Let me add some context from the perspective of an airline pilot who is also is a company training captain.
All modern transport category aircraft are equipped with a system called TCAS, or Terminal Collision Avoidance System.
TCAS operates by interrogating the TCAS system of other aircraft in a defined proximity ring based on some variables like altitude and rate of closure and resolves a climb/descend/level command to each aircraft, which we pilots train regularly to execute. The system is a near perfect solution to deconfliction when collision is probable.
With daily average flights in the US alone around 45 000, the amount of “near misses” is an incredibly small percentage. In 15 years of flying TCAS equipped aircraft, I’ve had 5 actual TCAS RAs (RA stands for resolution advisory - the actual avoidance maneuver)
Another way to look at it is: when was the last mid-air collision in the US, or even the world involving TCAS equipped airliners? The only one that comes to mind is the DHL-BAL mid air in 2002, which was a result of the one crew not following the TCAS instruction.
This article can fuck right off.
For those that don’t speak plane, this is like saying every red light that tells you to stop and wait for someone is a near miss.
Pilot above is saying they got a red light 5 times in 15 years… hell, they got a give way 5 times when there was actually something there would be more accurate.
I see you don’t “speak plane” as well, because this is a terrible explanation
Obeying red light is like obeying air traffic. controller.
getting TCAS advisory is as if you had a system in your car that would tell you “you are too close to the car In front of you - slow down!”
He’s not explaining the system, he’s explaining why the article is shitty journalism, and it works fine as an explanation for me
If you need an explanation, that means you don’t understand the issue well enough to be qualified to decide whether that explanation is good… It’s not and the article is not shitty journalism.
Did your mum say it was good and pin it on the fridge 😂
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Another way to look at it is: when was the last mid-air collision in the US, or even the world involving TCAS equipped airliners? The only one that comes to mind is the DHL-BAL mid air in 2002, which was a result of the one crew not following the TCAS instruction.
A significant part of the report focused on near collisions on runways.
TCAS doesn’t mitigate that, right?
There are other systems for runway collision avoidance. This video outlines both how they work and an actual runway incident: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nj7nG6gJqsU
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=nj7nG6gJqsU
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
A pilot who’s also a training captain?! Come on, MentourPilot, it’s you, isn’t it?
Is that some kind of a faux pas? I don’t know who mentor pilot is
Mentor Pilot is an aviation youtuber who is also a training captain.
which was a result of the one crew not following the TCAS instruction.
That is serious misinterpretation. that crew followed their TCAS until they got conflicting instructions from the ATC…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_Überlingen_mid-air_collision
I believe you are getting pedantic - when they got conflicting info they didn’t follow the TCAS. Point remains, they didn’t follow the TCAS.
The call was ambiguous at the time and they ended up settling out of court. I guess it is only pedantic if you consider that detail to be irrelevant to the broader discussion of air safety. Otherwise, zeroing the fact they didn’t follow he TCAS could be considered pedantic.
Only one thing is sure, I am currently being pedantic about the usage of the word pedantic. But really, I think the relevancy of this detail depends on who we’re putting the blame on. If it was a human error, then, point remains. If it wasn’t, then it ain’t just a matter of if the TCAS was followed.
I am aware nowadays this would be considered a human error though, not listening to the TCAS I mean.
Im going to chat with you as you provide a much more balanced arguement than personal-attack-know-it-all i have been talking with.
Yes, the call was ambiguous and easily debatable at the time - no disaster is ever one mistake and unfortunately in this case everyone paid for it with their life, including the ATC controller.
The TCAS was designed and taught as a last resort option, and was to be followed instantly and overruled everything, including ATC. Unfortunately it only works if everyone follows it - one did, one followed atc and they dived into eachother. The system failed because it wasn’t followed, and at the end of the day the pilots knew that TCAS took priority. The pilots are in final command and responsible for their aircraft, and cant blame anyone else who gave instructions anymore than the holder of a firearm, captain of a ship or driver of a vehicle.
Modern understanding adds a number if factors into play, namely peoples reaction to authority in an emergency. Pilot error caused the crash, but there are multiple factors that went into their error - external authority (who pilots are used to listening to), sudden need to react in an uneventful flight, cant remember if there were training, equipment and fatigue issues or not, and a pile of others. No one reacted recklessly (don’t know why other poster thought I said that), just instantly with no chance to second guess their choice.
no i am not and no, the point definitely does not remain.
first, phrasing it like “they didn’t follow TCAS” make them sound like some reckless cowboys, which is simply not the case. they did exactly what they were told by tcas and when they got contradicting order from ATC the did exactly what they were told by him.
second, the statatement “was a result of the one crew not following the TCAS instruction” is simply not true. the accident was a result of ATC (as in the organization, not the specific people having the shift that night) fucked up". reading that linked wiki article may be good place to start to learn about the accident.
Had both aircraft followed those automated instructions, the collision would not have occurred.
That is right from the wiki.
I never claimed the pilots were “cowboys”, you made that up in your head. I simply said the accident was a result of not following TCAS, which at its core is correct. Of course there are multiple contributing factors, ATC being the largest, but my post was already getting long winded.
and had all the pilots overslept that day the incident might not have happen as well and in spite of that, we don’t list them getting out of the bed in the morning as a reason of the accident.
them obeying the atc command was reasonable and expected course of action.
them obeying the atc command was reasonable and expected course of action.
That’s incorrect, and is exactly why we train to ignore ATC commands and follow TCAS advisories. We don’t even tell ATC if we’re climbing or descending, simply “Aircraft XYZ, TCAS RA”
And guess since when it is done that way…
Based on the videos of near misses on YouTube, the safety margins are so enormous that even an event classified as near miss is not really recognizable by a layperson, because the two airplanes are nowhere near each other.
Guessing “near collision” means one plane had to divert a few degrees before continuing course? Yeah totally normal, you don’t want them to be anywhere close to what you and I consider as “near”.
They usually go up or down as opposed to left or right, but near miss is usually just anything that activates TCAS in either aircraft.
AFAIK “near” means “in a minute’s time, you might be within a thousand feet of another aircraft”.
Which means 99.99% of the time they didn’t “need” to divert course, but they did out of an abundance of caution.
Near miss can be a confusing phrase, but it means a miss where the objects (or planes here) were very near each other. With that context, a near collision wouldn’t make sense as there’s no way to have a collision where the objects are just near each other (as opposed to contacting each other).
Yes, but the layperson’s perspective doesn’t really matter here and it’s worth reading the NYT piece. The underlying issue is that air traffic controllers are overworked and making mistakes due to staffing shortages and mandatory overtime while working a mentally taxing job. There are legitimate concerns that if this isn’t addressed, we could see actual collisions and casualties.
It seems silly to minimize this.
Even if the distances seem great to you, if the FAA says “that’s a near miss” and “we’re operating outside of safety requirements”, that means that if you roll the dice long enough you WILL have a crash.
Yes, but the “everybody panic!” vibe the article is trying to convey is way too dramatic.
When air traffic controllers tell you “this is a crisis” I think we should listen. Must we wait for an actual crash before we do something? It seems like we never react UNTIL a crisis explodes.
Another example: last year, while threatening a railroad strike, the railroad unions warned that derailments and near catastrophes were going up. Just a few months after they were forced back to work without additional support or breaks, the East Palestine disaster struck. The people responsible for inspecting cars TOLD the media and TOLD congress that this was happening. And it’s still going on. Derailments are like mass shootings. They happen about weekly, but the reporting just covers a few of the big ones.
Of course the air traffic controllers should be listened to, since they can predict the future tendencies.
I think railroads have less safety margin in their system, mostly due to having one dimension fewer available. A plane can (and automatically does) stop a collision by ascending or descending. A train can’t do that.
Absolutely. But when the two objects are flying at 600 mph…
The NYT article points to at least one case where the planes almost scraped skin to skin.
good think we have you, a laymen who fixed the problem by watching youtube videos! 😂
I’m not fixing anything, I’m just saying that “everybody panic!” is premature.
And basis for this deep insight of yours is you have seen some YouTube videos… Got it. That definitely wins over some pilots describing their experience in that NYT article.
And airplanes have systems to make sure planes don’t collide midair. I’m not sure if small private planes do however.
Can someone be sacked for these stupid fear mongering presentations of what should be fairly banal topics? If there was actual reason to worry, we would point out the constant remarkable disasters which should discourage you.
I wish. I’m so entirely sick of sensationalism and shitty science writing.
It’s only going to get worse with AI writing the stories.
That all depends on how it is trained and/or regulated. You could train a model to avoid sensationalism, but with no motive other than profit, it will definitely get much much worse.
There is a news site that does use AI to write articles without sensationalism. I can’t rember the name of it off the top of my head. I looked at it once and was surprised at how uninterested I was in any of the stories. I doubt it gets much traffic over the initial curiosity look. I’m sure everyone will just use it to make the news even more sensationalized.
That’s why the regulation part is important.
I’m not sure how regulation can be effective for AI. No politician understands AI. Also, by the time anything gets passed, AI will have advanced so far that any regulations that are passed will be pointless. Eventually everyone will have AI locally in their pocket. Then there’s really no way to regulate it. It’s a genie that you can’t put back in the bottle.
Not actually sure this is banal? The story is a staffing shortage of air traffic controllers and several near misses due to them being exhausted. Just because there hasn’t been a problem yet doesn’t mean there isn’t a problem at all.
Looks like the TCAS system has been doing a fine job, which it was designed to do.
For those who don’t know, there is a system onboard every modern airliner that has one job: detect planes at (roughly) same altitude, heading towards each other. It then very clearly tells one plane to pull up while telling the other to dive.
Pilots are instructed to follow TCAS above anything else they might hear from controller or captain.
TCAS is why we have nearly no mid air collisions, especially considering the amount of planes sharing the same crowded space near airports.
This is cool, but I’m annoyed at how blase this whole comments thread is.
Even if we were to go another ten years without a crash, the traffic controllers are burning out. That’s not fair to them. That’s not fair to make people work at the edge of their capability, struggling each day to manage to provide people another unappreciated close call.
The FAA should set requirements on air traffic controllers per flight or day and enforce them. Not enough controllers to fly safely? That’s a real shame that flights have to be cancelled.
If it affected passengers and CEOs, this issue would be solved much faster.
We need Mentour Pilot or 74 Gear to make a video tearing apart all the fear mongering in this article (not saying it’s totally invalid, but it’s massively overblown). But basically, a “near miss” in commercial aviation is “this plane momentarily transgressed the very generous mandated safety distances and triggered a resolution advisory in the cockpit of both aircraft which was complied with immediately.” It is by no means equivalent to a “near colission” like they imply. The worst part of the ordeal was probably the reports the pilots and ATC had to file afterward.
Immediately from the headline my first reaction was “well, the rate of actual collisions is near 0”, so either they’re very good at dodging each other, or what they deem as a “near collision” is actually quite a wide berth.
But then, this is the journalistic integrity we’ve come to expect from gizmodo.
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I’m annoyed that this article doesn’t call out the people responsible for this whole ordeal. First: the FAA has been without a confirmed administrator for over a year.
“The FAA, which manages air traffic throughout the nation, has been without a Senate-confirmed leader since March of last year, when Stephen Dickson resigned halfway through his five-year term. Since then, the agency has faced understaffing of air traffic controllers, a technical outage that grounded flights nationwide in January, and several close calls between airline jets.”
https://apnews.com/article/faa-acting-administrator-biden-buttigieg-079bbc6c1abb13b404946c75a06ec311
Biden has not made nominating a qualified candidate a priority. The Senate needs to stop dicking around and approve or deny faster, because they’re the reason this stretches on. And Secretary of Transpiration Pete Buttigieg seems to only appear in the news when he’s apologizing after people ask where he is when a critical piece of transportation infrastructure suffers a catastrophic failure. Maybe he’s doing great things, but I’m not hearing about them, I’m just seeing signs of things not going well, and I’d like some reassurance.
I honestly thought that Transportation was going to be the thing that Biden and Buttigieg would be best qualified for, and I’ve been pretty baffled by the lack of management going on.
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/03/22/politics/phil-washington-committee-vote/index.html
The GOP aide said that because Republicans remain unified in their opposition to Washington’s prospective leadership, “his nomination is on life support.”
About a nomination made by Biden last year. Without a majority he can’t force it through.
Nominations just go through the senate, not the house of representatives. Democrats DO hold a majority in the senate.
I don’t want to let Republicans off the hook – they are obstructionists and government abolitionists, and this is primarily due to Ted Cruz’s opposition – but no, this is happening entirely under a Democratic held chamber.
I just want to point out how common this is, btw: Democrats plead for votes to get control over government, and then when they get it, somehow they still always find a way to insist that they can’t do anything because they just don’t have enough control. Even when they’re in charge, the media and the party advance the narrative that they’re not REALLY in charge.
Since they’re a little less totalitarian than GOP they don’t force everybody to vote with the party as aggressively. When the majority is narrow it like now that means Biden can’t force it through if even just 1 or 2 people aren’t on board.
And then you can look at the track record of the specific senators who won’t go along. The party leadership would have to push alternative candidates to get them voted out to make that happen. But do you want them to have that degree of centralized control?
I mean this with no disrespect: I think you should examine why your response to criticism of the performance of elected officials is to focus on justifying the behavior of those you view as allies.
Can I suggest that you view it like a sports team? If you were on a sports team and the team lost, even if you thought that they were at a serious disadvantage, you’d watch the game tape and say, “Do you see here? We should’ve subbed out this player, and here, we should have avoided leaving this gap in the defense.”
I think you’re demonstrating a conditioned response to generate permission structures for a preferred party. I think the media programs us to view all criticism of our preferred party as a threat to their success, and the only response to criticism to be defending their actions instead of asking how we can leverage power better.
For contrast, compare Biden’s nominees to lead the FCC and to the FTC. Biden nominated Lina Khan to the FCC in March of 2021 and he and Chuck Schumer got her confirmed in June. Under a 50-50 senate. And she’s been an absolute all-star. This is what I wanna see.
Conversely, Biden waited NINE MONTHS into his presidency to appoint a head to the FTC. This has huge consequences. The FTC was captured by the internet service providers under Trump, and they can’t reverse these terrible policies until they get a new Democratic appointee. After a nine month wait, the nomination stalled for a year, and now we’re in year 3 of Biden’s presidency and still living under Trump’s net neutrality rules. There isn’t a reason why this is okay. It’s a fumble. It’s a self-goal. If you want Biden to get reelected, don’t spend time telling me why this is actually fine, join me in saying, “Hey! Wake up and take care of this! I’ve seen you guys do this with other nominees, so I know you can, so do it!”
Our job is to push the government to act, not run defense when it doesn’t.
I don’t view them as allies, just less terrible. I specifically do not treat it as sports because that’s far too simplified.
Collision avoidance is an automated system built into all commercial planes. These “near misses” aren’t actually that close. Go look up TCAS and you’ll see what margins they work with.
Secretary of transpiration
🤣🤣🤣
Sorry, I was typing with a toddler on my lap.
for the smartasses who once heard about tcas, so everything is, obviously, made up bullshit.
from the nyt article that gizmodo refers to:
“I saw the nose of the jet with his lights illuminated at a close range. It looked like a cover photo from Flying Magazine,” a commercial airline pilot wrote in March, after coming within 200 feet of crashing into another aircraft in the skies around Jacksonville, Fla. “This conflict was too close to risk any single life we had on board, much less the 198 souls traveling collectively on us.”
In another report this year, a pilot narrated nearly colliding with two separate passenger planes after landing in Tampa on a foggy morning.
“I noticed a dark silhouette of an aircraft that appeared to be moving directly at us. It was extremely difficult to see, but I yelled ‘STOP’ to the captain, ‘The aircraft is going to hit us,’” the pilot wrote. “The other aircraft never slowed down, and if we would have noticed it a second later we would have collided. There was a second aircraft following the first, and it did not slow down either, and it passed our wingtips within ft.”
Just after 5 p.m. on Aug. 7, a controller at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport cleared American Flight 1388 for takeoff to New York. The controller instructed it to turn right after departing the airport, but the American pilot incorrectly repeated the directions back to the controller, according to F.A.A. safety reports. The controller didn’t catch the mistake.
After the plane took off, it banked left instead of right, directly into the path of a Southwest flight en route to Austin.
A different air traffic controller realized the planes were on a collision course. He radioed in urgent tones to the American pilot that the other flight was just to its left — “a Boeing 737 sitting right there.”
The two planes came within a third of a mile horizontally and 300 feet vertically of each other before pulling apart.
A midair catastrophe had been averted by seconds.
I experienced what they’re talking about. Plane was coming in to land. Suddenly the engines revved to the max and we tilted up. We flew right past the airport. The captain came in the com and said “Ladies and gentlemen you may have noticed we did not land. A Delta flight was on the runway where it should not have been. At delta they’re still learning to fly, and it shows!”
You could tell from his voice that he was pissed. To be fair I doubt he knew for sure it was pilot error instead of controller error. But anyway.
These people don’t know how TCAS works lol
At least it’s nice to see them sticking with George Carlin’s nomenclature.
Here’s a phrase that apparently the airlines simply made up: near miss. They say that if 2 planes almost collide, it’s a near miss. Bullshit, my friend. It’s a near hit! A collision is a near miss. [WHAM! CRUNCH!] “Look, they nearly missed!” “Yes, but not quite.”
Wow, I could actually hear George talking as I read that. Damn, I miss him.
Nearly missed, and near miss are totally different things. Near is just description of what kind of miss this is, but it is still a miss. Near miss, far miss, typical miss, etc.
Pretty sure they were referring to the “near collisions” in the article title.
I was not replying about the title.
Yes, I understood that. The person you replied to, on the other hand, likely was referencing the title.
No mention of the TCAS? Education time.
The ICAO requires all passenger aircraft to be equipped with TCAS - Traffic Collision Avoidance System. It is a last line of defense to avoid collision. When two TCAS-equipped airplanes are on a collision course, the TCAS modules will contact each other and negotiate, then issue corrective actions to their respective pilots - one to ascend, and the other to descend. Responding to a TCAS command is mandatory and overrules ATC instructions.
TCAS is the last resort. If that’s being activated, it means Air Traffic Control screwed up. The NYT reporting talked about how ATC is making more and more mistakes due to staffing issues.
I didn’t want to know that.
It’s not actually true, so don’t worry.
Edit. If you’re going to reply with an “actually” comment, don’t. Just go back to Reddit.
It is actually true though. Just the FAA’s definition of “near collision” is much much looser than what a lay person would think.
I don’t know. I’ve seen some pretty loose lay persons.
Ok
I mean it is true, it’s just “near collisions” has a broad definition in terms of air safety. Things that are very low risk or potential problems that were simply resolved before they grew are still recorded.
“Anyone who points out that I’m wrong needs to leave this place.”
Such fragility. Yikes.
No. The top comments already explain why the article is wrong.
He is just worried that HIS “actually” wouldn’t stand out as nicely if someone added second one…
Lol you’re the only one that noticed that. Kudos
The article is clickbait. The margins of range for “near miss” is enormous to ensure such things don’t happen. A “near miss” is usually still miles and miles apart, and only registers because two flights may be at the same altitude to avoid weather.
And just to think, some people actually think flying cars are a good idea… 🤦♂️
Decision Height: Climb Climb Climb
Other plane: Descend Descend Descend
On one hand, flying is incredibly safe compared to all other forms of travel.
On the other hand, jet engines burn a lot of fossil fuel and wrecks the global clime. We’re working on that.
It’s grounds to get harassed by the TSA if you’re a minority or some official doesn’t like you or you wound up on some list. We’re working towards making this even worse.
