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Near mid-air collision at LAX between American Airlines and ITA [video]

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Re: Near mid-air collision at LAX between American Airlines and ITA [video]

#51
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The canonical counter-example against voice/audio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NDqZy4deDI JFK controller tries to communicate with Air China 981

One of the YouTube commenters contributed some much-needed nuance. JFK Ground added to the confusion by repeatedly refusing to use standard phraseology, and failed to maintain professionalism, getting audibly angry and impatient. Both sides of the radio conversation had problems.

Exactly, voice comms has a large number of disadvantages. Thanks for expanding on the point I was making.

Re: Near mid-air collision at LAX between American Airlines and ITA [video]

#52
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Open to suggestions. Keep in mind I've worked on Aircraft control systems and have a very strong opinion on reliability and crew management. I also note that the budget isn't infinite nor do these aircraft like running electron apps. Also note that not all (if not most) aircraft are not brand new and so would need all to be retrofitted and re-rerated w/ any new system and every single pilot retrained. This requiremen…

> Also note that not all (if not most) aircraft are not brand new and so would need all to be retrofitted and re-rerated w/ any new system and every single pilot retrained Ah yes, I forgot, we never introduce new aircraft technology because it's too hard. Too bad we don't, it would be great to fit aircraft, with, say, anti-collision transponders and advanced ground proximity systems. Oh well, my mistake for even brin…

Suggest a specific idea, instead of this theatrical sarcasm.

Re: Near mid-air collision at LAX between American Airlines and ITA [video]

#53

Government shutdown. ATC are not being paid. Sort your country out!

Who are you yelling at? Do you think the Trump administration reads Hacker News? What do you expect the average American taxpayer to do to fix a government shutdown?

Re: Near mid-air collision at LAX between American Airlines and ITA [video]

#54

Is this significantly different from the near mid-air collisions that happen on a regular basis? The audio does an excellent job of showing a layperson how difficult it is to interpret and who's going wear based on sound, and then I had to go back through the video to see the turn. These people aren't being paid to do this right now? Is that right? I'm not American, but that's what I've heard.

I can't speak to the first question, but as to the second, correct, US air traffic controllers are not currently being paid. [1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/07/travel/shutdown-air-traff... . [2]: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/20/us/politics/shutdown-air-... . [3]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/28/air-traffic-...

Why are they turning up for work?

Re: Near mid-air collision at LAX between American Airlines and ITA [video]

#56
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right? Just in a car, we know that talking to someone in the car itself has adverse effects on situational awareness, and talking to someone on a phone is much worse than that. But even after all the research and training that goes into human factors in aviation ... we can't do better than confusing, poor quality, AM band party lines during critical phases of flight?

Would you rather them read text messages on their iPads?

Is your problem a trust issue with always-updating AWS-hosted randomly-banned silently-breaking framework-rotating modern web apps, or something fundamental with GUI based systems?

I mean, I wouldn’t trust a literal iPad, but I’m not sure if I distrust an entirely figurative iPad.

Re: Near mid-air collision at LAX between American Airlines and ITA [video]

#57

I was watching KBOS https://www.flightaware.com/live/airport/KBOS on Thursday morning and saw a couple of Cape Air flights that looked like they were within 500 feet of each other. I suspect we'll be hearing more of these stories soon.

If you are casually listening to ATC for fun then you should be able to recognize that the event in this story is not ATC error...

Re: Near mid-air collision at LAX between American Airlines and ITA [video]

#58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't speak to the first question, but as to the second, correct, US air traffic controllers are not currently being paid. [1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/07/travel/shutdown-air-traff... . [2]: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/20/us/politics/shutdown-air-... . [3]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/28/air-traffic-...

Why are they turning up for work?

Because they will be back-paid when the government reopens and if they stop showing up then they will be fired. Now, you could ask: won't they be able to get a job back later, who knows.

Re: Near mid-air collision at LAX between American Airlines and ITA [video]

#59
post #7

Kind of blows my mind how primitive this whole system still is. Audio quality is really bad. They're sending instructions by voice. The way they know who is speaking is by just saying their callsign with every message. There's got to be a better solution surely?

> Audio quality is really bad.

as the video says at the beginning, the audio is sourced from LiveATC, which is a network of volunteers with their own radio equipment [0] who tune in to ATC frequencies and then livestream them.

those volunteers are by necessity not at the airport itself, but some distance away. and the audio is compressed to 16kbps MP3 for livestreaming purposes.

this means the sound quality we're hearing is going to be worse (significantly worse, in some cases) than what the pilots and controllers actually hear.

> They're sending instructions by voice.

I get that it's 2025 and it's tempting to say "everything should be a text message". but remember that there's 2 pilots in the aircraft, the Pilot Flying and the Pilot Monitoring [1].

under normal circumstances, the PM handles talking to ATC (among other duties). but both pilots have headsets that allow them to hear transmissions from ATC. and crucially for the Pilot Flying, they hear those messages without taking their eyes away from actually flying.

modern aircraft do have a text message system of sorts [2] but there is a very good reason why the crucial ATC instruction in this case ("turn right heading 270 immediately") happens via voice and not an ACARS message.

also, it's important to remember that airline pilots in the US have a minimum of 1500 hours of flying time, and pilots flying an A330 on an LAX-Rome route probably have significantly more than that. we're watching a 5-minute video and going "oh it's a bit hard for me to follow this" but for actual commercial pilots this radio chatter is routine and something they have been practicing for years.

0: https://www.liveatc.net/faq/

1: https://skybrary.aero/articles/pilot-flying-pf-and-pilot-mon...

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACARS

Re: Near mid-air collision at LAX between American Airlines and ITA [video]

#60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the most reliable situation you can think of that will never fail and drive better audio quality? This is a field where they need more .9999s than Amazon.

Amazon is up to, what, one and half nines right now?

5 9s in 95.79999%
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