If the goal is to improve safety firing people is almost always the wrong response. That juvenile preoccupation with punishment only serves to create a culture where mistakes are hidden rather than understood.
It's also an extremely niche field, with a very high attrition rate in terms of training, and few people are truly capable of working in that industry. There will be retraining for certain, and a reduction in pay/rank. They certainly do not need to lose their job over a mishap, while an egregious one, it is still a trainable moment.
How do you retrain someone not to tell 2 planes they can use the same runway with repeated confirmations based on the fact that he thinks 3 miles is far enough away? At that point are we certain its not Alzheimer's?
While I 100% think the controller in this situation made a terrible judgement call and likely shouldn't be working planes anymore, it's worth noting that that there are very specific regulations on multiple planes using the same runway (called Same Runway Separation). Specifically, for these types of aircraft (SRS Category III), the departing plane needs to be at least 6000ft down the runway and airborne by the time the arriving plane crosses the runway threshold. Heck, for smaller general aviation aircraft, you can have a plane land when another has landed and is still on the runway, as long as they are 3000ft past the threshold.
A different regulation (applicable only to radar environments, which AUS is) allows for a departure if an arriving aircraft is 2+ miles away from the runway, as long as there is at least 3 miles of separation within 1 min after takeoff.
All that being said -- it is possible to execute a squeeze play like this if everything is perfect, but you need the departure to go IMMEDIATELY. Trying this in low visibility was extremely reckless and incompetent.
That is mature, rational, considered, and completely wrong. What's exposed here is not a failure of process or education, its the fact that controller is an incompetent idiot who never should have been acting in a life critical capacity.
In the linked communication you can see that he knew both planes were incoming on the same runway and confirmed his brain dead plan repeatedly to both crews. Even telling SW that they could take off because Fedex was 3 miles out. At any reasonable speed this is virtually no time. At 165 it would be a little over 1 minute. Since the critical moment came around the 2 minute mark it seems likely that in addition to any other faults he also can't estimate distance.
Even after it went south or shall we say southwest he was never capable of recovering in any timely fashion as evidenced by the Fedex crew taking over his job. As a result of his incompetence everyone would have died. The only meaningful fact he could have ascertained in order to correct his plan would have been to understand that planes go fast. At this juncture retraining him seems like a poor decision. He's a hazard.
> That is mature, rational, considered, and completely wrong. What's exposed here is not a failure of process or education, its the fact that controller is an incompetent idiot who never should have been acting in a life critical capacity.
Let's assume that you are right. I don't think I can be as confident about anything as you are. Especially not before an investigation, but let's pretend that you are right: the controller in question is an imbecile who need to be fired immediately.
How is that not a process problem? How did an idiot get on frequency controlling traffic at a big airport? Shouldn't there be filters to prevent that? And if he is an idiot, which I don't believe but we are in a hypothetical, how many others there are?
> How did an idiot get on frequency controlling traffic at a big airport? Shouldn't there be filters to prevent that?
If you see r/ATC, he's been shuffled between locations and this isn't his first screw-up. He manages to stay employed through claiming discrimination under EEO when performance issues come up. There's even another past incident from another airport featuring him.
Luckily, this may be the nail in the coffin that even US Critical Race Theory policies can't prevent, and it happened without any loss of life.
From the responses of those who have worked ATC, lazy & incompetent would be more accurate than idiot. He sounds checked out, and isn't really thinking about his choices.
I would apply that logic to anyone responsible for honest mistakes. Mistakes are a valuable opportunity for learning, and learning doesn’t thrive in a culture of fear.
The same system should definitely exist in law enforcement, to the extent that the mistakes are made in good faith. I would argue that a good percentage of the “mistakes” made by police in the US are malicious in nature, akin to ATC intentionally putting planes in danger. Our law enforcement culture in the US is so rotten that mistakes are neither punished nor understood.
To your point that ATC is notoriously awful for not firing people, I would say their safety record speaks for itself. The impulse for punitive vengeance is what puts lives at risk, not ATC's safety culture.
When we have major line-of-fire incidents on our sites that can very possibly result in loss of life, generally you do get the boot. And it is certainly not 'hidden', you get black listed and company-wide communications are sent as a result. People certainly do learn from these kinds of mistakes, but usually the person at the centre of it goes for a walk.
A very pertinent one. The comment you responded to talked about how aviation achieves their stellar safety record. You told us that in your other industry (now we know it is mining) things are done differently. So it is fair to ask: How is that going for you? What are the results? Are you safer or less safe than aviation?
I wouldn't say that's a given. For example, a similar incident occurred at Rhode Island in 1999, and the air traffic controller responsible was not fired -- merely sent for retraining before being returned to service. Like this incident, it was another flight crew that prevented the situation from becoming worse, by rejecting their takeoff clearance -- something the pilot-in-command of this Southwest flight should have done when told about a heavy 767 three miles out.
What if there's pressure from airlines to reduce late flights and increase the amount of traffic airports can handle resulting in ATC cutting margins on separation? Would it really be the controller's fault if their job performance is dependent on getting planes into the air as quickly as possible?
> Would it really be the controller's fault if their job performance is dependent on getting planes into the air as quickly as possible?
Yes. Their primary job is safety, speedy traffic flow is secondary to that objective. Cutting corners would mean abandoning pretty much the entire purpose of bothering with ATC versus letting pilots figure it out themselves.
This is completely correct. One of the first sentences in the 7110.65 (the FAA document governing ATC rules in the US, often referred to as "the book" by controllers) is "the primary purpose of the ATC system is to prevent a collision involving aircraft operating in the system." Loss of adequate separation between aircraft (called a "deal") is much worse for a controller's career than being inefficient.
In a world where airline regulators weren't captured by the industries they regulate, this would be iron-clad. In the real world, where humans live and make decisions, not so much.
