significant delay—a few seconds at most between lining up and starting the roll down the runway. The diagram isn’t to scale, so it’s hard to tell. I wonder how much faster an expedited departure could have been.

From TFA: "Time 1:54, Tower: “Southwest 708, confirm on the roll?” Note that this comes 34 seconds after the previous transmission, and nearly a minute after the tower cleared Southwest for takeoff. In that minute, the FedEx plane has covered most of the distance to the airport. Presumably the visibility is so bad that the tower can’t even see the Southwest plane sitting on the runway. So the tower controller is asking: Hey, are you moving? Southwest immediately replies, “rolling now.” Investigators will also want to find out what the Southwest crew was doing through this time, in the minute after saying “we’re ready” and while knowing that another plane was about to land."

Re: ‘Confirming we are cleared to land?’ Who said what at Austin

#138

Post by Fatnino »

ekianjo wrote: post #53
xpe wrote: post #16

The top of the article: > ‘As bad as it gets without body bags.’ > Why the Austin airport situation was so dangerous. Because the planes almost collided. But the author wants to say more than that. The article covers the “how” things went wrong by analyzing the transcript. The write-up doesn’t answer the key ”why” question —- why are existing procedures and training not suitable? Safety-critical systems (including pr…

> he write-up doesn’t answer the key ”why” question —- why are existing procedures and training not suitable? This will be the job of the investigators but it sounds like obvious tower control human operator error.

It could be the fault of the southwest crew for dallying on the runway when there was an incoming jet. Had they gone immediately they would have been long gone by the time FedEx tried to land.

Re: ‘Confirming we are cleared to land?’ Who said what at Austin

#139

Post by hef19898 »

EdwardDiego wrote: post #136
hef19898 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are not involved directly with any of that professionally, it is better to treat it the way non-developer treat the OS. Assume it will work as intended because loads of highly trained professionals take care of it. Added benefit ehen it comes to aviation: strict and sensible regulation (the MAX disaster notwithstanding).

Well, I'm fucked if I assume that it's working as intended, and fucked if I don't, because as you say, I'm entirely reliant on professionals doing their job correctly when I'm flying. And that professionalism seems to have failed in parts in this circumstance. (And has been well noted to have failed in many other circumstances with often tragic consequences.) All that aside, I still want to understand why the Austin…

No idea about Austin airport. Regarding professionalism and failure, the Austin incident is actually proof of the system working as intended. There was, by the looks of it, only one real mistake made, maybe two. Training of everyone involved, including the ATC, prevented those mistakes from creating a cascade of failures that could have let to two hull losses and 100+ dead passenger on the Southwest flight.

For fatal accidents to happen in aviation and aerspace, more than one thing has to go wrong at the same time. Single, isolated failures are no longer sufficient to cause serious accidents.

Re: ‘Confirming we are cleared to land?’ Who said what at Austin

#140

Post by formerly_proven »

kochie wrote: post #43
mynegation wrote: post #32

So I am neither a pilot nor an aviation geek, but to me it looks like, besides heavy fog, two things happened. (1) control misjudged the approach time for FedEx. 3 miles out is - what? - a minute and a half, at best at approach speed? (2) control did not expedite a takeoff for southwest so they took their sweet time rolling onto the runway and accelerating. At this day and age it is bewildering to see all of this run…

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…

The job ATC does is conceptually the same job as railway signalling (allocating non-colliding paths through a shared medium).
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