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Pilots Say That the F-16-Cessna Crash Illustrates a Civil-Military Difference
- Patrick_Devine 11y agoAn IFR (Instrument Flight Rules) pilot in VMC (Visual Meteorological Conditions) is still responsible for looking out of the airplane. Even if the pilot was "under the hood" (wearing a view limiting device), the safety pilot (the guy in the other chair) should have ensured separation from the Cessna. My guess is this is going to end up in court.
- zrail 11y agoThere was only one pilot in the F-16 (there are two seat trainer F-16s but AFAIK this was not one of them). Also, you're basically making the same point as the article, except that (so the article conjectures) the military pilot didn't think he needed to look out for other aircraft because ATC was doing it for him.
- ngoede 11y agoBut also failed to respond appropriately to the ATC instructions that he turn immediately. It seems to me you cannot have it both ways regardless.
- comrh 11y ago> Delusions of infallibility, arrogance, defensiveness, and blind deference to rank and regulation over common sense have all been shown, through the history of aviation tragedies, to be much more dangerous than all other factors. Basically the most dangerous type of people across any situation.
- jnbiche 11y ago> Basically the most dangerous type of people across any situation. The amazing things is that most surgeons are like this -- the traits described are a near archetype for surgeons -- and yet outcomes for surgery are pretty damn good, and rapidly getting better for many types of surgery.
- hackuser 11y ago> outcomes for surgery are pretty damn good I would say that "good" is relative to what can be reasonably expected. If most surgeons fit that description, then we may not have an independent way to establish our expectations. That is, maybe we think it's "good" because we don't know better. Hospital error is a leading cause of death in the U.S., though I don't know how much of that is due to surgery.
- ngoede 11y agoThe only source for that I have seen assumed that if the optimal treatment was chosen that the outcome would always be positive which I suspect is not super accurate. I wish I remembered where that source was. Do you have one? Would love to look at it again.
- marcosdumay 11y agoFirst, those are completely different standards of safety. If airplanes felt as often as surgery fails, people would not travel on them all the time. Even radical sports are much safer than surgery. Also, pilots must sustain a good enough performance for hours, while surgeons must sustain a great performance for minutes. Those are very different requirements, and may quite well fit different personalities.
- mcguire 11y agoThe attempts to get surgical checklists[1] (a basic aviation tool) adopted see to suggest that it is very, very amazing that outcomes are so good. [1] http://www.who.int/patientsafety/safesurgery/ss_checklist/en/ http://www.who.int/patientsafety/safesurgery/ss_checklist/en...
- zimpenfish 11y agoI can recommend [1] as a good read on the topic of checklists for surgeons and pilots. [1] http://atulgawande.com/book/the-checklist-manifesto/ http://atulgawande.com/book/the-checklist-manifesto/
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- ngoede 11y agoThis is apparently a big problem historically in countries that derive most of their commercial airline pilots from the military. It creates a culture in the cockpit where deference to rank is more important than the safety of the passengers.
- leereeves 11y agoThere's a good reason to defer to rank and regulation over "common sense". Our instincts and the lessons we learned in childhood are often wrong, especially in environments very different from our childhood, historical, and evolutionary environments, like aviation.
- touristtam 11y agoThat sounds like the perfect soldier, after the T-800.
- mikeash 11y agoDoes anyone know if fighters run their radar routinely, or if it's only done when required (e.g. in combat, or training for combat)? I've always wondered why modern fighters ever collide with other aircraft, since they have the hardware on board to track every aircraft in the sky within 50 miles in front of them.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- rblatz 11y agoAlso if guess the military would like to keep as much data about its radar secret. Running with it on all the time gives a lot of potential data points.
- sandworm101 11y agoNot on a stock f-16 used for pilot training. There isn't much about those planes that isn't public knowledge already. It's an extraordinarily common and well-understood aircraft.
- eck 11y ago> which can put out a very harmful amount of ionizing radiation It's not ionizing radiation any more than wifi is. It's just a lot of concentrated non-ionizing radiation.
- pm24601 11y agoWhen I was training for my pilot license, my instructor was very clear about this point: "Your responsibility is to NOT get into an accident. It doesn't matter what the air traffic controller said, what I told you to do, or what the other guy did. If you collide with another plane - IT IS YOUR FAULT. You are the PIC." This absolute responsibility is well placed when even a "fender bender" is death for all. It sounds like the military pilot didn't get taught that concept.
- tacticus 11y agoVery first time i went up as an air cadet we all received this lecture. And it is entirely the case.
- ngoede 11y agoIt seems terribly unfair that in this situation the person behaving recklessly had the best tools for surviving after the crash happened. Just how things go I guess.
- Retric 11y agoThis is actually part of why the United States Air Force skips over a lot of 'important' general aviation training. The Air Force goal is to quickly train people for very specific and demanding roles and the tools to be say a great glider pilot are considered relatively unimportant. Unfortunately, AF pilots often confuse the ability to excel in specific very demanding roles as far more general aviation experience.
- sandworm101 11y agoIFR training in a one-man airframe? That's very odd in the civilian world. One-man planes are rare enough, but a one-man plane with full instrumentation would be something special. And to then use it for training? I suspect this crash is the result of a gap in FAA regulations. I would suggest that no pilot should be doing IFR training alone while around aircraft not flying IFR. But I can see why the rule doesn't exist: it is an extraordinarily rare situation that, probably, nobody thought needed covering. This is one of the reasons that American's and Brits go to Goose Bay for low-level training. Canada has more empty sky than either of them combined.
- dbenj 11y agoIt was an F16 (e.g. military, not civilian). And if the pilot is simulating instrument conditions, there is a rule: FAR 91.109 "No person may operate a civil aircraft in simulated instrument flight unless - The other control seat is occupied by a safety pilot who possesses at least a private pilot certificate with category and class ratings appropriate to the aircraft being flown". If not simulating IMC, it's the pilot's responsibility to see and avoid per 91.113(b)
- ngoede 11y agoWhat constitutes a "civil aircraft" in this situation?
- ksherlock 11y agoPer the Code of Federal Regulations: Civil aircraft means aircraft other than public aircraft. Public aircraft means any of the following aircraft ... (1) An aircraft used only for the United States Government ... (2) An aircraft owned or operated by the armed forces ... (3) An aircraft owned or operated by the National Guard ...
- neurotech1 11y agoThey do not fly simulated IMC ("under the hood") in F-16s. By the time the pilot gets anywhere near a F-16, they have already trained for IMC in multiple trainer aircraft. FAR 91 doesn't apply to military aircraft, although military rules require they maintain a visual scan outside the aircraft.
- throwaway64908 11y agoThe article is 100% correct about civilian (FAA) air regs - in fact the rules mentioned are pretty basic to any civil IFR pilot. Although it's not surprising that military pilots would not be sharp on FAA regs, it does raise the question, "so how does civil and military aviation share the same airspace?" From accidents seen around the world, you can't safely mix them. Civil pilots are "solely responsible" and military pilots are "flying under orders" and "flying a mission", which is why they defer to controllers.
- mcguire 11y agoI don't want to address the difference between civilian and military pilots, since I think the author has done a fine job of that. But I would like to point out that see-and-avoid doesn't really work in general, and particularly not in the case of two small aircraft with wildly different performance characteristics. I suspect that, even if the F-16 was on a practice instrument approach, the bottom of its performance envelope is significantly higher than the top of the Cessna 150's. (According to the 'pedia, maximum speed is 109kt and Vne is 140kt.) See-and-avoid has been the first and more-or-less primary anti-collision system in aviation use, but if you've ever tried to cross a highway with high-speed oncoming traffic, you've probably already learned that there are limits to the human visual system. It's just not built to do that sort of thing. No doubt keeping your head outside the cockpit does prevent a lot of crashes, but expecting it to have prevented any crash, much less this one, is too much of a reach. Keep in mind that most animal's visual systems are pretty good at picking up movement, but one of the signs that you are on a collision course with another vehicle is that it isn't moving in you visual field. From [1]: "[The University of Washington’s Autonomous Flight System Lab] came up with a novel way to [modeled the UAS collision risk], reasoning that the known behavior (and random collisions) of gas molecules could serve as a way to predict collision probabilities between VFR aircraft, including UAS. (PDF)[3] To test the hypothesis, they compared the gas-molecule data to actual midair collision data and found a remarkably good fit. This allows two conclusions: manned airplanes under VFR run into each other at about the same random rate as gas molecules do and that’s pretty strong statistical evidence that see and avoid doesn’t work. (Because of a variance between the gas data and actual midairs, the paper concluded that see and avoid might work 14 percent of the time, but a bit better during the past few years. Possibly for a reason.)" By the way, [1] is an entertaining post with some information, while [2] is a paper from 'stralia called, "Limitations of the See-and-Avoid Principle". [1] http://www.avweb.com/blogs/insider/Why-See-and-Avoid-Doesnt-Work-223680-1.html http://www.avweb.com/blogs/insider/Why-See-and-Avoid-Doesnt-... [2] http://www.skybrary.aero/bookshelf/books/259.pdf http://www.skybrary.aero/bookshelf/books/259.pdf [3] https://www.aa.washington.edu/research/afsl/publications/lum_risk_for_uavs_2010_2.pdf https://www.aa.washington.edu/research/afsl/publications/lum... Ps. Ok, I do want to say something about the difference between military and civilian pilots. Back in 2004, six soldiers and a general died when a Blackhawk hit a television transmission tower guy wire while in heavy fog.[4] The tower was 1800 feet tall; apparently the helicopter hit the wire about half way up. It wasn't a training mission; the helicopter was "headed to Red River to check maintenance on equipment". The first question from me, the most holster-sniffing of non-pilots, was, "What was he doing flying below 1000 feet in heavy fog?" [4] http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/Seven-soldiers-from-Fort-Hood-killed-in-Texas-1964766.php http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/Seven-soldie...
- blantonl 11y agoOne interesting Civil-Military difference is that military aircraft and civilain aircraft operate on two completely different sets of communications channels yet the air traffic controllers talk to both military and civilain aircraft at the same time. Military aircraft typically trasmit to air traffic controllers in a frequency range between 225-380 MHz, while civilan aircraft transmit to air traffic controllers in a frequency range between 118-136 MHz. The air traffic controllers simulcast their transmissions betweeen both frequency bands to make sure their instructions reach both military and civilan pilots, however the transmissions back to the controllers cannnot be heard between civilan and military pilots. This is a prime example of the "Civil-Military" difference outlined in the article. * Note: Most Military pilots have the ability to transmit on both VHF (118-136 MHz) and UHF (225-380 MHz) however it is up to pilots discretion.
- repiret 11y agoControllers don't always simulcast on the military and civilian frequencies. Sometimes they do, because its convenient, just like they sometimes simulcast on Ground and Tower or on Ground and Clearance, but often they only transmit on the frequency used by the people they're talking to.
- pdonis 11y agoOne question that I don't see discussed in the article, or in any of the previous ones it links to: why didn't the air traffic controller tell the F-16 to turn right? From the geometry as described, a right turn would seem to be better for avoidance. (The F-16 was northeast of the Cessna and heading west-southwest; the Cessna was heading east-southeast.)
- lujim 11y agoAlthough this is armchair quarterbacking, having the F-16 break off the approach to climb and maintain a new altitude would have been nice. Not sure if there was traffic above him though. Altitude separation is always more comfortable than a vector away from traffic at or near your altitude.
- jsight 11y agoThis part baffles me as well. The Cessna was at 1200 feet indicated to begin with. AFAIK, Mode C has an error of +- 200 feet. That doesn't sound like adequate vertical separation to me. Why not ask for a 500 foot climb instead of giving a vector?
- frozenport 11y agoI find it crazy that one small aircraft could collide with another small aircraft, with such a vast amount of space to avoid each other. How is a collision possible? What am I missing?
- em3rgent0rdr 11y agovery rare event. But rare events happen.
- SapphireSun 11y agoWhen I was going through flight training, I thought about this a lot. I think the reason is that the places airplanes go is not random. If airplanes just went to random places in the sky at random altitudes, then indeed accidents would be rare, but everyone heads towards airports, which have particular traffic pattern altitudes for instance. I don't know the specifics of this situation, but perhaps the military pilot wanted to practice IFR near the ground and there also happened to be a VFR corridor passing through there. These non-random intents of pilots mean that airplanes get a lot closer together than you would otherwise think.
- hudibras 11y ago> I think the reason is that the places airplanes go is not random. This is how two planes collided 37,000 feet above the Amazon rain forest. http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2009/01/air_crash200901 http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2009/01/air_crash200901
- SapphireSun 11y agoThank you for that, that was an incredible article. I was ultra surprised that just after finishing that, this popped up on HN's front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9970336 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9970336
- david-given 11y agoThere's a known problem in the sailing world where people will set their autopilots to GPS coordinates from waypoints published in sailing magazines, and then collide with another vessel in the middle of deep ocean with no landmarks around.
- Animats 11y agoTrying to read the actual NTSB report, but the NTSB site is completely down. "500 Internal Server Error" (not as a HTTP status, as a text web page) for their home page.
- TallGuyShort 11y agoI wonder if the people who do the post-mortems on IT outages there are considered "crash investigators".
- mmaunder 11y agoA couple of comments about the article. Firstly, if you're a pilot or into aviation, definitely read Fate is the Hunter. It's awesome. You'll need to get the paper version as it's not available for an ebook AFAIK. A few folks in the article suggest 'slamming' the plane into a turn when ATC uses 'immediately'. That's really not a great idea in a variety of situations. Remember: aviate, navigate, communicate. AOPA has a great article this week on a situation where ATC screwed up and cleared a pilot for landing with another plane on final. He turned onto a tight base ready for short final and ATC told him to turn quickly. He executed a 60 degree bank/climb at 300 ft AGL and stall/spun the plane and put a 4 foot smoking hole in the ground. http://www.aopa.org/AOPA-Live.aspx?watch={384817B3-70C4-4147-9C4C-2A5517FD5DEE} http://www.aopa.org/AOPA-Live.aspx?watch={384817B3-70C4-4147... I'd add that I've been in the pattern at small airports around Colorado Springs with Air Academy pilots (and flown through the MOA's in the area) and they've always been polite and helpful. Although it sounds like the culture issue described comes up with military pilots on IFR plans around VFR civilians.
- bootload 11y ago"if you're a pilot or into aviation, definitely read Fate is the Hunter." Second that, "Fate is the Hunter" [0] by Ernest Gann [1] describes the precarious life of a US career airline pilot (including descriptions of flying DC2's, DC3's & DC4's, flight seniority and luck) between the 30's to the 50's. The book is dedicated to a hundred or so commercial pilots not as fortunate as EKG. "Although we can never be absolutely certain, we now believe the Eastern Airline crash at Bainbridge was caused by unporting. Do you know what that is?" I confessed that I had never heard of it. [Unporting: could be caused by a missing elevator hinge bolt, like that missing on Gann's DC-4, and cause an uncontrollable nose-dive, if the plane were flown at certain speeds and center of gravity loadings.] "Did you slow down when you first noticed the vibration? You did not because you had no fear of it. But if you had been the nervous type, if you slowed down, the center of gravity would have changed. That would have been quite enough to complete the process of unporting which had partially begun." The title of the book is derived from the fickle nature of flight and how cumulative mistakes become catastrophic depending on luck and fear associated with flying. [2] One interesting chapter I do remember is Ch16, "A Pretender" where an untrained pilot takes command of an aircraft only to be found out by very poor co-ordination. Gann describes how nobody checked his credentials prior to employment of commercial flying. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fate_Is_the_Hunter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fate_Is_the_Hunter [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_K._Gann https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_K._Gann [2] http://rwebs.net/avhistory/fate.htm http://rwebs.net/avhistory/fate.htm
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- poof131 11y agoI don’t think this article is fair and borders on click bait, with a salacious headline and handpicked responses. 1. All all the facts are NOT in, yet judgment has been reached and mudslingers are throwing. 2. By the NTSB preliminary report, the entire time from the first pilot warning (1100:18) to midair (1100:52) was 34 seconds. Barely half a minute for life and death decisions to be made. All of which fell on ATC and the F-16 pilot with the civilian not in radio contact. 3. ATC made the traffic call. 8 seconds later ATC gives the ‘turn south’ call. The F-16 pilot asks ‘confirm 2 miles’. 8 seconds later ATC says ‘if traffic not in sight, turn immediately 180.’ The F-16 pilot complies and begins his turn south. 18 seconds later they collide. 4. From 2 miles to collisions in 34 seconds coincides with just under 4 miles a minute closure or 240kts. Cesna at 60 and F-16 at 180 seems reasonable. Could the F-16 driver have overbanked and started his turn quicker by a few seconds? Maybe, but there was only 16 seconds and the pilot collided in a turn, so if he’d delayed a few more seconds the collision would have been a miss. Also, how responsible is a civilian pilot for climbing through an instrument approach near a military airfield without radio contact? It’s a tragedy. Military aviation could probably ditch Tacan approaches, but they are good training. Perhaps any that are close to civilian fields need to be given the axe. Yet to blame this only on the military pilot and military pilots in general is a complete disgrace. An accident is like swiss cheese, with multiple holes. Errors with people, processes, and things all help cause it. If only one thing would have changed (if the turn started earlier or later, if ATC picked up the radar hit earlier, if the F-16 pilot got a visual quicker, if the F-16 had a radar lock, if the Cesna was in radio contact, if the Cesna stayed below and didn’t climb through an instrument approach) the crash wouldn’t have happened. Aviation is dangerous, especially if you aren’t in a bus. Even a bus driver is mildly dangerous.[1] General Aviation and Fighter Aviation are especially dangerous. While I’m all for lessons learned, this salacious, click-bait, profiteering-off-a-tragedy, poised-as-a-question trash doesn’t help. [1] http://qz.com/410585/garbage-collectors-are-more-likely-to-die-on-the-job-than-police-patrol-officers/ http://qz.com/410585/garbage-collectors-are-more-likely-to-d...
- cma 11y agoAll of this seems like a rehash of the last comment the article quoted.
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- icambron 11y agoCan someone more familiar with this stuff tell me why the air traffic controller had the F-16 turn left, so that its path would cross that of the Cessna's? Seems backwards.
- rockdoe 11y agoCheck the previous articles that are linked in the header, it's explained at length!
- berkut 11y agoIs it really the F-16's pilot's responsibility to ensure separation when under ATC control? Doesn't the US have MARSA (Military Accepts Responsibility for Separation of Aircraft) rules that military flights can occasionally use, and which point they are then fully responsible, but otherwise I thought they'd still have to generally follow ATC directions.
- ubernostrum 11y agoIs it really the F-16's pilot's responsibility to ensure separation when under ATC control? Yes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9965658 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9965658
- berkut 11y agoThat post doesn't really prove anything: obviously, if you can see you're heading towards another aircraft and it's likely you'll collide, you'll take evasive action irrespective of ATC control. I was talking more about deciding which flight level to use and general legal responsibility. Unless the F-16 pilot turned on his radar or could see other aircraft, how does he know exactly what other aircraft there are. Admittedly, ATC only generally knows squarked aircraft, but this is generally a good picture of what's happening, and will probably be more complete a picture than what the F-16 has access to under non-military conditions (AWACS, datalink, etc).
- ubernostrum 11y agoATC provides a lot of guidance, but in the end responsibility for the safety of the aircraft rests with the pilot in command. If you collide with another aircraft and say "well, it can't be my fault because ATC didn't tell me there was traffic", you are not going to have a good time.
- chinpokomon 11y agoAviation in itself is not inherently dangerous. But to an even greater degree than the sea, it is terribly unforgiving of any carelessness, incapacity or neglect. ? Captain A. G. Lamplugh
- cmurf 11y agoLet's pretend the perspective is true, that ATC has full responsibility for separation when the pilot is doing instrument training in visual conditions under radar contact. Why delay doing exactly what you're told to do, twice? 1. Turn left if you don't have that traffic in sight, does not mean ask questions to confirm the distance, it means turn left if you don't have that traffic in sight. This delay is a minimum of 8 seconds difference in whether this accident happens. 2. Turn left immediately means do it now, not beginning to turn over 18 seconds... I've put a Cessna in a 60˚ 2G bank inside of 5 seconds many times (it is an unusual attitude, done for training purposes), and this guy is in a fighter jet. He can do better than that. From this transcript, it's a much easier case proving negligence on the part of the F-16 pilot, than defending it. About the best defense the F-16 pilot I can come up with is that he probably had no chance to see and avoid because of the nose cone of the F-16 obstructing the view of the slightly lower Cessna; and the whole see and avoid principle is probably statistically bullcrap, and all flights should be under positive control. But unfortunately that's not the system we have, and I don't understand the cause for these two delays and the seemingly slow turn when the word "immediately" was used by ATC, which has a very explicit, formal meaning in ICAO terms which is when instant action is required by a pilot.
- touristtam 11y agoReminds me of the Cavales cable car disaster. (http://www.nytimes.com/1998/02/04/world/20-die-in-italy-as-us-jet-cuts-a-ski-lift-cable.htmlhttp://www.nytimes.com/1998/02/04/world/20-die-in-italy-as-us-jet-cuts-a-ski-lift-cable.html http://www.nytimes.com/1998/02/04/world/20-die-in-italy-as-u...)