'Near Collisions' of Commercial Jets Happen All the Time: FAA Records
'Near Collisions' of Commercial Jets Happen All the Time: FAA Records
In a report that will make you want to travel by car for the rest of your life, the FAA's records detail how "near collision" episodes are frequent and ongoing.
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.
89For 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.
32Another 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?
8There 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
2
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
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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.
76Guessing "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".
23They usually go up or down as opposed to left or right, but near miss is usually just anything that activates TCAS in either aircraft.
11AFAIK "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.
8Near 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).
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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.
14It 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.
10Absolutely. But when the two objects are flying at 600 mph.....
6The NYT article points to at least one case where the planes almost scraped skin to skin.
5And airplanes have systems to make sure planes don't collide midair. I'm not sure if small private planes do however.
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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.
59Not 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.
7
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.
57This 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.
20
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.
26Immediately 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.
10Permanently Deleted
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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.
24https://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.
9Nominations 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.
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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.
8Secretary of transpiration
🤣🤣🤣
2Sorry, I was typing with a toddler on my lap.
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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.
20I 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.
15These people don't know how TCAS works lol
14At 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."
12Wow, I could actually hear George talking as I read that. Damn, I miss him.
3
I didn’t want to know that.
5It's not actually true, so don't worry.
4I 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.
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And just to think, some people actually think flying cars are a good idea... 🤦♂️
3Decision Height: Climb Climb Climb
Other plane: Descend Descend Descend
3On 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.
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