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

by the_mitsuhiko • 2 years ago

33 52 2 years ago

paxys2• 2 years ago

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

ranger_danger• 2 years ago

sounds like the movie Swordfish

toomuchtodo• 2 years ago

Or is a large scale disaster the only way to make people understand the urgency?

Yes. And a controller is going to get scapegoated (likely ruining their life) when a few hundred people die in the process, versus the failing system.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/02/business/air-traffic-cont... | https://archive.today/bFcAh

(Obviously, I would rather be wrong about this)

WorkerBee28474• 2 years ago

Obviously, I would rather be wrong about this

No, you're right, this is a common procedure across industries

stevepeg• 2 years ago

But The Times found that the combination of six-day workweeks and round-the-clock schedules has caused controllers to develop physical and mental health problems. Many avoid seeking professional help because doing so might jeopardize the medical clearances they need to work.

This is happening frequently to pilots and cabin crew as well, all over the world. Regulators have allowed a lot of flex in rostering in recent years, maybe a bit too much.

yongjik• 2 years ago

Two planes collided in LAX in 1991 due to what was clearly a controller error, killing 35. Investigators decided that anyone could have made such a mistake given circumstances. The controller wasn't punished, and instead a bunch of changes were made to prevent similar situations in the future.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_runway_disaster

Obviously it would be ideal if such changes are made before planes collide, but the US air accident investigation system generally does its job, as far as I've heard.

TillE• 2 years ago

It's really crazy that ATC isn't 99% computerized. It's exactly the kind of problem which is trivial for a computer program with all the necessary information, but incredibly stressful for a human.

dralley2• 2 years ago

It's not exactly trivial, certainly when it comes to the edge cases. Emergencies, unusual situations, etc.

squigz• 2 years ago

If it's so trivial, why do you think we haven't done it yet?

icegreentea2• 2 years ago

I'd argue against the triviality, but even if we accept that premise, the exact challenge is "with all the necessary information".

Human ATC operators integrate a huge variety of information including voice comms to build a situational awareness of not just the current position and velocities of planes, but also their stated intentions.

Yes, with sufficient coordination you could push all of that over into the cockpit and have the pilots input their intentions directly. We all know that voice transcription is a bit hit and miss (though the phraselogy used would probably be quite helpful), and certainly typing is... not optimal for emergencies.

This aligns with basically all questions about automation in aviation (including in the cockpit). Automated systems can generally out perform human operators in probably the 99.99+% of typical cases. However a human with full situational awareness is still critical in the remaining situations. The challenge is that:

* For a human to have proper awareness, they must be meaningfully engaged. They must actually be having some real agency and effect on the system.

* Neither full human nor full automation provides the degree of safety and performance that we currently desire. Somehow we must integrate the two systems together.

dmitrygr• 2 years ago

Are you a pilot? Or an ATC perhaps? No?

This worldview, commonly espoused by Silicon Valley types, that every problem is just one iphone app away from being solved, is nauseating.

There are so many corner cases you cannot even imagine! Special requests. Weather. Emergencies.

SkyPuncher• 2 years ago

It’s is 99% computerized. It’s the last 1% that requires significant human interpretation and reaction to real world events.

Even further, many of these problems do not lie solely with ATC. They also involve humans, piloting the airplanes.

jmward016• 2 years ago

I'm a big fan of overhauling the system for a lot of reasons, but safety isn't one of them. 'Close call' without 'accident' still means there wasn't an accident. Rebuilding the system because you think it is dangerous will likely lead to a less safe system since the one in place is incredibly safe with many years of statistics to prove it.

However, overhauling the current system because it is incapable of handling the future where autonomous vehicles flood the skies, now that is something I can get behind.

randmeerkat• 2 years ago

However, overhauling the current system because it is incapable of handling the future where autonomous vehicles flood the skies, now that is something I can get behind.

Until cars can drive themselves without crashing into stopped fire trucks[1], I don’t want anything autonomous flying anywhere near where I live.

[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/tesla-driver-killed-plo...

mlyle5• 2 years ago

'Close call' without 'accident' still means there wasn't an accident.

Close calls are a very important signal for how safe the system is.

Good safety systems are redundant and require many failures to result in a crash. Here, we got down to the last link in the chain: weather was clear and the departing pilots could see there was an obvious problem while there was time to stop.

since the one in place is incredibly safe with many years of statistics to prove it.

We've gotten to this safe system by chipping away at problems we see-- both from actual accidents and close calls. The only way we reach and keep (and perhaps surpass) this level of safety is to keep (carefully) correcting problems.

(And yes, there is risk of changes making things worse. We need to do our best to avoid that and detect it quickly if it happens).

defrost2• 2 years ago

'Close call' without 'accident' still means there wasn't an accident.

It's a giant red flag in any serious OSHA system in resource mining, energy extraction, military logistics, etc.

In order to reduce fatal accidents close attention is paid to the full incident pyramid, minor accidents and near misses.

Fiftty years of practice about the globe strongly makes the case that a reduction in near misses and non fatal incidents has a real flow on to reducing fatal accidents.

the one in place is incredibly safe with many years of statistics to prove it.

Achieved via exactly the kind of OSHA attention to small details and near misses system just outlined.

The safety officers at New York and elsewhere will be failing at their job if they are not putting some the hours in to looking at this incident and how to mitigate future occurrences .. especially when visibility is lower than on this day.

harshbutfair• 2 years ago

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

atomicnumber3• 2 years ago

How much actually went wrong here? Forgive me, genuine question.

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

dralley2• 2 years ago

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

zug_zug• 2 years ago

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

Zenzero• 2 years ago

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

jmward016• 2 years ago

I wish for every one of these 'not an accident, but it was scary' stories there was a story about the 30+k deaths that yet again happened on US roads last year and we barely cared. Unfortunately some day there will be another major airline accident because no system is perfect. The stats are clear though, airlines are incredibly safe. We are over reporting these types of issues by orders of magnitude compared to other transportation and safety related issues.

I wonder if there is an (unnamed?) psychological effect at play here. When a large activity has very rare issues compared to its peers maybe we tend to over emphasize the few issues found? Possibly because the difference in rates is too extreme for us to comprehend. Hundreds dying on the roads every day, nobody blinks an eye. One plane does what it is supposed to when a mistake was made and it is a news story.

dvngnt_• 2 years ago

plane big, car small. planes made 9/11

panick21_6• 2 years ago

Its incredible how little society cares about road accidents. Its not just the deaths. Also the injuries and the massive amount of property damage and other costs.

Somehow this hasn't been identified as systematic issue and the only solution anybody seems to come up with is 'cars are just gone drive themselves and they are going to be perfect'.

The solution are so simple and low tech, so much incredible low hanging fruit. If only people actually thought about it in those terms.

jmward016• 2 years ago

People just aren't good at understanding risk. If we do it every day we get numb to it.

I actually use cars as a personal risk metric. Most people drive regularly so it is clearly a risk we 'accept' but we also admit it is risky and require training, inspections, vehicle and road standards, dedicated police/fire/ambulance/etc etc etc. Basically, driving is my cut-line. If I am doing an activity that is statistically as dangerous/near the danger of driving I will consider extra precautions or consider avoiding it all together. If it is less dangerous I generally just accept the default safety included with the activity. If it is more dangerous I seriously consider not doing it.

NikkiA• 2 years ago

Also the injuries and the massive amount of property damage and other costs.

I'd put the well documented, utterly massive cost to health and wellness, short and long term, due to pollution, up there too. Pretty much every single case of asthema for a start.

piva002• 2 years ago

Not all societies care so little, in the Nordics, Germany, the Netherlands, etc. there has been a constant effort through the last decades to make roads safer.

Norway (and I believe Sweden as well) have their own programs aiming for zero road fatalities, it's a dream but there's an aim and concerted effort has made traffic accidents less fatal to all road participants (pedestrians, bikes, and drivers).

The technical solutions are low tech: slower speed limits for traffic in denser populated areas, removing space for cars in cities to make drivers more attentive, roundabouts instead of crossings. The issue for the USA is the willingness of the average Joe driving their car to have their privileges taken away, that's not a technical issue but a political/social one.

laborcontract• 2 years ago

It's called the availability heuristic and the response to airplane crashes are frequently used as an example of it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic

Simulacra• 2 years ago

Gun violence?

mynameisnoone• 2 years ago

The way the world works: dismiss enormous numbers of deaths when they're unknown, nameless, individual, low status people, or happen to Rwandans or Palestinians in distant lands and not pretty children of celebrities.

sandspar• 2 years ago

That's the way our species works. You work that way too.

smitty1e• 2 years ago

The stats are clear though, airlines are incredibly safe.

The concern among some is that safety is being sacrificed on a political altar, and that there will be a butcher's bill, probably sooner than later.

remarkEon• 2 years ago

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

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

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