8 ms·

This is facilitated by the fact that in some airports, taxiways and runways are similar and sometimes even used interchangeably (!), i.e. a runway may be remark

This is facilitated by the fact that in some airports, taxiways and runways are similar and sometimes even used interchangeably (!), i.e. a runway may be remarked as taxiway and vice versa. So it's not 'how can he be so dumb' moment, in some case you have no way to tell the difference unless you just know.

gambiting 9y ago
It feels like it could be solved incredibly easily by a row of lights at the beginning/end of both the taxiway and the runway, bright red for taxiway, bright green for the runway. If you are attempting to land on the strip marked red, then you are doing something wrong. In case that the taxiway is legitimately used for landing, change the colours around. I guess it hasn't been done for "reasons", I'd be quite interested in hearing why.
- dgoldstein0 9y ago
  this sounds like the start of a good idea, but we should choose something that works for colorblind people and red/green colorblind people too.
  - gambiting 9y ago
    Stupid question - can you be certified as a commercial pilot if you are colourblind?
    - briandear 9y ago
      You can’t even be certificated as a Private Pilot if you are colorblind.
      - phdp 9y ago
        Not true at all. https://www.aopa.org/go-fly/medical-resources/health-conditions/vision/color-restriction-removal https://www.aopa.org/go-fly/medical-resources/health-conditi...
      - Agathos 9y ago
        My father is red-green colorblind and he flies small planes.
      - CPLX 9y ago
        You can, but you're not allowed to fly at night.
      - deelowe 9y ago
        Why do people comment on things they know nothing about? Of course you can.
        pdelbarba 9y ago
        It's HN.... I get a good laugh out of all these aviation related threads. Understandably your average CS undergrad doesn't have much real aeronautical knowledge but that doesn't stop everyone from blowing up the comments every time the word 'airplane' is uttered.
      - cmurf 9y ago
        No you just get a night flying and color signals proscription on your certificate if you're a monochromat or dichromat (full color blindness); if you merely have a color discrimination problem by being an anomalous trichromat, you might pass the test, or fail it but then get an exemption (reversal of the prior failure) by later passing a more involve series of tests.
    - BjoernKW 9y ago
      No, you can't. A friend of mine couldn't become a commercial pilot because he has some kind of colourblindness. However, I remember him trying for some time and even campaigning for colourblind people to be admissible as commercial pilots because for the actual flying colourblindness doesn't seem to matter. So, perhaps ridiculous as it may sound taking colourblindness into account when proposing such an improvement isn't such a weird idea after all.
      - BurningFrog 9y ago
        You can become color blind later though.
        manarth 9y ago
        Commercial pilots are generally required to take a regular medical (it's every 6 months or 12 months in the UK). If a pilot were to acquire colour blindness, they'd be obliged to ground themselves and report the condition to the aviation authority.
        dbarlett 9y ago
        Or temporarily from medication, particularly those used to treat erectile dysfunction and benign prostatic hyperplasia [1][2]. [1] https://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/headquarters_offices/avs/offices/aam/ame/guide/pharm/ed/ https://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/headquarters_offices/av... [2] https://www.leftseat.com/viagra.htm https://www.leftseat.com/viagra.htm
        URSpider94 9y ago
        ... and as a professional pilot, you'd probably have to consult a flight physician if you were taking meds like these.
    - qubex 9y ago
      Actually, airline pilots (and pilots generally) are not the only people you need to take into account here. Many other potential users of the runways and taxiways would need to be taken into account, including ground staff and maintenance staff. Since I doubt that all of these are ruled out on the basis of colourblindness, it makes sense to construct a system that is impervious to ambiguity due to colourblindness.
      - schwap 9y ago
        But ground and maintenance staff don't need to identify them by colour from far away. For them, you could rely on simple signage.
    - cmurf 9y ago
      Yes, but the certificate comes with a limitation (color signal landing daytime only proscription; or night and color signal landing proscription). The requirements vary depending on class of medical certificate but in this context it's a class I medical for airline transport pilots (not commercial pilots) so it's complicated. Also, full on dichromats or monochromats are rare. Usually people are one of three anomalous trichomats. Hence testing is required to determine if it's a problem. The initial test is designed to have a high failure rate, and the exception tests to get the restrictions lifted take more effort. https://www.aopa.org/go-fly/medical-resources/health-conditions/vision/color-restriction-removal https://www.aopa.org/go-fly/medical-resources/health-conditi...
    - cyberferret 9y ago
      Not a stupid question at all. I clearly remember doing the colour blind test during my preliminary medical when I arrived at flying school to get my commercial licence. The test consists of going through a book with images made up of different coloured dots, and within each image was a coloured number made up of similar dots. We simply had to flip through the book and identify the number within each image. I was totally smug as I flipped through the book, calling out the numbers and watching the doctor tick off his chart. But towards the end of the booklet, I reached a page, and the image was just a jumble of dots to me. I couldn't see a number. I remember the panic and tightening in my chest as I thought to myself "Oh No, I can't see the number - I MUST be colour blind!! My dream of being a pilot is OVER". I stared and stared at the page, but in the end had to concede defeat and I quietly told the doc that I couldn't see the number on that page. "Oh", he replied casually. "That's OK, there isn't one on that page!". And he grabbed the booklet and tossed it back on his desk saying "You passed."
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- Domenic_S 9y ago
  It is done pretty much like that. PDF warning, page 31: https://www.faa.gov/airports/southern/airport_safety/part139_cert/media/aso-airfield-standards-quick-reference.pdf https://www.faa.gov/airports/southern/airport_safety/part139... Taxiways are marked with blue lights. Here's a video of a night landing on the same runway, the approach lighting is unmistakable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNMtMYUGjnQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNMtMYUGjnQ
  - cmurf 9y ago
    Yeah. At 1:18 that's clearly HIRL enabled. There's no ambiguity that's for a runway rather than taxiway. And it's not possible to visually misalign yourself with the taxiway, the whole point of HIRL is a visual aid for precision instrument landings in bad weather for Cat I and II ILS landings. On an instrument landing, it's not legal to go below decision height (200 and 100 feet respectively) unless you meet the visual reference requirement in 91.175 c3, ergo the HIRL lighting is simply unambiguous for a night VFR landing, and makes me wonder if it was even on.
- phdp 9y ago
  This already exists. Runway is lit up in white, has a green strip of lights at the close end as you look at it, and instrument rated fields have a chase strobe that points right to the end of the runway. Taxi ways are blue.
- oasisbob 9y ago
  Things like this are being tried. SeaTac airport has a taxiway which is large, parallel, and frequently (enough) mistaken for a runway. > SEA-TAC personnel have been very proactive in trying to reduce the problem, including the installation of an unlit, nonreflective elevated lighted X at the threshold of taxiway Tango; broadcasting a notice on the Automatic Terminal Information Service (ATIS) not to mistake the parallel taxiway for the adjacent runway; posting warnings on aeronautical charts not to mistake the taxiway for runway 16R; and the development of numerous training aids and brochures that explain the problem to transient pilots traveling through SEA-TAC. (Testing of multiple methods begins on page 5) http://www.airtech.tc.faa.gov/safety/downloads/TN07-54.pdf http://www.airtech.tc.faa.gov/safety/downloads/TN07-54.pdf
  - rconti 9y ago
    "...including the installation of an unlit, nonreflective elevated lighted X at the threshold of taxiway Tango..." Unlit lighted X. Right.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
    - shuntress 9y ago
      My assumption based on nothing in particular is that one (of unlit/lighted) means 'Lights contained within the X illuminating it from within' and the other means 'Lights external to the X illuminating it from without'
briandear 9y ago
It’s SFO though. And he’s an airline captain, so he should know.
- ncallaway 9y ago
  The absolutely stellar safety record of the airline industry exists because they have repeatedly and consistent pushed past human error as an explanation for a crash. Understanding that if a human made this mistake, another future human will likely make the exact same mistake, they push to understand _why_ an airline captain that should know made this error. Then try to correct for that. If every crash was written off as "the captain should have known better", aviation would not be nearly as safe as it is.
  - kbutler 9y ago
    Someday, perhaps computer programmers will start applying this principle.
    - Analemma_ 9y ago
      They do, or at least the big-scale places who know what they’re doing do. When Gmail or aws-east-1 or something goes down for hours, nobody is fired: they figure out why it was allowed to happen and change procedures so it can’t happen again.
    - goblin89 9y ago
      Perhaps not all tech companies care to push past human error in each postmortem (or even have a proper formal process at all), but some are known to do just that. Etsy and Google are among the well-documented cases. > This idea of digging deeper into the circumstance and environment that an engineer found themselves in is called looking for the “Second Story”. In Post-Mortem meetings, we want to find Second Stories to help understand what went wrong. — Blameless PostMortems and a Just Culture, https://codeascraft.com/2012/05/22/blameless-postmortems/ https://codeascraft.com/2012/05/22/blameless-postmortems/ > Blameless postmortems are a tenet of SRE culture. … Blameless culture originated in the healthcare and avionics industries where mistakes can be fatal. These industries nurture an environment where every "mistake" is seen as an opportunity to strengthen the system. When postmortems shift from allocating blame to investigating the systematic reasons why an individual or team had incomplete or incorrect information, effective prevention plans can be put in place. You can’t "fix" people, but you can fix systems and processes to better support people making the right choices when designing and maintaining complex systems. — Site Reliability Engineering — Postmortem Culture: Learning from Failure https://landing.google.com/sre/book/chapters/postmortem-culture.html https://landing.google.com/sre/book/chapters/postmortem-cult...
Karunamon 9y ago
Yeowch. I was about ready to make a comment about how the airport/approach plates should make something like this impossible, but then I looked up the diagram for SEA: https://flightaware.com/resources/airport/SEA/APD/AIRPORT+DIAGRAM/pdf https://flightaware.com/resources/airport/SEA/APD/AIRPORT+DI... Basically, you've got a runway, the taxiway of the same length as the runway!, and then two longer runways from left to right. I totally see how someone could make this mistake in bad lighting or weather!
- wolfgang42 9y ago
  And a note on that diagram: CAUTION: Pilots are cautioned not to mistake Twy T for a landing surface.

gambiting 9y ago

It feels like it could be solved incredibly easily by a row of lights at the beginning/end of both the taxiway and the runway, bright red for taxiway, bright green for the runway. If you are attempting to land on the strip marked red, then you are doing something wrong. In case that the taxiway is legitimately used for landing, change the colours around. I guess it hasn't been done for "reasons", I'd be quite interested in hearing why.

dgoldstein0 9y ago
this sounds like the start of a good idea, but we should choose something that works for colorblind people and red/green colorblind people too.
- gambiting 9y ago
  Stupid question - can you be certified as a commercial pilot if you are colourblind?
  - briandear 9y ago
    You can’t even be certificated as a Private Pilot if you are colorblind.
    - phdp 9y ago
      Not true at all. https://www.aopa.org/go-fly/medical-resources/health-conditions/vision/color-restriction-removal https://www.aopa.org/go-fly/medical-resources/health-conditi...
    - Agathos 9y ago
      My father is red-green colorblind and he flies small planes.
    - CPLX 9y ago
      You can, but you're not allowed to fly at night.
    - deelowe 9y ago
      Why do people comment on things they know nothing about? Of course you can.
      - pdelbarba 9y ago
        It's HN.... I get a good laugh out of all these aviation related threads. Understandably your average CS undergrad doesn't have much real aeronautical knowledge but that doesn't stop everyone from blowing up the comments every time the word 'airplane' is uttered.
    - cmurf 9y ago
      No you just get a night flying and color signals proscription on your certificate if you're a monochromat or dichromat (full color blindness); if you merely have a color discrimination problem by being an anomalous trichromat, you might pass the test, or fail it but then get an exemption (reversal of the prior failure) by later passing a more involve series of tests.
  - BjoernKW 9y ago
    No, you can't. A friend of mine couldn't become a commercial pilot because he has some kind of colourblindness. However, I remember him trying for some time and even campaigning for colourblind people to be admissible as commercial pilots because for the actual flying colourblindness doesn't seem to matter. So, perhaps ridiculous as it may sound taking colourblindness into account when proposing such an improvement isn't such a weird idea after all.
    - BurningFrog 9y ago
      You can become color blind later though.
      - manarth 9y ago
        Commercial pilots are generally required to take a regular medical (it's every 6 months or 12 months in the UK). If a pilot were to acquire colour blindness, they'd be obliged to ground themselves and report the condition to the aviation authority.
      - dbarlett 9y ago
        Or temporarily from medication, particularly those used to treat erectile dysfunction and benign prostatic hyperplasia [1][2]. [1] https://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/headquarters_offices/avs/offices/aam/ame/guide/pharm/ed/ https://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/headquarters_offices/av... [2] https://www.leftseat.com/viagra.htm https://www.leftseat.com/viagra.htm
        URSpider94 9y ago
        ... and as a professional pilot, you'd probably have to consult a flight physician if you were taking meds like these.
  - qubex 9y ago
    Actually, airline pilots (and pilots generally) are not the only people you need to take into account here. Many other potential users of the runways and taxiways would need to be taken into account, including ground staff and maintenance staff. Since I doubt that all of these are ruled out on the basis of colourblindness, it makes sense to construct a system that is impervious to ambiguity due to colourblindness.
    - schwap 9y ago
      But ground and maintenance staff don't need to identify them by colour from far away. For them, you could rely on simple signage.
  - cmurf 9y ago
    Yes, but the certificate comes with a limitation (color signal landing daytime only proscription; or night and color signal landing proscription). The requirements vary depending on class of medical certificate but in this context it's a class I medical for airline transport pilots (not commercial pilots) so it's complicated. Also, full on dichromats or monochromats are rare. Usually people are one of three anomalous trichomats. Hence testing is required to determine if it's a problem. The initial test is designed to have a high failure rate, and the exception tests to get the restrictions lifted take more effort. https://www.aopa.org/go-fly/medical-resources/health-conditions/vision/color-restriction-removal https://www.aopa.org/go-fly/medical-resources/health-conditi...
  - cyberferret 9y ago
    Not a stupid question at all. I clearly remember doing the colour blind test during my preliminary medical when I arrived at flying school to get my commercial licence. The test consists of going through a book with images made up of different coloured dots, and within each image was a coloured number made up of similar dots. We simply had to flip through the book and identify the number within each image. I was totally smug as I flipped through the book, calling out the numbers and watching the doctor tick off his chart. But towards the end of the booklet, I reached a page, and the image was just a jumble of dots to me. I couldn't see a number. I remember the panic and tightening in my chest as I thought to myself "Oh No, I can't see the number - I MUST be colour blind!! My dream of being a pilot is OVER". I stared and stared at the page, but in the end had to concede defeat and I quietly told the doc that I couldn't see the number on that page. "Oh", he replied casually. "That's OK, there isn't one on that page!". And he grabbed the booklet and tossed it back on his desk saying "You passed."
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
Domenic_S 9y ago
It is done pretty much like that. PDF warning, page 31: https://www.faa.gov/airports/southern/airport_safety/part139_cert/media/aso-airfield-standards-quick-reference.pdf https://www.faa.gov/airports/southern/airport_safety/part139... Taxiways are marked with blue lights. Here's a video of a night landing on the same runway, the approach lighting is unmistakable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNMtMYUGjnQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNMtMYUGjnQ
- cmurf 9y ago
  Yeah. At 1:18 that's clearly HIRL enabled. There's no ambiguity that's for a runway rather than taxiway. And it's not possible to visually misalign yourself with the taxiway, the whole point of HIRL is a visual aid for precision instrument landings in bad weather for Cat I and II ILS landings. On an instrument landing, it's not legal to go below decision height (200 and 100 feet respectively) unless you meet the visual reference requirement in 91.175 c3, ergo the HIRL lighting is simply unambiguous for a night VFR landing, and makes me wonder if it was even on.
phdp 9y ago
This already exists. Runway is lit up in white, has a green strip of lights at the close end as you look at it, and instrument rated fields have a chase strobe that points right to the end of the runway. Taxi ways are blue.
oasisbob 9y ago
Things like this are being tried. SeaTac airport has a taxiway which is large, parallel, and frequently (enough) mistaken for a runway. > SEA-TAC personnel have been very proactive in trying to reduce the problem, including the installation of an unlit, nonreflective elevated lighted X at the threshold of taxiway Tango; broadcasting a notice on the Automatic Terminal Information Service (ATIS) not to mistake the parallel taxiway for the adjacent runway; posting warnings on aeronautical charts not to mistake the taxiway for runway 16R; and the development of numerous training aids and brochures that explain the problem to transient pilots traveling through SEA-TAC. (Testing of multiple methods begins on page 5) http://www.airtech.tc.faa.gov/safety/downloads/TN07-54.pdf http://www.airtech.tc.faa.gov/safety/downloads/TN07-54.pdf
- rconti 9y ago
  "...including the installation of an unlit, nonreflective elevated lighted X at the threshold of taxiway Tango..." Unlit lighted X. Right.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
  - shuntress 9y ago
    My assumption based on nothing in particular is that one (of unlit/lighted) means 'Lights contained within the X illuminating it from within' and the other means 'Lights external to the X illuminating it from without'

briandear 9y ago

It’s SFO though. And he’s an airline captain, so he should know.

ncallaway 9y ago
The absolutely stellar safety record of the airline industry exists because they have repeatedly and consistent pushed past human error as an explanation for a crash. Understanding that if a human made this mistake, another future human will likely make the exact same mistake, they push to understand _why_ an airline captain that should know made this error. Then try to correct for that. If every crash was written off as "the captain should have known better", aviation would not be nearly as safe as it is.
- kbutler 9y ago
  Someday, perhaps computer programmers will start applying this principle.
  - Analemma_ 9y ago
    They do, or at least the big-scale places who know what they’re doing do. When Gmail or aws-east-1 or something goes down for hours, nobody is fired: they figure out why it was allowed to happen and change procedures so it can’t happen again.
  - goblin89 9y ago
    Perhaps not all tech companies care to push past human error in each postmortem (or even have a proper formal process at all), but some are known to do just that. Etsy and Google are among the well-documented cases. > This idea of digging deeper into the circumstance and environment that an engineer found themselves in is called looking for the “Second Story”. In Post-Mortem meetings, we want to find Second Stories to help understand what went wrong. — Blameless PostMortems and a Just Culture, https://codeascraft.com/2012/05/22/blameless-postmortems/ https://codeascraft.com/2012/05/22/blameless-postmortems/ > Blameless postmortems are a tenet of SRE culture. … Blameless culture originated in the healthcare and avionics industries where mistakes can be fatal. These industries nurture an environment where every "mistake" is seen as an opportunity to strengthen the system. When postmortems shift from allocating blame to investigating the systematic reasons why an individual or team had incomplete or incorrect information, effective prevention plans can be put in place. You can’t "fix" people, but you can fix systems and processes to better support people making the right choices when designing and maintaining complex systems. — Site Reliability Engineering — Postmortem Culture: Learning from Failure https://landing.google.com/sre/book/chapters/postmortem-culture.html https://landing.google.com/sre/book/chapters/postmortem-cult...

Karunamon 9y ago

Yeowch. I was about ready to make a comment about how the airport/approach plates should make something like this impossible, but then I looked up the diagram for SEA: https://flightaware.com/resources/airport/SEA/APD/AIRPORT+DIAGRAM/pdf https://flightaware.com/resources/airport/SEA/APD/AIRPORT+DI... Basically, you've got a runway, the taxiway of the same length as the runway!, and then two longer runways from left to right. I totally see how someone could make this mistake in bad lighting or weather!

wolfgang42 9y ago
And a note on that diagram: CAUTION: Pilots are cautioned not to mistake Twy T for a landing surface.