The headline in The Daily Mail says, "... desperate pilot landing at Austin airport tells passenger jet below it to abort takeoff because they're using the SAME runway." This is a great headline because it truly was only the Fedex crew that prevented a disaster and not the ATC system that is supposed to prevent collisions like between the landing fedEx jet and the departing Southwest jet.
Usually when these events break through to the public's awareness, an FAA spokesperson appears and says, Safety was Never Compromised. It's a cliche. This was a total system failure. These airplanes were not separated by any good fortune of serendipitious timing. The only thing preventing another Tenerife was the FedEx crew's situational awareness and the breath of god.
American aviation is a system with different parts and priorities, checks and balances, and really quite a bit of public transparency. This system, like all systems, can be studied and improved. The people who study the American ATC system have been shouting for at least twenty years that the next major airplane disaster will look like a particular scenario. This is going to be the Next Big Thing.
It looks like this: Two big jets. One of them is supposed to use a runway for takeoff or landing. The other plane will either cross or use the runway, and they collide. This is the nightmare scenario of American aviation, this is what the safety analysts tell anybody who will listen, this is the thing that keeps people awake at night.
Back in the 1980's and 1990's, the bad events in the ATC system were generally unknown outside of the facility. It was as if an information moat surrounded the tower. The controllers would walk into the Quality Assurance office, people would review and talk to make sure everybody understood the implications, and then just like any other Confessional they'd be told to do some perfunctory training as penance, and go and sin no more.
Technology progressed, the internet arrived, and now if a Tower has an event over the weekend, guaranteed on Monday morning the phone rings and Headquarters says, "Hey I'm sure you're already looking at Saturday's event with United 123, call me when you get a solid handle on it".
This Austin situation is awful. As bad as it gets without body bags. The phrase, "pink mist" which was popularized in a 1999 ATC movie to refer to the clouds of airborne body fluids is not misplaced.
Aviation these days is quite public. Various Flight Tracker websites offer the public a view of the airplanes. There are ATC radio fans who put receivers on their houses and stream the audio online at sites like LiveATC.net. The airplane transponders, which used to send position information to the radar site, now transmit really detailed info into the public realm.
So the re-enactions, the tapes, the transcripts that we see - they're all ersatz wannabees, using readily available hobbyist info of unofficial provenance to paint the picture for the public, before the government agencies are anywhere close to making a public disclosure. This is a good thing which keeps good people honest.
As in any breaking news event, we tend to focus more on what the media shows us - oooh, bright shiny object - than to what's missing. The Austin airport does not have ASDE / AMASS gear which would have rang an alarm about the occupied runway. Even though they have 767s and 737s, Congress did not see fit to authorize funds for the Austin AMASS. I bet they will now.
This brings us to the cost-justification of saving lives. JFK deserved AMASS. Austin didn't. You may have heard of a Vision Zero philosophy in eliminating vehicle-driven deaths; proponents argue that there are no cost-justified levels of acceptable death. They say, it can never be ethically acceptable that people are killed or seriously injured when moving within the transport system. There is an Austin Vision Zero program.
The Tower controller cleared Southwest for takeoff when the inbound was three miles out (roughly). Usually, in nice weather, this could work. If the controller had said, "cleared for takeoff no delay traffic two mile final", that would have been even better.
I think the buried clue is the very low visibility. You hear the Tower controller reciting RVR numbers, "runway visibility range" touchdown 1400 (feet), midfield 600 (feet), rollout 1800 (feet). That's not much at all. 600 feet is the minimum requirement for planes with special equipment and crews with special training. This is the sort of sensitive operation that invokes the concerns about 5G phones interfering with radar altimeters.
Normally in nice weather, with Southwest ready to go and Fedex three miles out, the Tower controller paints the picture - "Southwest123, cleared for immediate takeoff, landing traffic two mile final". And then Southwest hits the gas and takes it on the roll, quickly lining up on the centerline but not being very anal about it.
With an 600-foot midpoint RVR, the departing captain taxies carefully out to the centerline, makes a full slow ninety-degree turn, and really really lines up. Takes a look out the window just to check for deer or vehicles, and then gradually applies takeoff power. It's a completely different takeoff experience, and it takes a lot more time. An experienced tower controller would know that.
Armed with the same misinformation that you have, I offer these thoughts:
- Was the controller a low-experience tower controller?
- Has the controller ever done same runway, arrivals and departures in very low visibility before?
- Has the controller ever sat in a jumpseat or simulator to see the different performance in different conditions?
- Was the Cab Cordinator or Tower Supervisor position staffed?
I guess: Yes, Maybe Not, No, No.
ATC is a system, not an individual feat. So lets look at system effects:
- The event happens at 6:47 am. Was the tower team all present? Was this a trainee and a distracted instructor?
- Why were they arriving and departing on the same runway when parallels were available?
- Did anybody brief the tower controller on what to expect and what to watch out for?
- Were positions combined? Were controllers working more than one job? Were they fully staffed?
The best book I read in 2022 was,
There are no Accidents by
Jesse Singer. Singer argues effectively that
collisions, crashes, fatalities happen because there's a rush to keep an operation moving fast, staffing is short, training is compromised, and employees are generally pressured to keep everything moving. In other words,
safety is a systems issue, a management policy, and a budget decision. It's rarely an individual matter.. We call these "accidents" to normalize and de-stigmatize the events and maintain personal comfort. It's a great book; highly recommended.
There was a similar event at JFK a few weeks ago, between Delta and American. One was taking off, the other crossed the runway downfield. We hear that the ASDE / AMASS worked well. The tower controller urged the departure to cancel takeoff clearance. They stopped before hitting the crossing jet. Disaster was averted.
Let me say this: If these two events in two weeks are a trend, it's going to be a terrible year. Pete Buttigeig, who is notionally in charge and responsible, needs to get ahold of this.
And finally, we're in the media awareness timeframe for the police killing of Tyre Nichols in Memphis. Media awareness begins at the killing and ends at the funeral. Can anybody doubt that police killings are a safety issue for black Americans? Is there pressure for results, courtesy quality assurance, political influence, overtime constraints, and a code of Omerta? Of course. There is no functional civilian oversight, and people fly Blue Lives Matter flags.
Police departments are failed public safety systems. People will say, But not all cops are racists. And of course that's true. Put any group of people together and they're not a monolith.
The phrase, Not all cops.... recognizes that in fact, some cops are bad apples, prone to beating and biased against black people, and they walk around with authority and guns. And the good apples stand around and let it happen.
Would we tolerate an ATC system where "not all controllers" are bad apples, indifferent to safety? Where the good apples get busy with their coffee and scones while the rookie puts two planes together? I don't think so. But these cops are going to kill more Americans than the airport disasters.
Why do we tolerate a police system - ostensibly a public safety system - that kills more Americans than aviation does, with some cops walking around indifferent to safety? And yet we're petrified about two airplanes getting too close.
Couldn't be that the cop's victims and the passengers are from different socio-economic groups, could it?