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As a pilot in my younger days, I was extra horrified by the events leading up to the occurrence of the mid air collision over the Potomac the other day. Boring initialisms and vague warnings were calmly droned by air traffic controllers as they watched a helicopter head straight for an airliner.
There
need to be two warning levels that are said with two levels of distress in the voice that any human brain will understand "FLIGHT PATH CONVERGENCE! FLIGHT PATH CONVERGENCE! FLIGHT PATH CONVERGENCE!" (or something similar) naming the two aircraft, then if they don't change course YELL "CRASH CRASH CRASH!". And I mean YELL!!!
I barely avoided a mid air collision over beautiful Half Moon bay one sunny afternoon flying a Cessna 172 many years ago. I can tell you, when you're closing head on at over 200 knots you don't have a lot of time to be calmly discussing flight adjustments using initialisms like which plane your about to crash into. That dot quickly turns into an aircraft and you turn or you die.
Luckily we're humans and there's built into language a system illustrating the order of magnitude of the imminent threat. It's called yelling and it has its place, but ONLY if a crash is imminent and as a last resort. You hear 'FLIGHT PATH CONVERGENCE!" or worse, "CRASH!" yelled over the radio you look all around you snap your head around as quick as possible and get ready for a hard bank in the other direction.
I'd propose creating even another level of warning. I know this goes against current protocols to be calm and collected on either end of the transmission between tower and aircraft, but clearly there might be times when calm and collected isn't the right approach.
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This is a very sad event, but lets wait for the inquiry report. |
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Honestly, I'm not sure your proposal would help overall. I believe air traffic controllers are selected specifically for their ability to remain calm under pressure.
While making everyone panic may avert some collisions, I wouldn't be surprised if it also caused more accidents - unrelated vehicles turning onto collision course, flying into terrain etc. |
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I just know as a former recreational pilot, if I'm headed for a crash I want the same emphasis from air traffic control as I'd get from a warning system saying "PULL UP! PULL UP! PULL UP!" if I'm heading for a mountain hidden by clouds. |
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Anyway, I hope whatever we can learn from this tragedy is applied to make sure it never happens again. |
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How about a brevity for "every plane above 100 feet immediately change course arbitrarily", to be used only by ATC in the case of imminent collision |
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Kind of like musical chairs? |
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Somebody could probably do the maths on if that would work, that is, how many crashes would it add per crashes avoided. |
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I'm surprised augmented reality displays haven't become common for pilots. All this information is available, but isn't made readily accessible to the pilot. The display could show: map/terrain, approach paths, other aircraft, etc. |
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The number of crashes caused would go up exponentially depending on how crowded the airspace is. |
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I know that's just a farce to parody the original idea, but if you heard "CRASH!" you obviously wouldn't just randomly turn, you'd very quickly look out your windows for another plane. |
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But speaking to the parody idea, planes around an airport are all flying a particular corridor similar to cars, so if they all turned randomly there wouldn't immediately hit a plane going the other direction. Planes at an airport are by design very far apart being given a flight path to land and takeoff. That's assuming this was just a sharp bank before they returned to their original course. If they all just started going in random directions, well, yea. |
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Not saying even that's a good idea, but planes wouldn't start falling out of the sky. But in that case since it's arbitrary, that imminent collision wouldn't necessarily even be avoided, they might just turn into each other. |
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So like I said, very bad idea but I'd like to see it modeled just out of curiosity. |
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I'd guess a 75% chance of the crash being avoided and a 25% increase in another crash being caused. And 100% chance it's a really bad idea. |
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But back to the original idea, say there's a plane 4 seconds away from hitting another airplane. What would you radio to them? You've only got 4 seconds. Anything more than one word isn't going to do anything. One word might not do anything either but better than nothing. |
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And of course, pilots would be told how to react: "Put your head up and look out the windows." In this particular case, the helicopter pilot who was clearly looking down would have looked up and see the plane they were flying into. Blackhawk helicopter cockpits have windows all around them, they were all looking at something on the ground, fiddling with the controls or otherwise not looking where they were going. If they heard "CRASH!" over the radio it would have probably given them a chance. |
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That is if they even had radio contact, no preventative is 100%, but might be better than nothing. |
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Hey, cars have automatic crash detection and avoidance, why don't planes? |
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Probably because mid air collisions are so rare they're not even really worth spending too much time thinking about. The mechanisms might cause more problems that they'd solve. |
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//Hey, cars have automatic crash detection and avoidance, why don't planes?// |
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I wonder whether this is because cars are much more manoeuvrable than planes. Cars have a good firm contact with solid road - or at least, they should, most of the time. Changing direction is a simple case of turning the wheels. (Okay, so there can be skidding, and control drops off with speed - but we simply disallow high speeds dependent on how much control is required.)
Planes, on the other hand, can only change direction by pushing on the air. And air isn't very dense, so it takes a long envelope of air being pushed differently to change anything very much. And as you've observed, things happen very quickly; there's a minimum speed at which planes can fly.
So the solution we have with planes and other air vehicles is to try not to let them get into a situation where they might potentially hit each other - and that's in the hands of a) air traffic controllers, and b) pilots doing what they're told. |
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Dunno, might also because they're really not needed seeing that mid air collisions are so rare. Car crashes happen every dy. |
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Maybe have something to throws a shield in front of the engines for a bird strike or something. |
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That's the thing though, that almost never happens, planes almost never crash. One figure I saw said "On average a person would have to travel by air every day for 103,239 years to experience a fatal accident," |
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Not sure if that's right but flying is the safest way to get around. |
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Holy schnikies! I knew car crashes were more common than plane crashes but DAMN! |
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"Each year, over 3,700 people die on California roadways. There is an estimated amount of between 20 and 50 million accident-related injuries that occur globally each year. At least 250,000 accidents in which injuries occur are reported in California each year." |
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I'm also seeing that self driving cars are twice as accident prone as human cars which is suprising. The accidents are supposedly more minor though. Someday they'll be much safer I assume. |
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