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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

#61

Post by King-Aaron »

valine wrote: post #10
King-Aaron wrote: post #3

Wow, reading that audio transmission log was pretty intense. Someone's losing their job for sure

If the goal is to improve safety firing people is almost always the wrong response. That juvenile preoccupation with punishment only serves to create a culture where mistakes are hidden rather than understood.

When we have major line-of-fire incidents on our sites that can very possibly result in loss of life, generally you do get the boot. And it is certainly not 'hidden', you get black listed and company-wide communications are sent as a result. People certainly do learn from these kinds of mistakes, but usually the person at the centre of it goes for a walk.

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

#62

Post by andreareina »

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…

Let's prevent ATC from oversubscribing runways first.

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

#63

Post by aaronmdjones »

King-Aaron wrote: post #3

Wow, reading that audio transmission log was pretty intense. Someone's losing their job for sure

I wouldn't say that's a given. For example, a similar incident occurred at Rhode Island in 1999, and the air traffic controller responsible was not fired -- merely sent for retraining before being returned to service. Like this incident, it was another flight crew that prevented the situation from becoming worse, by rejecting their takeoff clearance -- something the pilot-in-command of this Southwest flight should have done when told about a heavy 767 three miles out.

EDIT: Link. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1999/12/19/r...

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

#64

Post by vlovich123 »

plaguepilled wrote: post #48
kochie wrote: post #43

Earlier 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.

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.

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

#66

Post by vlovich123 »

bobterryo wrote: post #28
xpe wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> without keying the mic I’m not following

The conversation that we hear off the tape is only when the mic is keyed. There was probably a lot of discussion going on in the cockpit when the microphone was not live.

Are such conversations typically made available to the public, perhaps when the report comes out?

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

#67

Post by andreareina »

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

When I've had to take preventive action the profanity came after, not before

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

#68

Post by hattmall »

michaelmrose wrote: post #52
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.

That seems in line with what happens though. There's less than a minute, normally around 40 seconds between movements, a take off and landing. To casual observer it seems close of course but it appears the delay from the southwest crew was the issue. Then it's complicated by the lack of visibility from the tower because the controller couldn't detect the delay and issue appropriate commands.

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

#69

Post by rflrob »

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.

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

#70

Post by [deleted] »

adanto6840 wrote: post #40
russdill wrote: post #29

I'm curious in this situation if there was a TCAS warning.

Me too. Usually the pilots will mention it if they receive an RA, though. I think TCAS might even be disabled (or nerfed?) at low altitudes like this -- not positive, though. From what I've read, it sounds like this airport is not equipped with the ATC-equivalent of TCAS -- which I think would have been sounding all kinds of alarms (how early?) in the tower for a scenario like this.

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