5 ms·

Incident: Swiss A333 at New York, rejected takeoff due to traffic on runway

33 points by the_mitsuhiko 3y ago

paxys 3y ago
How many more close calls will it take for us to significantly overhaul the ATC system and bring it into the present century? Or is a large scale disaster the only way to make people understand the urgency?
- ranger_danger 3y ago
  sounds like the movie Swordfish
- toomuchtodo 3y ago
  > Or is a large scale disaster the only way to make people understand the urgency? Yes. And a controller is going to get scapegoated (likely ruining their life) when a few hundred people die in the process, versus the failing system. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/02/business/air-traffic-controllers-safety.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/02/business/air-traffic-cont... | https://archive.today/bFcAh https://archive.today/bFcAh (Obviously, I would rather be wrong about this)
  - WorkerBee28474 3y ago
    > Obviously, I would rather be wrong about this No, you're right, this is a common procedure across industries
  - stevepeg 3y ago
    > But The Times found that the combination of six-day workweeks and round-the-clock schedules has caused controllers to develop physical and mental health problems. Many avoid seeking professional help because doing so might jeopardize the medical clearances they need to work. This is happening frequently to pilots and cabin crew as well, all over the world. Regulators have allowed a lot of flex in rostering in recent years, maybe a bit too much.
  - yongjik 3y ago
    Two planes collided in LAX in 1991 due to what was clearly a controller error, killing 35. Investigators decided that anyone could have made such a mistake given circumstances. The controller wasn't punished, and instead a bunch of changes were made to prevent similar situations in the future. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_runway_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_runway_disaster Obviously it would be ideal if such changes are made before planes collide, but the US air accident investigation system generally does its job, as far as I've heard.
- TillE 3y ago
  It's really crazy that ATC isn't 99% computerized. It's exactly the kind of problem which is trivial for a computer program with all the necessary information, but incredibly stressful for a human.
  - dralley 3y ago
    It's not exactly trivial, certainly when it comes to the edge cases. Emergencies, unusual situations, etc.
  - squigz 3y ago
    If it's so trivial, why do you think we haven't done it yet?
    - paxys 3y ago
      The same reason why ACH transfers still happen by transferring large files to a FTP server once a day or why San Francisco's train routing system still uses 5.25-inch floppy disks or why social security payments are calculated by a system running COBOL. It has always worked this way, and there's no political will or public pressure to change it.
  - icegreentea2 3y ago
    I'd argue against the triviality, but even if we accept that premise, the exact challenge is "with all the necessary information". Human ATC operators integrate a huge variety of information including voice comms to build a situational awareness of not just the current position and velocities of planes, but also their stated intentions. Yes, with sufficient coordination you could push all of that over into the cockpit and have the pilots input their intentions directly. We all know that voice transcription is a bit hit and miss (though the phraselogy used would probably be quite helpful), and certainly typing is... not optimal for emergencies. This aligns with basically all questions about automation in aviation (including in the cockpit). Automated systems can generally out perform human operators in probably the 99.99+% of typical cases. However a human with full situational awareness is still critical in the remaining situations. The challenge is that: * For a human to have proper awareness, they must be meaningfully engaged. They must actually be having some real agency and effect on the system. * Neither full human nor full automation provides the degree of safety and performance that we currently desire. Somehow we must integrate the two systems together.
- jmward01 3y ago
  I'm a big fan of overhauling the system for a lot of reasons, but safety isn't one of them. 'Close call' without 'accident' still means there wasn't an accident. Rebuilding the system because you think it is dangerous will likely lead to a less safe system since the one in place is incredibly safe with many years of statistics to prove it. However, overhauling the current system because it is incapable of handling the future where autonomous vehicles flood the skies, now that is something I can get behind.
  - randmeerkat 3y ago
    > However, overhauling the current system because it is incapable of handling the future where autonomous vehicles flood the skies, now that is something I can get behind. Until cars can drive themselves without crashing into stopped fire trucks[1], I don’t want anything autonomous flying anywhere near where I live. [1] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/tesla-driver-killed-plowing-firetruck-northern-california-freeway-rcna71436 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/tesla-driver-killed-plo...
    - jmward01 3y ago
      People do that a lot too. Over 40k people died on the roads in 2022. Maybe we could save some of them if we went autonomous. The better decision point is about overall safety, not one-off incidents. In aviation, like driving, the #1 source of accidents is human error.
  - mlyle 3y ago
    > 'Close call' without 'accident' still means there wasn't an accident. Close calls are a very important signal for how safe the system is. Good safety systems are redundant and require many failures to result in a crash. Here, we got down to the last link in the chain: weather was clear and the departing pilots could see there was an obvious problem while there was time to stop. > since the one in place is incredibly safe with many years of statistics to prove it. We've gotten to this safe system by chipping away at problems we see-- both from actual accidents and close calls. The only way we reach and keep (and perhaps surpass) this level of safety is to keep (carefully) correcting problems. (And yes, there is risk of changes making things worse. We need to do our best to avoid that and detect it quickly if it happens).
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
harshbutfair 3y ago
Here's a very good video to help visualise what happened. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KW6lAwLy_Os https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KW6lAwLy_Os
- atomicnumber3 3y ago
  How much actually went wrong here? Forgive me, genuine question. Afaict from my armchair as a computer scientist, at least some level of operational safeguards worked to cover what I guess is an edge case (multiple controllers racing against each other allowing multiple planes onto / crossing a runway at the same time)? One of them saw traffic on the runway and then proceeded to make a 6 minute detour instead of blindly hitting it. Maybe this is still safe enough and is worth it vs having everything be slower the rest of the time forcing all the controllers to wrap commands in a semaphore or mutex, so to speak.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
dralley 3y ago
A different incident from a few days ago https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yooJmu30DxY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yooJmu30DxY
zug_zug 3y ago
Curious if there are any metrics anywhere of how often these types of mistakes happen. It sounds very serious and it would be nice to have an authoritative answer on whether they are indeed increasing and/or whether it's particular (as commenters suggest) to any particular airports.
- Zenzero 3y ago
  Exactly. Without any sort of baseline measure of what is typical in any given year, this could be interpreted as either a sensationalized cherry picking of the usual rate of problems, or a major deviation from normal.
jmward01 3y ago
I wish for every one of these 'not an accident, but it was scary' stories there was a story about the 30+k deaths that yet again happened on US roads last year and we barely cared. Unfortunately some day there will be another major airline accident because no system is perfect. The stats are clear though, airlines are incredibly safe. We are over reporting these types of issues by orders of magnitude compared to other transportation and safety related issues. I wonder if there is an (unnamed?) psychological effect at play here. When a large activity has very rare issues compared to its peers maybe we tend to over emphasize the few issues found? Possibly because the difference in rates is too extreme for us to comprehend. Hundreds dying on the roads every day, nobody blinks an eye. One plane does what it is supposed to when a mistake was made and it is a news story.
- dvngnt_ 3y ago
  plane big, car small. planes made 9/11
- panick21_ 3y ago
  Its incredible how little society cares about road accidents. Its not just the deaths. Also the injuries and the massive amount of property damage and other costs. Somehow this hasn't been identified as systematic issue and the only solution anybody seems to come up with is 'cars are just gone drive themselves and they are going to be perfect'. The solution are so simple and low tech, so much incredible low hanging fruit. If only people actually thought about it in those terms.
  - jmward01 3y ago
    People just aren't good at understanding risk. If we do it every day we get numb to it. I actually use cars as a personal risk metric. Most people drive regularly so it is clearly a risk we 'accept' but we also admit it is risky and require training, inspections, vehicle and road standards, dedicated police/fire/ambulance/etc etc etc. Basically, driving is my cut-line. If I am doing an activity that is statistically as dangerous/near the danger of driving I will consider extra precautions or consider avoiding it all together. If it is less dangerous I generally just accept the default safety included with the activity. If it is more dangerous I seriously consider not doing it.
decremental 3y ago
[dead]
remarkEon 3y ago
What's the definitive data source that I can use to tell if these incidents really are becoming more common, or if they're all just bubbling up in a more visible way because of the repeated drama about Boeing? I'm expressing genuine curiosity here, because if they are indeed becoming more common you can start asking interesting questions using the data. More common since when, or what's the cutoff? What kind of incidents are happening more? Is there a common theme between airports? Between Air Traffic controllers? And so on.

33 points by the_mitsuhiko 3y ago

How many more close calls will it take for us to significantly overhaul the ATC system and bring it into the present century? Or is a large scale disaster the only way to make people understand the urgency?

ranger_danger 3y ago
sounds like the movie Swordfish
toomuchtodo 3y ago
> Or is a large scale disaster the only way to make people understand the urgency? Yes. And a controller is going to get scapegoated (likely ruining their life) when a few hundred people die in the process, versus the failing system. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/02/business/air-traffic-controllers-safety.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/02/business/air-traffic-cont... | https://archive.today/bFcAh https://archive.today/bFcAh (Obviously, I would rather be wrong about this)
- WorkerBee28474 3y ago
  > Obviously, I would rather be wrong about this No, you're right, this is a common procedure across industries
- stevepeg 3y ago
  > But The Times found that the combination of six-day workweeks and round-the-clock schedules has caused controllers to develop physical and mental health problems. Many avoid seeking professional help because doing so might jeopardize the medical clearances they need to work. This is happening frequently to pilots and cabin crew as well, all over the world. Regulators have allowed a lot of flex in rostering in recent years, maybe a bit too much.
- yongjik 3y ago
  Two planes collided in LAX in 1991 due to what was clearly a controller error, killing 35. Investigators decided that anyone could have made such a mistake given circumstances. The controller wasn't punished, and instead a bunch of changes were made to prevent similar situations in the future. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_runway_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_runway_disaster Obviously it would be ideal if such changes are made before planes collide, but the US air accident investigation system generally does its job, as far as I've heard.
TillE 3y ago
It's really crazy that ATC isn't 99% computerized. It's exactly the kind of problem which is trivial for a computer program with all the necessary information, but incredibly stressful for a human.
- dralley 3y ago
  It's not exactly trivial, certainly when it comes to the edge cases. Emergencies, unusual situations, etc.
- squigz 3y ago
  If it's so trivial, why do you think we haven't done it yet?
  - paxys 3y ago
    The same reason why ACH transfers still happen by transferring large files to a FTP server once a day or why San Francisco's train routing system still uses 5.25-inch floppy disks or why social security payments are calculated by a system running COBOL. It has always worked this way, and there's no political will or public pressure to change it.
- icegreentea2 3y ago
  I'd argue against the triviality, but even if we accept that premise, the exact challenge is "with all the necessary information". Human ATC operators integrate a huge variety of information including voice comms to build a situational awareness of not just the current position and velocities of planes, but also their stated intentions. Yes, with sufficient coordination you could push all of that over into the cockpit and have the pilots input their intentions directly. We all know that voice transcription is a bit hit and miss (though the phraselogy used would probably be quite helpful), and certainly typing is... not optimal for emergencies. This aligns with basically all questions about automation in aviation (including in the cockpit). Automated systems can generally out perform human operators in probably the 99.99+% of typical cases. However a human with full situational awareness is still critical in the remaining situations. The challenge is that: * For a human to have proper awareness, they must be meaningfully engaged. They must actually be having some real agency and effect on the system. * Neither full human nor full automation provides the degree of safety and performance that we currently desire. Somehow we must integrate the two systems together.
jmward01 3y ago
I'm a big fan of overhauling the system for a lot of reasons, but safety isn't one of them. 'Close call' without 'accident' still means there wasn't an accident. Rebuilding the system because you think it is dangerous will likely lead to a less safe system since the one in place is incredibly safe with many years of statistics to prove it. However, overhauling the current system because it is incapable of handling the future where autonomous vehicles flood the skies, now that is something I can get behind.
- randmeerkat 3y ago
  > However, overhauling the current system because it is incapable of handling the future where autonomous vehicles flood the skies, now that is something I can get behind. Until cars can drive themselves without crashing into stopped fire trucks[1], I don’t want anything autonomous flying anywhere near where I live. [1] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/tesla-driver-killed-plowing-firetruck-northern-california-freeway-rcna71436 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/tesla-driver-killed-plo...
  - jmward01 3y ago
    People do that a lot too. Over 40k people died on the roads in 2022. Maybe we could save some of them if we went autonomous. The better decision point is about overall safety, not one-off incidents. In aviation, like driving, the #1 source of accidents is human error.
- mlyle 3y ago
  > 'Close call' without 'accident' still means there wasn't an accident. Close calls are a very important signal for how safe the system is. Good safety systems are redundant and require many failures to result in a crash. Here, we got down to the last link in the chain: weather was clear and the departing pilots could see there was an obvious problem while there was time to stop. > since the one in place is incredibly safe with many years of statistics to prove it. We've gotten to this safe system by chipping away at problems we see-- both from actual accidents and close calls. The only way we reach and keep (and perhaps surpass) this level of safety is to keep (carefully) correcting problems. (And yes, there is risk of changes making things worse. We need to do our best to avoid that and detect it quickly if it happens).

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

harshbutfair 3y ago

Here's a very good video to help visualise what happened. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KW6lAwLy_Os https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KW6lAwLy_Os

atomicnumber3 3y ago
How much actually went wrong here? Forgive me, genuine question. Afaict from my armchair as a computer scientist, at least some level of operational safeguards worked to cover what I guess is an edge case (multiple controllers racing against each other allowing multiple planes onto / crossing a runway at the same time)? One of them saw traffic on the runway and then proceeded to make a 6 minute detour instead of blindly hitting it. Maybe this is still safe enough and is worth it vs having everything be slower the rest of the time forcing all the controllers to wrap commands in a semaphore or mutex, so to speak.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

dralley 3y ago

A different incident from a few days ago https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yooJmu30DxY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yooJmu30DxY

zug_zug 3y ago

Curious if there are any metrics anywhere of how often these types of mistakes happen. It sounds very serious and it would be nice to have an authoritative answer on whether they are indeed increasing and/or whether it's particular (as commenters suggest) to any particular airports.

Zenzero 3y ago
Exactly. Without any sort of baseline measure of what is typical in any given year, this could be interpreted as either a sensationalized cherry picking of the usual rate of problems, or a major deviation from normal.

jmward01 3y ago

I wish for every one of these 'not an accident, but it was scary' stories there was a story about the 30+k deaths that yet again happened on US roads last year and we barely cared. Unfortunately some day there will be another major airline accident because no system is perfect. The stats are clear though, airlines are incredibly safe. We are over reporting these types of issues by orders of magnitude compared to other transportation and safety related issues. I wonder if there is an (unnamed?) psychological effect at play here. When a large activity has very rare issues compared to its peers maybe we tend to over emphasize the few issues found? Possibly because the difference in rates is too extreme for us to comprehend. Hundreds dying on the roads every day, nobody blinks an eye. One plane does what it is supposed to when a mistake was made and it is a news story.

dvngnt_ 3y ago
plane big, car small. planes made 9/11
panick21_ 3y ago
Its incredible how little society cares about road accidents. Its not just the deaths. Also the injuries and the massive amount of property damage and other costs. Somehow this hasn't been identified as systematic issue and the only solution anybody seems to come up with is 'cars are just gone drive themselves and they are going to be perfect'. The solution are so simple and low tech, so much incredible low hanging fruit. If only people actually thought about it in those terms.
- jmward01 3y ago
  People just aren't good at understanding risk. If we do it every day we get numb to it. I actually use cars as a personal risk metric. Most people drive regularly so it is clearly a risk we 'accept' but we also admit it is risky and require training, inspections, vehicle and road standards, dedicated police/fire/ambulance/etc etc etc. Basically, driving is my cut-line. If I am doing an activity that is statistically as dangerous/near the danger of driving I will consider extra precautions or consider avoiding it all together. If it is less dangerous I generally just accept the default safety included with the activity. If it is more dangerous I seriously consider not doing it.

decremental 3y ago

[dead]

remarkEon 3y ago

What's the definitive data source that I can use to tell if these incidents really are becoming more common, or if they're all just bubbling up in a more visible way because of the repeated drama about Boeing? I'm expressing genuine curiosity here, because if they are indeed becoming more common you can start asking interesting questions using the data. More common since when, or what's the cutoff? What kind of incidents are happening more? Is there a common theme between airports? Between Air Traffic controllers? And so on.