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Comment by direwolf20 | Hacker News Reader

When an overworked air traffic controller in Germany gave a plane an instruction that happened to be the opposite of TCAS automatic collision avoidance system, and one pilot followed TCAS to avoid a collision and one followed the controller, the planes crashed and everybody died. A family member of one of the passengers looked up, hunted down, and murdered in cold blood the air traffic controller.

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> an overworked air traffic controller in Germany

Actually the air traffic controller in question was Swiss not German.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_%C3%9Cberlingen_mid-air_c...

You left out - was a foreigner, managed to escape, faced zero consequences at home (AFAIK).

He didn't escape, he sentence was reduced from 8 to 3 1/2 by a Swiss judge. The reasoning was that his mental state was properly accounted for. Who knows if lobbying from Russia played a part in that. Also, not only did he face no consequences at home, he was celebrated and given a high-level job.

Maybe it's my American-ness showing, but it's pretty shocking to me that 8 years was considered too harsh for someone who stabbed a man to death in front of his family.

On the other hand, I suppose one could argue that the perpetrator was highly unlikely to commit a similar act in the future, if only because his motivation was the death of his own family, who would no longer be around to inspire him to violence a second time.

Until some other nefarious air traffic controller waits for him to remarry and have another family.

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