8 ms·

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

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 running on human communication essentially. Why cannot descending plane lay a claim on a runway in some computer system and a cabin in Southwest - blare a horn for pilots trying to steer into a claimed runway?

idlewords 4y ago
The Southwest crew here is also to blame, they knew a plane was on short final to their runway in terrible visibility and for some reason took their sweet time taking off.
- kelnos 4y ago
  Or hell, they could have taken the even-safer option and informed ATC they were going to hold until FedEx landed. Regardless, I think it's too early to lay definitive blame until the NTSB report comes out.
  - cjrp 4y ago
    Commercial pressures. Holding for Fedex would have added a few mins, maybe lost them their place in the queue, etc. It's not a reason to act unsafely, but it is a factor.
    - ninjagoo 4y ago
      > Commercial pressures. Holding for Fedex would have added a few mins They spent a minute extra before starting their takeoff roll; it wouldn't have hurt to wait an additional 5 minutes. Commercial flights build in a generous margin for ground ops these days. I doubt this was a factor in this specific case. > maybe lost them their place in the queue, etc. They were at the runway already, there's no way for them to have lost their place in the queue for that runway 18L [1]. [1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a9/AUSFAA.pdf https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a9/AUSFAA.p...
      - cjrp 4y ago
        > They were at the runway already, there's no way for them to have lost their place in the queue for that runway 18L [1]. Sure there is, enter the runway at bravo, right turn foxtrot, left on alpha and join the conga line. Happens all the time at places like JFK (admittedly Austin is not JFK).
        ninjagoo 4y ago
        >> They were at the runway already, there's no way for them to have lost their place in the queue for that runway 18L [1]. > Sure there is, enter the runway at bravo, right turn foxtrot, left on alpha and join the conga line. Happens all the time at places like JFK (admittedly Austin is not JFK). This routing appears to require the SouthWest aircraft to enter the active runway with FedEx Heavy on Final to that end, presumably the problem we're trying to avoid ... In both cases, SW would be well within their rights to say "unable to comply".
- doctor_eval 4y ago
  You’re assuming situational awareness, but they would have been running checklists preparing for takeoff, and may not have heard how far away the fedex was. I didn’t think they took overly long, and they weren’t instructed to hurry.
  - justsid 4y ago
    The Southwest flight announced that they are ready after presumably holding short of the runway to do exactly what you just said. ATC also informed them that there was a 767 3 miles out right after reading the take off clearance. The Southwest crew read back the take off clearance, so presumably they also heard the bit about the other plane. Even without being instructed to expedite the departure, they should at least have realized that they don't have a ton of time on the runway. More will surely be revealed in the follow up investigation and right now it's all armchair piloting. But I too am a little surprised the Southwest flight took its sweet time to do anything and was seemingly unaware of what was going despite being explicitly informed.
    - doctor_eval 4y ago
      Totally agree we should wait for the investigation. It’s going to be very interesting. To your point though, we also don’t know what was going on in the cockpit of the 737. Even if they were aware of how close the FedEx jet was, it’s entirely possible something went wrong that caused them to delay the takeoff roll (assuming it was delayed). There are plenty of things that could have gone wrong on the ground. Separating traffic is the ATCs job and clearly there was a loss of separation. Very hard for me to see how this could be Southwest’s problem particularly since they weren’t yet airborne.
Ancapistani 4y ago
One issue with that is that "aviation" includes a lot more than commercial airliners - it also includes inexpensive, Spartan general aviation aircraft. The cost of such a system would be prohibitive. Just look at the rollout for ADS-B In/Out if you're curious how difficult that might be to implement.
- knodi123 4y ago
  Yeah, but at least at this airport, they almost always use separate runways. They COULD share, but that sounds like making perfection the enemy of improvement.
- quest88 4y ago
  Are there aircraft with cat3 approaches that aren’t commercial? I don’t know any any GA that do that.
  - mulmen 4y ago
    Looks like the Piper M600, Daher TBM 940, and Cirrus Vision all have auto-land capabilities through the Garmin G3000 system. But it doesn’t seem to be as sophisticated as what is described for the airliners. It’s more of an emergency system.
- mynegation 4y ago
  At least one of the planes in this situation was equipped with the system that lands the plane automatically in almost zero visibility. It’s not a stretch of imagination to see how that can extend to the system that tracks planes on approach to the airport and steering on the ground and extrapolates their trajectories at least for the typical braking/abort time forward. These are not general aviation, these are planes carrying tons of cargo and hundreds of people.
  - euroderf 4y ago
    Sounds like a job for... A.I.?
kochie 4y ago
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 not an aviation expert either but it’s assume that some form of system exists for this also in a more manual form.
- plaguepilled 4y ago
  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.
  - vlovich123 4y ago
    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.
    - 1letterunixname 4y ago
      Expecting mechanical accuracy from humans is a fool's errand. ATC should be wearing VR goggles, visualizing approach and takeoff routing as it maps to flown with machines spotting the dangers similarly but differently from TCAS.
      - hef19898 4y ago
        And the VR goggles help them read the minds of pilots about the speed in which they move their planes around on the ground, and when? Move fast and break things has no place in aerospace nor aviation, just rolling whatever fancy new tech is there is not done for reasons. And this behavior made aviation as safe as it is today.
ekianjo 4y ago
> Why cannot descending plane lay a claim on a runway in some computer system and a cabin in Southwest - blare a horn for pilots trying to steer into a claimed runway? Because you have unions protecting the manual, error-prone job of human operators.
- lmm 4y ago
  And yet somehow commercial aviation, with its strong unions, ends up safer than virtually any other field of human endeavour.
  - hef19898 4y ago
    More or less the only real Six Sigma safe industry humanity managed to create. And still, every incident turns everyone into safety and procedurural experts, even before the official incident reports are done. As much as this frustrates me, it has always been like that, and always will be like that.
    - euroderf 4y ago
      Any back-of-the-envelope safety comparisons between the airline industry and manned spaceflight (to include STS) ?
      - hef19898 4y ago
        What would that be good for, did a shuttle accident take down an airliner and I am not aware of that?
    - amluto 4y ago
      Nuclear power is also extremely safe.
      - Schroedingersat 4y ago
        ^1 At the point and time of power generation. Safety may not apply if your ground water was poisoned by a Uranium mine. If your town happens to have its cancer rates triple you probably started smoking or something. You will not be eligiblefor compensation.
andreareina 4y ago
Let's prevent ATC from oversubscribing runways first.
Animats 4y ago
That's called Runway Status Lights, controlled by an Autonomous Runway Incursion System [1]. The busiest US airports have that, but Austin doesn't have one.[1][2] So the tower controllers had responsibility for separation. Here are the current FAA rules on separation between departing and arriving aircraft using the same runway. See section 3-1-3 of [3]. This is the rule: "Separate an arriving aircraft from another aircraft using the same runway by ensuring that the arriving aircraft does not cross the landing threshold until one of the following conditions exists .... The other aircraft has departed and crossed the runway end or turned to avert any conflict. If you can determine distances by reference to suitable landmarks, the other aircraft needs only be airborne if the following minimum distance exists between aircraft: ...when either is a Category III aircraft- 6,000 feet." The trouble is, the controller can apparently say "Cleared to land" when they expect that departing aircraft will be airborne and at least 6,000 feet down the runway, and thus out of the way, before the incoming aircraft crosses the landing threshold. Not when it actually is in the air and out of the conflict zone. Or at least in this case, the controller did. This is apparently called "reduced runway separation". The intent is to increase traffic capacity. But this was in fog. Tower probably could not see the departing aircraft, and they did not apparently have a sensor system to compensate for that. [1] https://skybrary.aero/articles/autonomous-runway-incursion-warning-system-ariws https://skybrary.aero/articles/autonomous-runway-incursion-w... [2] https://skybrary.aero/articles/runway-status-lights-rwsl https://skybrary.aero/articles/runway-status-lights-rwsl [3] https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/atpubs/atc_html/chap3_section_10.html https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/atpubs/atc_html...
- EdwardDiego 4y ago
  The fact that Austin doesn't have ARIS terrifies me. It might not be the busiest airport, but it's not exactly a backwater town.
  - hef19898 4y ago
    You're flying in and out of Austin a lot?
    - 4y ago

idlewords 4y ago

The Southwest crew here is also to blame, they knew a plane was on short final to their runway in terrible visibility and for some reason took their sweet time taking off.

kelnos 4y ago
Or hell, they could have taken the even-safer option and informed ATC they were going to hold until FedEx landed. Regardless, I think it's too early to lay definitive blame until the NTSB report comes out.
- cjrp 4y ago
  Commercial pressures. Holding for Fedex would have added a few mins, maybe lost them their place in the queue, etc. It's not a reason to act unsafely, but it is a factor.
  - ninjagoo 4y ago
    > Commercial pressures. Holding for Fedex would have added a few mins They spent a minute extra before starting their takeoff roll; it wouldn't have hurt to wait an additional 5 minutes. Commercial flights build in a generous margin for ground ops these days. I doubt this was a factor in this specific case. > maybe lost them their place in the queue, etc. They were at the runway already, there's no way for them to have lost their place in the queue for that runway 18L [1]. [1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a9/AUSFAA.pdf https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a9/AUSFAA.p...
    - cjrp 4y ago
      > They were at the runway already, there's no way for them to have lost their place in the queue for that runway 18L [1]. Sure there is, enter the runway at bravo, right turn foxtrot, left on alpha and join the conga line. Happens all the time at places like JFK (admittedly Austin is not JFK).
      - ninjagoo 4y ago
        >> They were at the runway already, there's no way for them to have lost their place in the queue for that runway 18L [1]. > Sure there is, enter the runway at bravo, right turn foxtrot, left on alpha and join the conga line. Happens all the time at places like JFK (admittedly Austin is not JFK). This routing appears to require the SouthWest aircraft to enter the active runway with FedEx Heavy on Final to that end, presumably the problem we're trying to avoid ... In both cases, SW would be well within their rights to say "unable to comply".
doctor_eval 4y ago
You’re assuming situational awareness, but they would have been running checklists preparing for takeoff, and may not have heard how far away the fedex was. I didn’t think they took overly long, and they weren’t instructed to hurry.
- justsid 4y ago
  The Southwest flight announced that they are ready after presumably holding short of the runway to do exactly what you just said. ATC also informed them that there was a 767 3 miles out right after reading the take off clearance. The Southwest crew read back the take off clearance, so presumably they also heard the bit about the other plane. Even without being instructed to expedite the departure, they should at least have realized that they don't have a ton of time on the runway. More will surely be revealed in the follow up investigation and right now it's all armchair piloting. But I too am a little surprised the Southwest flight took its sweet time to do anything and was seemingly unaware of what was going despite being explicitly informed.
  - doctor_eval 4y ago
    Totally agree we should wait for the investigation. It’s going to be very interesting. To your point though, we also don’t know what was going on in the cockpit of the 737. Even if they were aware of how close the FedEx jet was, it’s entirely possible something went wrong that caused them to delay the takeoff roll (assuming it was delayed). There are plenty of things that could have gone wrong on the ground. Separating traffic is the ATCs job and clearly there was a loss of separation. Very hard for me to see how this could be Southwest’s problem particularly since they weren’t yet airborne.

Ancapistani 4y ago

One issue with that is that "aviation" includes a lot more than commercial airliners - it also includes inexpensive, Spartan general aviation aircraft. The cost of such a system would be prohibitive. Just look at the rollout for ADS-B In/Out if you're curious how difficult that might be to implement.

knodi123 4y ago
Yeah, but at least at this airport, they almost always use separate runways. They COULD share, but that sounds like making perfection the enemy of improvement.
quest88 4y ago
Are there aircraft with cat3 approaches that aren’t commercial? I don’t know any any GA that do that.
- mulmen 4y ago
  Looks like the Piper M600, Daher TBM 940, and Cirrus Vision all have auto-land capabilities through the Garmin G3000 system. But it doesn’t seem to be as sophisticated as what is described for the airliners. It’s more of an emergency system.
mynegation 4y ago
At least one of the planes in this situation was equipped with the system that lands the plane automatically in almost zero visibility. It’s not a stretch of imagination to see how that can extend to the system that tracks planes on approach to the airport and steering on the ground and extrapolates their trajectories at least for the typical braking/abort time forward. These are not general aviation, these are planes carrying tons of cargo and hundreds of people.
- euroderf 4y ago
  Sounds like a job for... A.I.?

kochie 4y ago

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 not an aviation expert either but it’s assume that some form of system exists for this also in a more manual form.

plaguepilled 4y ago
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.
- vlovich123 4y ago
  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.
  - 1letterunixname 4y ago
    Expecting mechanical accuracy from humans is a fool's errand. ATC should be wearing VR goggles, visualizing approach and takeoff routing as it maps to flown with machines spotting the dangers similarly but differently from TCAS.
    - hef19898 4y ago
      And the VR goggles help them read the minds of pilots about the speed in which they move their planes around on the ground, and when? Move fast and break things has no place in aerospace nor aviation, just rolling whatever fancy new tech is there is not done for reasons. And this behavior made aviation as safe as it is today.

ekianjo 4y ago

> Why cannot descending plane lay a claim on a runway in some computer system and a cabin in Southwest - blare a horn for pilots trying to steer into a claimed runway? Because you have unions protecting the manual, error-prone job of human operators.

lmm 4y ago
And yet somehow commercial aviation, with its strong unions, ends up safer than virtually any other field of human endeavour.
- hef19898 4y ago
  More or less the only real Six Sigma safe industry humanity managed to create. And still, every incident turns everyone into safety and procedurural experts, even before the official incident reports are done. As much as this frustrates me, it has always been like that, and always will be like that.
  - euroderf 4y ago
    Any back-of-the-envelope safety comparisons between the airline industry and manned spaceflight (to include STS) ?
    - hef19898 4y ago
      What would that be good for, did a shuttle accident take down an airliner and I am not aware of that?
  - amluto 4y ago
    Nuclear power is also extremely safe.
    - Schroedingersat 4y ago
      ^1 At the point and time of power generation. Safety may not apply if your ground water was poisoned by a Uranium mine. If your town happens to have its cancer rates triple you probably started smoking or something. You will not be eligiblefor compensation.

andreareina 4y ago

Let's prevent ATC from oversubscribing runways first.

Animats 4y ago

That's called Runway Status Lights, controlled by an Autonomous Runway Incursion System [1]. The busiest US airports have that, but Austin doesn't have one.[1][2] So the tower controllers had responsibility for separation. Here are the current FAA rules on separation between departing and arriving aircraft using the same runway. See section 3-1-3 of [3]. This is the rule: "Separate an arriving aircraft from another aircraft using the same runway by ensuring that the arriving aircraft does not cross the landing threshold until one of the following conditions exists .... The other aircraft has departed and crossed the runway end or turned to avert any conflict. If you can determine distances by reference to suitable landmarks, the other aircraft needs only be airborne if the following minimum distance exists between aircraft: ...when either is a Category III aircraft- 6,000 feet." The trouble is, the controller can apparently say "Cleared to land" when they expect that departing aircraft will be airborne and at least 6,000 feet down the runway, and thus out of the way, before the incoming aircraft crosses the landing threshold. Not when it actually is in the air and out of the conflict zone. Or at least in this case, the controller did. This is apparently called "reduced runway separation". The intent is to increase traffic capacity. But this was in fog. Tower probably could not see the departing aircraft, and they did not apparently have a sensor system to compensate for that. [1] https://skybrary.aero/articles/autonomous-runway-incursion-warning-system-ariws https://skybrary.aero/articles/autonomous-runway-incursion-w... [2] https://skybrary.aero/articles/runway-status-lights-rwsl https://skybrary.aero/articles/runway-status-lights-rwsl [3] https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/atpubs/atc_html/chap3_section_10.html https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/atpubs/atc_html...

EdwardDiego 4y ago
The fact that Austin doesn't have ARIS terrifies me. It might not be the busiest airport, but it's not exactly a backwater town.
- hef19898 4y ago
  You're flying in and out of Austin a lot?
  - 4y ago