How a Series of Air Traffic Control Lapses Nearly Killed 131 People (deccanherald.com) 58
Due to an air traffic control mistake in February, a FedEx cargo plane flew within 100 feet of a Southwest Airlines flight in February. The New York Times reports that the flight's 128 passengers "were unaware that they had nearly died."
In a year filled with close calls involving US airlines, this was the one that most unnerved federal aviation officials: A disaster had barely been averted, and multiple layers of the vaunted US air-safety system had failed... But the errors by the controller — who has continued to direct some plane traffic in Austin, Texas — were far from the whole story, according to 10 current and former controllers there, as well as internal Federal Aviation Administration documents reviewed by the Times. Austin-Bergstrom, like the vast majority of US airports, lacks technology that allows controllers to track planes on the ground and that warns of imminent collisions. The result is that on foggy days, controllers can't always see what is happening on runways and taxiways. Some have even resorted to using a public flight-tracking website in lieu of radar.
In addition, for years Austin has had a shortage of experienced controllers, even as traffic at the airport has surged to record levels. Nearly three-quarters of shifts have been understaffed. Managers and rank-and-file controllers have repeatedly warned that staffing levels pose a public danger. The controller on that February morning was working an overtime shift. In June, Stephen B. Martin, then Austin's top manager, and a local union representative wrote a memo pleading for more controllers. "Drastic steps are needed to allow the facility to adequately staff for existing traffic," they wrote to FAA and union officials.
Austin is a microcosm of a systemic crisis. The safety net that underpins air travel in America is fraying, exposing passengers to potential tragedies like the episode in February.
And yet the chair of America's National Transportation Safety Board calls the February incident "just one of seven serious close calls and near misses involving commercial airlines that we have initiated investigations on this year."
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article.
In addition, for years Austin has had a shortage of experienced controllers, even as traffic at the airport has surged to record levels. Nearly three-quarters of shifts have been understaffed. Managers and rank-and-file controllers have repeatedly warned that staffing levels pose a public danger. The controller on that February morning was working an overtime shift. In June, Stephen B. Martin, then Austin's top manager, and a local union representative wrote a memo pleading for more controllers. "Drastic steps are needed to allow the facility to adequately staff for existing traffic," they wrote to FAA and union officials.
Austin is a microcosm of a systemic crisis. The safety net that underpins air travel in America is fraying, exposing passengers to potential tragedies like the episode in February.
And yet the chair of America's National Transportation Safety Board calls the February incident "just one of seven serious close calls and near misses involving commercial airlines that we have initiated investigations on this year."
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article.
Same story, different month, different year (Score:4, Informative)
The air traffic control system has been broken since the 90s.
They hire big contractors to fix it and they just pocket the free money and nothing gets fixed.
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Re: Same story, different month, different year (Score:5, Informative)
More accidents before the 80s than after ....
The reason for this is a safety system called TCAS (Traffic Collision Alert and Avoidance System) which since 1988
has been required on all Commercial passenger planes.
TCAS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Please explain how reducing manpower (a common way to increase profits) and reducing development and maintenance of technology (another popular way to increase profits) would benefit ATC or aircraft safety.
Assuming that your philosophy is correct in all contexts is a fallacy. The correct solution is to look at the requirements and develop your solution around those rather than around ideology.
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> privatize it the way it's done in Canada
"Each airport authority leases its airport(s) from the federal government and is solely responsible for operating, maintaining, and developing the airport(s) in accordance with the terms of the lease between the authority and the federal government."
"The Canadian aviation industry is regulated by several government entities. From overseeing the safety and security aspects of civil aviation, the economic regulation of civil aviation, front-line border enforcement,
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Shit you're right...Things were much more dangerous before Reagan destroyed PATCO in 1981.
https://aviation-safety.net/st... [aviation-safety.net]
I think you're on to something here...Maybe Ford and GM will stop producing shitty cars if the UAW is destroyed too.
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They hire big contractors to fix it and they just pocket the free money and nothing gets fixed.
Maybe I'm missing something, but why is it a hard problem?
A couple college students should be able to slap something together in a weekend.
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Submit a bid and git r done.
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Submit a bid and git r done.
Thank you Larry The Cable Guy
Re: Same story, different month, different year (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not hard if you know what you're doing in every applicable domain.
Software, radar, human factors, aviation, weather, probable some more obvious ones I'm missing, and a couple non-obvious ones too.
Plenty of college students can get smart about one or two of these "in a weekend" but not many organizations can get together enough people competent across everything necessary *and* make sure they're working together vs in parallel silos.
Same as any complex system that works most of the time. Someone did a lot of hard work to make it look easy.
Re: Same story, different month, different year (Score:4, Insightful)
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It's a mixture of ancient systems with proprietary and bizarre interfaces. Lots of rules and regulations that must be accounted for. There are established ways of doing things, created in reaction to various to accidents and failures. The industry and regulators are very resistant to change for that reason.
And that's just the near miss that got caught (Score:4, Interesting)
How many more where noone involved even realized a mistake occurred?
Re:And that's just the near miss that got caught (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, logs get analyzed very carefully, but also quite a bit later. They probably know about all of them.
Re: And that's just the near miss that got caught (Score:1)
Logs get analyzed carefully...in the event of an obvious mishap or near miss. I would speculate that an average day with average events gets less attention.
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Since they _find_ these things from log analysis, I would speculate you speculate wrong.
Re: And that's just the near miss that got caught (Score:2)
TFA wasn't found from log analysis. It was found by the fedex pilot seeing a plane where there should have been an empty runway.
Re:Expect more of this in the future... (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, I can understand you really _love_ that tree. But constantly barking up that tree just makes you stupid.
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Well, I can understand you really _love_ that tree. But constantly barking up that tree just makes you stupid.
Consistent with their anti-diversity ideology they only actually have that one argument for any situation.
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Except his statement was true for pilots:
"United’s flight school is meant to provide training to pilots with little-to-no experience. United said it wants to train 5,000 pilots and aims for half of them to be women and people of color."
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/0... [cnbc.com]
The problem is that he didn't provide a supporting link for whether there is a diversity/qualification issue for ATCs also.
That article doesn't show a (potential) diversity/qualification issue for pilots either.
There would be a qualification issue if United was simply hiring unqualified female & minority pilots. Instead, it's planning to train female & minority pilots so there's a pool of qualified pilots for them to hire.
Re: Expect more of this in the future... (Score:1)
He's modded troll (but not trolling- moderation in bad faith is common though).
But it isn't like his hypothesis can be checked by laymen like you or I- the data of mistakes categorized by severity, race, age, and sex is not available.
Since the people in charge of this could easily get that data, we are left with the following states, one of which is true.
1- They deliberately do not gather this data because it may show a truth they don't want, such as many nations that refuse to list crime data by race, some
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3- Nobody cares but the racists, so only racists deal with that data.
The people who worry about diversity hires are never your top candidates in the first place. The whole question is *moot* from the hiring perspective because they weren't going to pick *you*. There are ten white adult males in line ahead of you and none of them look like HR nightmares.
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if it weren't being swung in our faces so often.
Maybe, instead, you should investigate who is swinging it in your face so much, and why they are doing it.
We all see it
Do we, though? I sure don't.
it would be very natural to suspect that it were.
No, it really isn't. That whole premise hinges on the ASSUMPTION that "diversity hires" were somehow involved. Do you have facts to back up that assumption?
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That whole premise hinges on the ASSUMPTION that "diversity hires" were somehow involved. Do you have facts to back up that assumption?
For ATC, I somehow doubt that.
Just another sign of things slowly crumbling (Score:2)
Not the only one by far.
Too many planes (Score:5, Interesting)
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-Get off my sky.
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Every now and then LAX gets loaded and there are a lot of planes coming in to land at the dual runways. At night we call them a "string of pearls".
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Living in north seattle, when the weather was clear, looking south towards the SeaTac airport in the evening it looked like a "Stairway To Heaven".
Always amazed me that it worked so well, and that on the cloudy/foggy days there weren't mass collisions.
Got to trust all those instruments like a mofo.
I avoid flying now.
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Nothing new. You must live in a city.
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rules surrounding not wanting to train people over age 25 or something ridiculous like that only helps to contribute to the problem
Long ago I had a friend that was an ATC. He told me that the cutoff age for new ATCs was 25(?) because they had 100% failure rate of everyone older than that who entered the training program. He was just under the cutoff age and scary driven and focused. So not so much a ridiculous rule and more of a pragmatic realization.
fix the february dup typo (Score:1)
ATC needs determine careful change (Score:2)
These near misses have been increasing in the past few years. Start with a 50Â cess on all tickets for a few years to fund research and development for making things better.
Why not feed all voice and traffic logs to AI and train it to find patterns leading to problems? But this should only be a small part of the initiative. The main problem should be addressed by fixing staffing issues and improving rule-based (non-AI) software systems.
Re: ATC needs "determined" careful change (Score:2)
"Determined, careful change"
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If autonomous is good enough for our cars then it's good enough for our planes.
Less flights and larger planes (Score:2)
With all these issues I am surprised airports are trying to reduce the number of flights and just have airlines use larger planes.
Iâ(TM)d even argue the FAA needs to provide an updated formula on the number of planes that can pass through at any point.
Beyond planes, the US really needs to starting reevaluating how high speed trains address future transportation.
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I agree. Transportation needs to be seen as a complete solution made up of the different types of solutions. The US was built with the help of the railway, then the government favoured the car and the aeroplane to its disadvantage.
The problem today in the US is partisan politics that gets in the way of actually improving the country.
While the EU does have its own issues, at least it has a coherent plan to improve travel across its member states.
Coincidentally, I have a view of AUS approach (Score:2)
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3/ (Score:2)
Simultaneous landings and takeoffs (Score:2)
money wasted (Score:5, Insightful)
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I have a friend, probably the most intelligent person I know. He took a pre-screening test to become an air traffic controller, but failed the multitasking part of the test. I wonder how many people can pass that test, and if these skills are really necessary to be a competent air traffic controller. This test is only applied towards new candidates. Old traffic controllers weren't tested to the same level. Also, the job is now heavily assisted by computers. Can they just allow for controllers of various levels of competence for various different setups? Say leave the super-multitaskers to take care of busy airspace and allow normal humans to control traffic at less busy airspace. Is the multitasking test even valid, psychometrically? Who made it a requirement? Why? Is there a Union behind all these hurdles?
I am not an ATC, but have maneuvered ships in heavy traffic areas. Technology helps, but unless you can keep a good mental picture of teh situation, i.e. spatial awareness, it is easy to get overwhelmed and lose the big flick; that's when things go bump in the night.
Repercussions for the controller? (Score:2)
I read TFA.
At the end: "It isn’t clear whether he [the controller] will face repercussions after the NTSB investigation is complete."
One thing that *is* clear though: If he does face repercussions, it'll be even more difficult to hire competent ATC staff in the future.
incompetent article (Score:4, Interesting)
These fine ladies who wrote this article know nothing about aviation, but it's the NYT, so why be surprised.
The problem that they are unaware of, in their in-depth analysis of everything else other than what the problem is with this event, is that under FAA regulations controllers are allowed to put planes on the runway while another plane is on final approach. This is allowed for only 1 simple reason: to increase throughput because airports in the US don't have the capacity to handle all the traffic that wants to fly at peak times.
As I understand it from comments from European pilots on aviation channels, Europe, which also has all the fancy doodads that these ladies complain about, PROHIBITS this action. No plane may be on the runway when there is another plane on final.
This whole event, and numerous similar ones, are the result of bad FAA rulemaking.
This is what happens when government runs the ATC (Score:2)
I am a commercial pilot.
The ATC system in the US is woefully outdated and obsolete. Most of the controllers are great professionals who are good at their jobs, but they have been handed a shit sandwich and are expected to chew and swallow it.
I would say at least HALF of ATCs function could be automated. The need for human interaction in half to 2/3rd of the course of normal operations is a major flow choke point in how things moving metal. Couple this with simplex radio communications and their only option