‘Confirming we are cleared to land?’ Who said what at Austin
fallows.substack.com
fallows.substack.com
When the approaching plane is cleared then there is no allowance for anyone and anything to be on the runway.
So if there is a departing plane waiting on the runway or someone crossing then the approaching plane is given "cleared approach runway 08" but never "cleared to land". Which also means that if you are piloting the landing plane then at your decision height you have to go around.
Also when someone is cleared to land no-one can be given a permission to enter the runway.
There is one clearance that kinda-sorta allows which is "BEHIND landing Boeing 737, line up and wait BEHIND". It intentionally has "BEHIND" before and after the call to be extra clear that the waiting pilot has to confirm that the plane has passed their nose and they can enter the runway while the landing plane is on rollout. But that plane can not be given a takeoff clearance before the plane on the rollout has exited the runway.
We were told that the americans do it differently and I've always found it dangerous.
Seems like this would be a good trigger to switch temporarily to a more pessimistic strategy. (Caveat: I don't know anything about aviation.)
It sounds to me like far too many critical safety decisions are being made with an eye on money rather than safety. There were reports warning that Fukushima wasn't safe in case of a tsunami, but the company in charge of the plant decided to ignore that. Deep Water was caused by cost cuts. The Boeing 737 Max was made for financial reasons, fixing a fundamental hardware problem in software.
Safety engineers clearly need a bigger say in these things.
[1]https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/13/colgan-air-crash-10-years-ag... [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incident...
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signaling_of_the_New_York_Ci...
Everything is a money/greed problem if you look at it through the lens of motivated reasoning.
The usage of infrastructure is mutually beneficial. The airport, the various businesses operating at it, the customers, everyone benefits per flight. Likewise you want to make that infrastructure get used as much as possible.
Would you be complaining about greed if a subway was running trains close together?
At least it would have forced the controller to verify that SW is clear of the runway before clearing fedex.
As it was, it cleared both and then did something else until the situation was over.
I've been in a helicopter hovering over Heathrow airport where you can see the lights from the line of planes coming in to land every 45 seconds that looks like it goes off to infinity. Whatever technique they use there seems to work.
https://www.heathrow.com/company/local-community/noise/opera...
Taking a quick look at Heathrow approach, looks like runway is clear of the first plane landing when the following plane is 1-2 miles out and around 500ft.
Multiple landing planes are allowed on the same runway surface at the same time in the daytime as in Oshkosh arrivals, but also a Category I (light single) can be cleared to land if the Category I or II aircraft to follow will be 3000 feet from the threshold, a Cat II (light twin) behind a I or II with 4500 feet of separation.
Given how advanced ILS is nowadays you could probably automate all of this - if the plane taking off isn't committed to takeoff (traveling at V1) by the time the landing aircraft reaches decision altitude, an automatic go-around is issued. Basically treat the runway as a "control zone" like trains do, and if the plane on the runway hasn't "cleared the zone" (by whatever definition) then the landing aircraft can't enter the zone.
Certainly that's something that could be conveyed as part of the ILS data at least. Maybe it's undesirable to automate it in the sense of the automation causing more problems (more aborts = more chances for something to go wrong, although the assertion is that by V1 you're committed and by decision altitude you can still abort safely, so this all fits inside the "theory of movements") but you can at least let the landing plane know at decision altitude that there's an aircraft still on the runway. Sort of a "green = runway clear, yellow = committed traffic, yellow bars = moving but uncommitted traffic, red = runway occupied/clearance not granted" type indicator perhaps.
Or maybe if the tower can't visually/instrument confirm execution of movements, the pilot on takeoff has to verbally confirm commit before the landing clearance can be granted. Then it just becomes something specific to zero-visibility operations.
It really seems like there should be some change in how movements are handled/clearances are issued. Maybe we don't need to go to full "one clearance at a time" all the time, but it certainly seems like there should be some tighter rules if the tower can't independently confirm movements are being executed, and perhaps convey that information to the pilot as well (although again, I know that pilots are already information-overloaded, but "is there someone on my runway" is seemingly pretty important and straightforward info).
My understanding was that the word "cleared" was to be avoided when you aren't actually cleared to land/take off, and the correct wording was now "continue approach runway 08".
There has been a decent amount of study of the cognitive interpretation of exact wordings, resulting in a standardised phrasing that avoids misinterpretation. It's a good thing. Using the word "cleared" could easily cause a lazy/tired/overloaded pilot over a noisy channel to think they are cleared to land.
Also the word "takeoff" is protected, I believe it can only be said within giving and reading back a takeoff clearance. Everywhere else it has to be "departure".
* ONE vehicle of any kind!
You can't use the runway because there's a bloody great Volvo in the middle of it, because I put the bloody great Volvo there, because I'm picking up bits of the last guy's wheel spat that fell off, because I don't want to have to write a long long tale about how your prop got chipped.
True story.
In Europe, I have heard, you can't operate CAT III ILS (or even maybe CAT II) when your ground radar is inop.
It seems that in Austin they don't even have a ground radar. How the hell is CAT III a thing there?
But, if an arriving aircraft is still on the runway, a controller can clear a departing aircraft for takeoff if there will be adequate separation when the departing aircraft starts takeoff roll (i.e., the arriving aircraft will be clear of the runway at that point).
[1] 7110.65 3-9-5 Anticipating Separation
In ICAO phraseology, "cleared to land runway 08" is allowed. Further:
> If the runway is obstructed when the aircraft reports ‘final’, but it is expected to be available in good time for the aircraft to make a safe landing, the controller will delay landing clearance by issuing an instruction to ‘continue approach’.
* https://www.skybrary.aero/sites/default/files/bookshelf/115....
In this case, the controller failed to tell the departing flight to hurry (the references to 'no delay' or 'immediate' in the blog post), AND frankly timed things pretty close given the weather. Without the ability to actually see the approaching plane, or perhaps even the plane on the ground, it will probably be found that timing a departure that close at all was reckless. That said, I feel for these tower controllers, it's not common for many planes to get stacked up waiting to depart, and it is their job to get them out. What may have worked just fine on a clear-weather day simply became too dangerous on that day.
The official manual for air traffic controllers in the US is the FAA Order JO 7110.65W [1], if anyone cares to review it.
I would feel for this tower controller if there wasn't a bunch of comments in r/ATC saying how this particular controller has transferred between facilities because he keeps messing up and makes workplace complaints instead of owning up to his mistakes.
Edit to add source:
> a controller who, according to everyone who has worked with him from the last facility where he washed out and now AUS, say has no business being a controller and they can't fire him because he files EEO complaints habitually.
https://old.reddit.com/r/ATC/comments/10uub5x/
More discussion:
https://old.reddit.com/r/ATC/comments/10u0zvl/disaster_avert...
Only in the US is it permitted for the controller to clear an aircraft to land while another is using the runway. The rest of of the world does not allow "anticipated clearance".
(Apart from a "land after" clearance where the landing aircraft must accept responsibility for separation.)
Edited to add: how it works everywhere else in the world: the controller is not permitted to clear an aircraft to land unless and until the previous one is confirmed clear. That's why the term is "cleared".
And with how many rules there are in that pdf, it's shocking we don't see multiple accidents a year.
> The median annual wage for air traffic controllers was $129,750 in May 2021
SOME unions do take advantage, given the traffic controllers' 'single point of failure' it can be very attractive for some unions who are greedy. Again I reiterate, unions are not a bad idea, just not all of them are solely in the interests of the actual employees.
Much like air hosts and pilots, air traffic controllers (at least in the EU) are tested frequently for substance issues including alcohol. A friends father who was an air traffic controller was tested daily for the very reason you mention. Nobody WANTS an accident.
> People with dangerous jobs need to be kept safe from themselves
Absolutely agree, they're professionals though and well trained. I believe they can be responsible adults. That's why it's so rare to see unfortunate mistakes like this seems to be.
Which also limits the hiring pool as many people, myself included, would refuse to be tested daily on principle. Hell I object to pre-employment screenings.
And I have not drunk a drop of Alcohol in over 25 years, nor done any drugs, dont smoke, nothing. That said I am not taking your little test to prove that to you unless you have a reasonable articulable reason to suspect I may be under said influence.
At the end of the day, I don't see potentially sacrificing the lives of multiple planeloads of people as a worthy tradeoff for foregoing verification that the controller is not under the influence of mind-altering substances when performing their job because it invades their privacy. Performing the job must inherently be approached with a collectivist attitude.
For other jobs where the magnitude of the mistake doesn't involve bodily harm or significant resources, I agree 100%.
I feel like there are a plethora of issues there.
Unions are frequently reasonably well aligned and sometimes not.
There are many solutions like government mandated elections of the officers, rotation of the officers, multiple unions for a given sector or company or factory, etc... Each solution of course comes with a cost including weaker officers coming in, dilution of the power of the union, etc...
This pattern also exists for governments, transnational organizations, corporations, non-profits, etc... and it doesn't make them bad or good or greedy or saintly - it just is the nature of any group.
Didn't make it beyond aviation news, probably because recording ATC is not allowed in France.
Human error will creep up everywhere, all you can control is the frequency.
They could have returned prior to the final deadline, they could have had a sick-out, they could have worked to rule.
I’m sympathetic to labor demands, but if your oath of office makes it illegal to strike and you participate in a walkout, well, that’s on you.
We saw this essential pattern play out with the recent near railway strike. The rail companies barely had to give up anything because the strike would have been too effective to be allowed to happen.
"All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service. It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to public personnel management." -- Franklin D. Roosevelt (the guy who created the NLRB and was responsible for modern labor law in the US.)
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/letter-the-resolut...
If a public employee union does the same, the government can't go out of business. So what that means is, as long as the union is granted monopoly on its kind of labor supply, they are holding the taxpayers and their infrastructure hostage.
Public employee unions should not be allowed to strike without giving up their monopoly on labor. And we would do well to not entitle private employee unions to mandatory membership and rigid seniority rules (I know from personal experience that these rules make them incredibly corrupt).
Reagan's actions have had a profoundly disturbing effect on the American middle class that is still being felt today.
> The laborers who held the skills needed
So did many other people. They conspired to break the law by arranging to violate their employment contracts in a group so as to cause undue difficulty to their employer and they held public infrastructure hostage to prevent anyone else operating it.
> Reagan's actions have had a profoundly disturbing effect on the American middle class
The death of unions is a lot broader of an issue than RR killing the ATCU, and generally much deserved. Unions exist to save lives where the law isn't capable but for every plausibly relevant situation like air-traffic control or deep mining there are a hundred overreaches like trying to unionize Amazon warehouses.
As society and work got safer in general it became less important to have such an option as the right to blockade someone's property and dictate who they can hire.
> Why were they arriving and departing on the same runway when parallels were available?
and it's a good question! If there's more than one runway available, and bad visibility, why make two planes use the same runway so close to one another??
https://vannevar.blogspot.com/2023/02/austin-fedexdal-disast...
Intuitively feels like the safest way to operate would be landing planes on the farthest runway, with takeoffs on the near one, because it would only require clearing just-landed aircraft to cross the takeoff runway and you have more discretion to time departures than arrivals.
I am unaware if there is a formal definition of how long a controller should expect a flight to take before following a non-urgent instruction, but 60 seconds doesn't seem wild to me.
Now you could say that the Southwest pilots should have heard 'traffic 3 miles out', and understood that things need to move quickly. But as a pilot, I can say we don't have the traffic picture controllers have, particularly in bad weather. The general understanding is if we can't see other aircraft, we manage our plane, and its ATC who can get a picture of how fast the other aircraft are moving and what is safe from a separation perspective.
Without ATC I do not know when "cleared to takeoff" is given; it may be given off the runway, pilots spend a minute checking the mirrors and blindspot before turning onto the runway.
Cleared to takeoff can be given before you have entered the runway, or you can be asked to “lineup and wait”.
The first means that you have permission to enter the runway, if you haven’t already, and takeoff. The latter means that you are cleared to enter the runway, but not takeoff and wait for takeoff clearance.
If the controller wanted you to do an immediate takeoff they normally make damn sure that you are able and you know the context. At least in my experience mixing it up with jet traffic at Boeing field.
Something like: “Southwest xxx cleared for immediate takeoff, you have a FedEx heavy on 3 mile final”
To the pilot that is saying: you can go, but you only have 90 seconds or so.
On a regular day the controller could see this, and ask what is going on. At a small GA airport with training ops the controller is likely used to people pulling out onto the runway and taking their god damn time. The FAA actually advises wait times of as long as 2 minutes for wake turbulence, and that’s something I’ve done. Just sit there on the end of a runway.
Things get a little different, in practice, at busy commercial airports, but the rules are the same.
More than once I remember a 747, 777 or A340 taking off and getting the call "cleared for immediate departure". The pilot I was with routinely would say something like "I'm not even taxing onto the runway for 2 minutes, then we can talk".
And it might be time to think about TCAS extensions to ground ops for aircraft with clearances?
Have the courage to not take off.
Kudos to that US Airways captain for refusing to takeoff and stay put until everyone got on the same page.
I recall in a CRM training they asked the class what would you do if the captain wanted to take off and you thought it was unsafe. Various answers and one person said "I'd hold my feet on the brakes to prevent moving" to which the trainer said yes - that's the right answer.
As the old old saying goes, better to be down here wishing you were up there than up there wishing you were down here.
the fuel in the fuel truck,
the altitude above you,
the runway behind you,
and a tenth of a second ago.
Every last piece of it.
or:
You're flying the plane until you take the key out of the ignition.
Doesn't matter how deep a hole you need to dig to get it.
However, landing is eventually assured.
So many tragedies could have been averted if people just sat the fck down.
If shit doesn't feel right, just chill until it does.
Well, I guess the Swiss cheese worked.
https://tinyurl.com/redditlinknoswearword
Adding comment text in case of deletion:
"This is the problem right here. You have a controller who, according to everyone who has worked with him from the last facility where he washed out and now AUS, say has no business being a controller and they can't fire him because he files EEO complaints habitually. And yet you have people trying to push another agenda entirely with the 6 day work weeks and fatigue, which this event has nothing to do with."
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?
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-w...
[2] https://skybrary.aero/articles/runway-status-lights-rwsl
[3] https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/atpubs/atc_html...
KSTL (St. Louis) and KMCI (Kansas City) are Class B, and at 10M and 7M carry fewer passengers than KAUS at 13M annually and have half the number of operations annually [1] [2].
There are many other airports on the List of Class B airports with smaller operations than Austin. [3]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Louis_Lambert_Internationa... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kansas_City_International_Airp... [3] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Class_B_airports_in_th...
KSTL and KMCI were formal airline hubs and are still Class B most likely due to legacy assignments. It's a lot harder for the FAA to "demote" a piece of airspace vs "promote" one.
I'm curious as to what you think upgrading KAUS to Class B would exactly accomplish, especially in this scenario? This was a runway localized mistake by the controller. Also, the word in the ATC community is this tower controller had been moved around the NAS multiple times as a problem child.
KSAT's airspace (not the airport, the airspace) farther south is FAR busier than KAUS and is considered some of the busiest airspace in the county due to multiple military fields in the area, extensive military training, etc. And it's also Class C airspace.
Under certain circumstances > 220k annual ops qualifies an airport for Class B status [1]. Austin's 2022 vs 2021 traffic is significantly higher [2]. When you include KEDC (Austin Exec Airport) and KGTU (Georgetown Municipal), the traffic certainly appears to exceeds the thresholds in question [3][4][5]. I didn't bother to look through the other airports within the area.
> I'm curious as to what you think upgrading KAUS to Class B would exactly accomplish, especially in this scenario? This was a runway localized mistake by the controller. Also, the word in the ATC community is this tower controller had been moved around the NAS multiple times as a problem child.
Designation as a Class B changes the care with which the airspace is managed and more importantly, staffed [6][7]. Perhaps the problem ATC is fine for a less busy area, perhaps the Tower staffing could use a little more oomph in the morning hours. There might also be additional RWLS and ARIWS requirements for Class B airports (needs regulatory research - maybe ChatGPT can give us pointers since this is all supposed to be public info!).
> KSAT's airspace (not the airport, the airspace) farther south is FAR busier than KAUS and is considered some of the busiest airspace in the county due to multiple military fields in the area, extensive military training, etc. And it's also Class C airspace.
The FAA Sectional for KSAT (San Antonio) shows that there are multiple Special Use Airspaces (Randolph, Laughlin, Crystal/North, Kingsville MOAs) to separate the civilian traffic from military airspace, and the military has their own controllers [8]. Caution: 111MB file.
[1] https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/atpubs/pham_htm... [2] https://www.austintexas.gov/news/november-2022-passenger-car... [3] https://www.gcr1.com/5010ReportRouter/EDC.pdf [4] https://www.gcr1.com/5010ReportRouter/GTU.pdf [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgetown_Municipal_Airport [6] https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/atpubs/pham_htm... [7] https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/atpubs/pham_htm... [8] https://aeronav.faa.gov/visual/02-23-2023/PDFs/San_Antonio.p...
When I visited I remember thinking ‘how the hell does this place handle the influx for south-by?’
What scares me about this is that I have no idea how common or uncommon this is, and what other airports are in a similar situation.
Just look at the rollout for ADS-B In/Out if you're curious how difficult that might be to implement.
It doesn’t alert you to planes on the ground because it would never stop going off. How is the system supposed to know that the pilot approaching the threshold as you land is going to stop? It can’t so it would issue an immediate correction alert and you have to go around.
skip the buzzword, why couldn’t a computer program of any kind helped avoid this
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.
Humans in the loop are a SPoF if they're there:
1. Solely to read information over a lossy, slow medium like analog radio. Digital data between ground and air systems should be the primary means of comms with voice radio as a backup channel for clarification and stating intent.
2. To flawlessly plan and avoid collisions between dozens of objects moving at high speed in 4 dimensions. Never going to happen. These should be done and verified mechanically, continuously.
Humans should be guiding and assisting mechanical, reliable automation of decision-making rather than playing telephone or doing long division on paper when calculators exist.
You're sure about that?
That said, it makes the "moving in" redundant and is shy a few dimensions if you want to go full descriptive phase space diagraming given velocity and acceleration in each spatial dimension are missing.
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.
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.
You have been repeatedly dismissing people in this thread, but HN is about being curious. “Leave it to the professionals” is neither satisfying nor interesting.
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.
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.
Regardless, I think it's too early to lay definitive blame until the NTSB report comes out.
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.p...
Because you have unions protecting the manual, error-prone job of human operators.
As much as this frustrates me, it has always been like that, and always will be like that.
> ‘As bad as it gets without body bags.’
> Why the Austin airport situation was so dangerous.
Because the planes almost collided. But the author wants to say more than that. The article covers the “how” things went wrong by analyzing the transcript. The write-up doesn’t answer the key ”why” question —- why are existing procedures and training not suitable?
Safety-critical systems (including procedures and protocols) must be designed to account for wide human variation, including mistakes and miscommunications. Let’s not waste our time pointing fingers at one person.
Accusing the author of blaming individuals is rather silly when you're rushing to blame training/procedures/the system.
I see your point. I am not ruling out individual culpability.
Still, by the time a person is in a cockpit or a control tower, they have a history, a record of performance. It is part of the system's responsibility to evaluate this record.
So I am less likely to blame an individual only, because to do so would require the individual to act in a way that no system could predict, mitigate, or compensate for.
I didn't say he did. (I was referring to comments here on HN.)
This will be the job of the investigators but it sounds like obvious tower control human operator error.
FedEx deserves all the credit for avoiding a disaster. As soon as they got their clearance to land, they called back to clarify and verify it. So, they knew that this was going to be a close one, and you can bet that they were ready to go around and abort the landing before they every broke out below minimums and saw the Southwest on the roll.
FedEx knew it was going to be ugly, and they were already ready for the go around.
The FAA says that, specifically the 7110.65 which governs ATC rules and procedures. In a radar environment it allows for departures when the arriving aircraft is 2+ miles from the runway, and there will be at least 3 miles of separation within 1 min of takeoff. A separate rule requires that the departing aircraft is at least 6000ft down the runway and airborne before the arrival crosses the runway threshold.
If there is a departing plane rolling up to the hold short line and confirmed ready for immediate takeoff, there is possibly time to get them out and maintain separation. If it's low visibility, the departing plane is rolling slowly and not confirmed ready, then it's a bad bad idea.
Juan Brown [1] made an interesting point also. For a Cat II or III approach, and this one was definitely Cat III, there is an ILS critical area that Southwest would have impinged on as it was taking off.
The controller very clearly made a huge mistake.
Just to keep stating this: I'm not at all defending the AUS controller here. A squeeze play like this in low visibility is needlessly reckless.
[1] https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/atpubs/atc_html...
(And they do have GPS, They also have ADSB, and ground based position detection, and, and, and..)
The fast reaction by the Fedex pilots may have contributed to increased distance between the planes that saved them, but their callout to the Southwest flight didn't fundamentally change anything. Maybe we'll find out that the Southwest flight climbed slower, suspecting the Fedex plane was directly over them. In that case maybe the callout in addition to the Fedex crew being attentive saved the day, but I haven't seen anyone claim that yet.
If the Southwest crew had realized how close the Fedex plane was, maybe they would have aborted even if it meant running off the end of the runway, but they didn't do that.
...
The flightradar replay is terrifying. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3cVMUCdxG0
I'm not sure anymore, given the above replay, that the Southwest plane was at V1. The Fedex flight was at least directly over (according to some other transponder-based replay videos), and might have passed the Southwest plane by about a plane length (as shown in the above video), before the Southwest plane had accelerated enough to close the velocity gap. Maybe Fedex waited, but if they radioed the request for Southwest to abort before the planes were overlapping in the horizontal plane, Southwest should have easily been able to stop.
It's up to investigators to find out. Pilots definitely can (and have the right to) abort after V1, if they consider it safer than taking off. Before V1, you can be sure that abort is safe, after V1, you have to weigh risks of high-speed abort against risks of continuing flying, but staying on the ground is still possible.
Yes, and nitpicking - decision speed is V1, not V0.
Let me put it another way. V1 is not the speed after which you cannot abort, V1 is the speed after which you can attempt to takeoff. Or, quoting the Boeing flight manual,
> V1 is the maximum speed at which the flight crew must take the first action to reject a takeoff.
If something happens _before_ V1, pilots must abort takeoff, period. However, if something happens after V1, pilots can still make a decision to stay on the ground.
Furthermore, V1 is calculated so that the plane can stop before the end of the runway even if one of the braking systems is not working properly (e. g. one of the engines is out and reverse thrust cannot be used). On a fully working plane, the actual distance necessary to stop will be lower. Then, there is always a safety zone right after the runway, which is not taken into account for V1 calculation.
Anyway, the investigation will thoroughly consider all the factors, let's wait for the results.
IIRC, it wasn't caused by the inexperience of the tower controller, or them being distracted, etc.
I understand this is how they are selected, trained and ultimately operate everyday moment-to-moment but the gap is so far for me I can't begin to understand it.
Genuine question, why is this not fully automated today? Seems like something we should be easily capable of doing given CAT III.
It reminds me of a video I saw that explored the crew resource management of a plane, and the good culture of the airline, that led to decision making that prevented a situation caused by the captain's earlier error becoming far worse.
[1] - https://www.amazon.com/Field-Guide-Understanding-Human-Error...
[2] - https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=3123581163...
> The Bad Apple Theory. It maintains that: • Complex systems would be fine, were it not for the erratic behavior of some unreliable people (Bad Apples) in it. • ‘Human errors’ cause accidents: more than two-thirds of them. • Failures come as unpleasant surprises. They are unexpected and do not belong in the system. Failures are introduced to the system through the inherent unreliability of people.
> • Getting rid of Bad Apples tends to send a signal to other people to be more careful with what they do, say, report or disclose. It does not make ‘human errors’ go away, but does tend to make the evidence of them go away; evidence that might otherwise have been available to you and your organization so that you could learn and improve.
> • Putting in more rules, procedures and compliance demands runs into the problem that there is always a gap between how work is imagined (in rules or procedures) and how work is done.
> Getting technology to replace unreliable people is an attractive idea, and is wide-spread. But technology introduces new problems as well as new capacities. Rather than replacing human work, it changes human work. New technology may lead to new kinds of ‘human errors’ and new pathways to system breakdown.
I think one problem with the radio communication is that because of its terse and scripted nature all of the emotion is removed and it does not convey the urgency.
I can imagine the apprehension of FedEx pilots when they asked "confirming we are cleared to land Runway 18 Left?". I can also understand why the controller just treated it as one of the million other question of the same type without ever catching there is anything wrong here.
Some airports will have a single "Tower" frequency that controls all arriving and department traffic on all runways.
Some larger airports will have multiple "Tower" frequencies that cover certain runway(s).
But a single runway will always have departing and arriving traffic working on the same frequency.
So in airport with multiple "Towers", an approaching aircraft is contacted (on a preset freq?) while still a ways out, and instructed to switch to a given "Tower" frequency on approach? (Same with departing planes)
Austin has been experiencing a lot of growth and I'm wondering how much of this is stressing the different systems at the airport. Earlier this year it was common for us to run low on jet fuel for lack of storage. On the weekends we've had issues with lines lasting for hours. There is a fight between the city and one of the leaseholders regarding expansion. These aren't directly related with the flight line, but point at a system that's stretching its capacity.
https://skybrary.aero/articles/tcas-ii-ra-very-low-altitude
https://www.faa.gov/documentlibrary/media/advisory_circular/...
From what I've read, it sounds like this airport is not equipped with the ATC-equivalent of TCAS -- which I think would have been sounding all kinds of alarms (how early?) in the tower for a scenario like this.
I suspect that higher stakes encourage politeness. A much lower stakes example than the OP: politics at a startup vs. at a big company.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenerife_airport_disaster#Comm...
I didn’t have the presence of mind to get a video, and I haven’t been able to find out anything about it since.
Any idea what the heck I was looking at?
Why are overlapping clearances allowed (and used) by rules, regulations and local operating procedures DURING CAT III operations, is beyond me.
I don't like overlapping clearances in normal times but during CAT III operations this is insane.
2. Knowing an incident just happened, they are probably aware of the fact that each of their words is being recorded and will be examined during the investigation. Like "don't talk to the police if you are arrested" it's wise to say as little as possible (after the danger has passed)
For almost killing them that's a light statement. Insane how they sound so calm. Always impressive fromn pilots.
I’m not following
It's very likely they said some less polite words like 'WTF ARE THEY DOING' before turning on the mic and acting all professional
Sure there's the initial surprise, sure there's the post-mortem release of emotional energy, but after the initial surprise it's all business. The pilots are communicating with each other, there's a lot of information, and tasks, to keep them occupied.
Relentless training for situations that "never happen" means that professionals go into a low-emotion state, and rely on memorized behaviours and checklists, coupled with intense intellectual evaluation.
See the audio from sullys Hudson landing. It's all simple communication, coupled with drilled responses (restart engine, start apu etc) being driven from cool analytical data processing - what will work, what won't etc.
Training the emotion (panic, fear etc) out of you is the very goal of training for extremely intense, life threatening, situations.
If the cockpit recordings are released it'll be interesting to know if I'm right, but the level of professionalism displayed by the FedEx crew suggests to me that they are both highly trained, and worthy of that training. Congratulations to them and their trainers.
Reminds me of Air Canada 759[1]:
> The pilot of United Airlines 1 (UA001), the first in line for takeoff, interrupted the radio traffic at 11:56:01 p.m. and asked "Where is this guy going? He's on the taxiway."
A different regulation (applicable only to radar environments, which AUS is) allows for a departure if an arriving aircraft is 2+ miles away from the runway, as long as there is at least 3 miles of separation within 1 min after takeoff.
All that being said -- it is possible to execute a squeeze play like this if everything is perfect, but you need the departure to go IMMEDIATELY. Trying this in low visibility was extremely reckless and incompetent.
In the linked communication you can see that he knew both planes were incoming on the same runway and confirmed his brain dead plan repeatedly to both crews. Even telling SW that they could take off because Fedex was 3 miles out. At any reasonable speed this is virtually no time. At 165 it would be a little over 1 minute. Since the critical moment came around the 2 minute mark it seems likely that in addition to any other faults he also can't estimate distance.
Even after it went south or shall we say southwest he was never capable of recovering in any timely fashion as evidenced by the Fedex crew taking over his job. As a result of his incompetence everyone would have died. The only meaningful fact he could have ascertained in order to correct his plan would have been to understand that planes go fast. At this juncture retraining him seems like a poor decision. He's a hazard.
Let's assume that you are right. I don't think I can be as confident about anything as you are. Especially not before an investigation, but let's pretend that you are right: the controller in question is an imbecile who need to be fired immediately.
How is that not a process problem? How did an idiot get on frequency controlling traffic at a big airport? Shouldn't there be filters to prevent that? And if he is an idiot, which I don't believe but we are in a hypothetical, how many others there are?
If you see r/ATC, he's been shuffled between locations and this isn't his first screw-up. He manages to stay employed through claiming discrimination under EEO when performance issues come up. There's even another past incident from another airport featuring him.
Luckily, this may be the nail in the coffin that even US Critical Race Theory policies can't prevent, and it happened without any loss of life.
From the responses of those who have worked ATC, lazy & incompetent would be more accurate than idiot. He sounds checked out, and isn't really thinking about his choices.
They're notoriously awful for not firing people who repeatedly put lives at risk.
Additionally, assuming you're American, would you apply this same logic to police officers? ATC is similar in that lives are at stake.
The same system should definitely exist in law enforcement, to the extent that the mistakes are made in good faith. I would argue that a good percentage of the “mistakes” made by police in the US are malicious in nature, akin to ATC intentionally putting planes in danger. Our law enforcement culture in the US is so rotten that mistakes are neither punished nor understood.
To your point that ATC is notoriously awful for not firing people, I would say their safety record speaks for itself. The impulse for punitive vengeance is what puts lives at risk, not ATC's safety culture.
EDIT: Link. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1999/12/19/r...
Yes. Their primary job is safety, speedy traffic flow is secondary to that objective. Cutting corners would mean abandoning pretty much the entire purpose of bothering with ATC versus letting pilots figure it out themselves.