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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

#51

Post by bruce511 »

smiley1437 wrote: post #22
xpe wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> without keying the mic I’m not following

'keying the mic' is turning on the microphone It's very likely they said some less polite words like 'WTF ARE THEY DOING' before turning on the mic and acting all professional

While that's certainly possible, in my very limited experience, the more dangerous things are the more professional the response.

Sure there's the initial surprise, sure there's the post-mortem release of emotional energy, but after the initial surprise it's all business. The pilots are communicating with each other, there's a lot of information, and tasks, to keep them occupied.

Relentless training for situations that "never happen" means that professionals go into a low-emotion state, and rely on memorized behaviours and checklists, coupled with intense intellectual evaluation.

See the audio from sullys Hudson landing. It's all simple communication, coupled with drilled responses (restart engine, start apu etc) being driven from cool analytical data processing - what will work, what won't etc.

Training the emotion (panic, fear etc) out of you is the very goal of training for extremely intense, life threatening, situations.

If the cockpit recordings are released it'll be interesting to know if I'm right, but the level of professionalism displayed by the FedEx crew suggests to me that they are both highly trained, and worthy of that training. Congratulations to them and their trainers.

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

#52

Post by michaelmrose »

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…

Who is saying that procedures allow one plane to take off when one is "3 miles out" or 65 seconds out at a very conservative estimate of a reasonable speed. This isn't a lack of attention or coordination. He literally decided that one plane could take off in that space and repeatedly confirmed this decision.

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

#53

Post by ekianjo »

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.

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

#54

Post by kcg »

Jtsummers wrote: post #42
cratermoon wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if there's pressure from airlines to reduce late flights and increase the amount of traffic airports can handle resulting in ATC cutting margins on separation? Would it really be the controller's fault if their job performance is dependent on getting planes into the air as quickly as possible?

> Would it really be the controller's fault if their job performance is dependent on getting planes into the air as quickly as possible? Yes. Their primary job is safety, speedy traffic flow is secondary to that objective. Cutting corners would mean abandoning pretty much the entire purpose of bothering with ATC versus letting pilots figure it out themselves.

This is completely correct. One of the first sentences in the 7110.65 (the FAA document governing ATC rules in the US, often referred to as "the book" by controllers) is "the primary purpose of the ATC system is to prevent a collision involving aircraft operating in the system." Loss of adequate separation between aircraft (called a "deal") is much worse for a controller's career than being inefficient.

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

#55

Post by ekianjo »

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…

> 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.

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

#56

Post by mynegation »

Ancapistani wrote: post #41
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…

One issue with that is that "aviation" includes a lot more than commercial airliners - it also includes inexpensive, Spartan general aviation aircraft. The cost of such a system would be prohibitive. Just look at the rollout for ADS-B In/Out if you're curious how difficult that might be to implement.

At least one of the planes in this situation was equipped with the system that lands the plane automatically in almost zero visibility. It’s not a stretch of imagination to see how that can extend to the system that tracks planes on approach to the airport and steering on the ground and extrapolates their trajectories at least for the typical braking/abort time forward. These are not general aviation, these are planes carrying tons of cargo and hundreds of people.

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

#59

Post by lmm »

ekianjo wrote: post #55
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…

> 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.
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