4 ms·
There's always room for improvement, but even the first incident outlined in the article shows how far we've come and how safe air travel is. - The 777's TCAS
by njovin 10y ago
There's always room for improvement, but even the first incident outlined in the article shows how far we've come and how safe air travel is.
- The 777's TCAS alerted them to the problem and recommended an evasive action, which they took
- The Controller, despite not having followed his normal procedure prior to issuing the takeoff clearance, noticed his mistake around the same time the TCAS went off in the 777 and ordered evasive action to the Cessna
- The FAA's reporting system allowed the pilot to report the incident which was followed up on with an official investigation after which several actions were taken, including training, QA reviews in the SFO tower, establishing a panel to review the SFO transition corridor, etc.
The road to flight safety is unfortunately paved with tragedy but that's the case with anything transportation-related.
The author's proposal to break ATC away from the FAA doesn't do much to fix the problem that caused the highlighted incident (human error). Although a better-funded ATC system might have more technical controls in place, when you're dealing with one of the busiest airspaces in the world issues like this are going to occur. A better solution might be to ban non-commercial traffic from certain Class B airspaces - not that I'm in favor of that.
- compiler-guy 10y agoYes, the amazing thing about that incident isn't that it happened, it's the number of simultaneous failures required for it to happen. And even in the face of so many failures, there was only a very close call, rather than a full incident. That seems like a pretty good outcome to me. The system could still use improvement, sure, but it is still pretty darn good.
- jedmeyers 10y ago> The Controller ... ordered evasive action to the Cessna From the tape it looks like the controller asked Cessna to 'maintain visual separation', which is a standard procedure for VFR and not an 'evasive action'.
- njovin 10y agoYou're right. He was told to 'pass behind that aircraft.' and since the report stated that the 777 saw the Cessna turning to avoid I sort of conflated the two things in my mind.
- Animats 10y agoThe paper strip system isn't that bad. Flight strips are mounted on rather bulky holders[1], and "handoff" is a physical handoff of the holder. Haneda, the busiest airport in Japan, deliberately stays with strips. The strip info also appears on screens, but the responsible controller has the physical strip. [1] http://www.flightstrips.co.uk/fpsh.html http://www.flightstrips.co.uk/fpsh.html