Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

fallows.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 402 posts

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

#281

Post by phpisthebest »

gus_massa wrote: post #275
barelyauser wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Risk will always exist. Our most precious resource is time. Every effort to save it is worth it. What if it causes one accident every 20 years? It saved thousands of years of human time in the meantime.

If time is our most precious resource, then build more runways. The problem is that they cost more money to build and more money to operate. So we go back to >> It sounds to me like far too many critical safety decisions are being made with an eye on money rather than safety.

Money is not the only problem at most locations

Major Airports are often locked in to the Physical foot print either due to Geography or other factors. Sure you can just "move the airpoirt" but then you have the NIMBY problem where everyone wants an airport close by, but never near by....

And if you want to simplistically run it all down to "money" well at that point everything is a money problem, so for like NYC; they could spend billions or Trillions to turn midtown into a big airport, but that seem rather unrealistic.

This narrative that came out of COVID of "if it saves just one life" is a bit ridiculous imo, and not at all practical

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

#282

Post by dghlsakjg »

blitzar wrote: post #193
sfeng wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did they come to rest on the runway, or did they wait a minute at the side of the runway and then proceed to takeoff? I don't think you would notice the difference as a passenger, unless you were listening in on the ATC transmissions.

I can not recall a flight where I was not in a queue to depart, nor an airport where there was not a 90 degree turn onto the runway. Without ATC I do not know when "cleared to takeoff" is given; it may be given off the runway, pilots spend a minute checking the mirrors and blindspot before turning onto the runway.

There are many runway intersections that are not 90 degree turns. They are frequently mid runway so typically only used by smaller planes for departure

Cleared to takeoff can be given before you have entered the runway, or you can be asked to “lineup and wait”.

The first means that you have permission to enter the runway, if you haven’t already, and takeoff. The latter means that you are cleared to enter the runway, but not takeoff and wait for takeoff clearance.

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

#283

Post by insane_dreamer »

blantonl wrote: post #278
insane_dreamer wrote: post #273

Question: are all approaching and departing planes on the same radio channel? Just wondering how the FedEx pilot communicated with Southwest plane. And if so, how does that work at very busy airports like Atlanta where there must be a couple dozen planes coming at going during peak times? Seems it would be confusing for everyone to be hearing everyone’s comms with ATC? (On the other hand it’s probably a good thing, a…

For operations on a specific runway, yes. Departing and arriving traffic on the same runway use the same frequency (called "Tower"). Some airports will have a single "Tower" frequency that controls all arriving and department traffic on all runways. Some larger airports will have multiple "Tower" frequencies that cover certain runway(s). But a single runway will always have departing and arriving traffic working on t…

makes sense; thanks.

So in airport with multiple "Towers", an approaching aircraft is contacted (on a preset freq?) while still a ways out, and instructed to switch to a given "Tower" frequency on approach? (Same with departing planes)

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

#284

Post by blantonl »

ninjagoo wrote: post #269
EdwardDiego wrote: post #95

Earlier 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.

Given that Austin has been adding > 50k people annually to its population over the past many years, and now is > 2.2 Million people in the Metro area, it might be time to upgrade KAUS from Class C to Class B, or at least started on that path. KSTL (St. Louis) and KMCI (Kansas City) are Class B, and at 10M and 7M carry fewer passengers than KAUS at 13M annually and have half the number of operations annually [1] [2].…

Class B criteria is > 300K operations annually - ~200K is KAUS.

KSTL and KMCI were formal airline hubs and are still Class B most likely due to legacy assignments. It's a lot harder for the FAA to "demote" a piece of airspace vs "promote" one.

I'm curious as to what you think upgrading KAUS to Class B would exactly accomplish, especially in this scenario? This was a runway localized mistake by the controller. Also, the word in the ATC community is this tower controller had been moved around the NAS multiple times as a problem child.

KSAT's airspace (not the airport, the airspace) farther south is FAR busier than KAUS and is considered some of the busiest airspace in the county due to multiple military fields in the area, extensive military training, etc. And it's also Class C airspace.

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

#285

Post by JustSomeNobody »

zackbloom wrote: post #123

Just to give a little context as a pilot: It is the job of the tower controller to decide who uses the runway when. There are often multiple planes waiting to take off, and multiple planes nearing the airport to land. It's not uncommon for a tower controller to allow a plane to takeoff while another is approaching the runway. The theory is, of course, that the flight will depart in plenty of time. In this case, the c…

Question, when FedEx says "Southwest Abort!" and then the controller tells them to turn right and Southwest says "negative" is that because they didn't have enough runway to do either?

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

#286

Post by blantonl »

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…

It is well known in the ATC community that this tower controller that was responsible for this incident was a problem child. He had been shuttled multiple times between facilities as a poor performer and was well known for filling EO complaints against the FAA for performance actions taken against him.

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

#287

Post by hef19898 »

doctor_eval wrote: post #260
hef19898 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you talk about something like aviation, and start with "from layman's perspective", stopping there is usually not such a bad idea.

There is nothing wrong with a layman’s perspective in any industry, and aerospace is not certainly not the sole domain of safety critical systems. An aerospace layman might still bring insight from other areas, which was the case here IMO. You have been repeatedly dismissing people in this thread, but HN is about being curious. “Leave it to the professionals” is neither satisfying nor interesting.

Curiosity is about learning, isn't it? Nothing wrong with asking questions, or following discussions and learn something new about an industry or domain you don't know a lot about.

Throwing ideas out to improve things, without properly thinking about the the root causes for incidents, not waiting for official investigations to be run, and all of that based on some audio recordings and headlines, or news coverage at best, is neither curious nor allows people to learn something. So yes, at a certain point, leave it to the professionals (whom else would one leave it to anyways?) is exactly the right thing to do. And maybe listen to people with more knowledge on a subject (probably not me in that case so).

Insisting on pre-formed "layman" opinions about something as peculiar as aviation, or aerospace, is the opposite of curiosity.

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

#288

Post by blantonl »

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 was without a doubt a performance problem with the tower controller.

FedEx deserves all the credit for avoiding a disaster. As soon as they got their clearance to land, they called back to clarify and verify it. So, they knew that this was going to be a close one, and you can bet that they were ready to go around and abort the landing before they every broke out below minimums and saw the Southwest on the roll.

FedEx knew it was going to be ugly, and they were already ready for the go around.

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

#289

Post by blantonl »

insane_dreamer wrote: post #283
blantonl wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For operations on a specific runway, yes. Departing and arriving traffic on the same runway use the same frequency (called "Tower"). Some airports will have a single "Tower" frequency that controls all arriving and department traffic on all runways. Some larger airports will have multiple "Tower" frequencies that cover certain runway(s). But a single runway will always have departing and arriving traffic working on t…

makes sense; thanks. So in airport with multiple "Towers", an approaching aircraft is contacted (on a preset freq?) while still a ways out, and instructed to switch to a given "Tower" frequency on approach? (Same with departing planes)

For all intents and purposes, yes, you are correct.
Post reply on HN