So I am neither a pilot nor an aviation geek, but to me it looks like, besides heavy fog, two things happened. (1) control misjudged the approach time for FedEx. 3 miles out is - what? - a minute and a half, at best at approach speed? (2) control did not expedite a takeoff for southwest so they took their sweet time rolling onto the runway and accelerating.
At this day and age it is bewildering to see all of this running on human communication essentially. Why cannot descending plane lay a claim on a runway in some computer system and a cabin in Southwest - blare a horn for pilots trying to steer into a claimed runway?
That's called Runway Status Lights, controlled by an Autonomous Runway Incursion System [1]. The busiest US airports have that, but Austin doesn't have one.[1][2]
So the tower controllers had responsibility for separation. Here are the current FAA rules on separation between departing and arriving aircraft using the same runway. See section 3-1-3 of [3].
This is the rule: "Separate an arriving aircraft from another aircraft using the same runway by ensuring that the arriving aircraft does not cross the landing threshold until one of the following conditions exists .... The other aircraft has departed and crossed the runway end or turned to avert any conflict. If you can determine distances by reference to suitable landmarks, the other aircraft needs only be airborne if the following minimum distance exists between aircraft: ...when either is a Category III aircraft- 6,000 feet."
The trouble is, the controller can apparently say "Cleared to land" when they expect that departing aircraft will be airborne and at least 6,000 feet down the runway, and thus out of the way, before the incoming aircraft crosses the landing threshold. Not when it actually is in the air and out of the conflict zone. Or at least in this case, the controller did. This is apparently called "reduced runway separation". The intent is to increase traffic capacity.
But this was in fog. Tower probably could not see the departing aircraft, and they did not apparently have a sensor system to compensate for that.
Given that Austin has been adding > 50k people annually to its population over the past many years, and now is > 2.2 Million people in the Metro area, it might be time to upgrade KAUS from Class C to Class B, or at least started on that path.
KSTL (St. Louis) and KMCI (Kansas City) are Class B, and at 10M and 7M carry fewer passengers than KAUS at 13M annually and have half the number of operations annually [1] [2].
There are many other airports on the List of Class B airports with smaller operations than Austin. [3]
Class B criteria is > 300K operations annually - ~200K is KAUS.
KSTL and KMCI were formal airline hubs and are still Class B most likely due to legacy assignments. It's a lot harder for the FAA to "demote" a piece of airspace vs "promote" one.
I'm curious as to what you think upgrading KAUS to Class B would exactly accomplish, especially in this scenario? This was a runway localized mistake by the controller. Also, the word in the ATC community is this tower controller had been moved around the NAS multiple times as a problem child.
KSAT's airspace (not the airport, the airspace) farther south is FAR busier than KAUS and is considered some of the busiest airspace in the county due to multiple military fields in the area, extensive military training, etc. And it's also Class C airspace.
> Class B criteria is > 300K operations annually - ~200K is KAUS
Under certain circumstances > 220k annual ops qualifies an airport for Class B status [1]. Austin's 2022 vs 2021 traffic is significantly higher [2]. When you include KEDC (Austin Exec Airport) and KGTU (Georgetown Municipal), the traffic certainly appears to exceeds the thresholds in question [3][4][5]. I didn't bother to look through the other airports within the area.
> I'm curious as to what you think upgrading KAUS to Class B would exactly accomplish, especially in this scenario? This was a runway localized mistake by the controller. Also, the word in the ATC community is this tower controller had been moved around the NAS multiple times as a problem child.
Designation as a Class B changes the care with which the airspace is managed and more importantly, staffed [6][7]. Perhaps the problem ATC is fine for a less busy area, perhaps the Tower staffing could use a little more oomph in the morning hours. There might also be additional RWLS and ARIWS requirements for Class B airports (needs regulatory research - maybe ChatGPT can give us pointers since this is all supposed to be public info!).
> KSAT's airspace (not the airport, the airspace) farther south is FAR busier than KAUS and is considered some of the busiest airspace in the county due to multiple military fields in the area, extensive military training, etc. And it's also Class C airspace.
The FAA Sectional for KSAT (San Antonio) shows that there are multiple Special Use Airspaces (Randolph, Laughlin, Crystal/North, Kingsville MOAs) to separate the civilian traffic from military airspace, and the military has their own controllers [8]. Caution: 111MB file.
KAUS might be the most classic example of Class C airspace in existence. They only have 3 App/Dep positions with a spare 4th, and the top of the charlie is 4500 feet. I can overfly that in a light sport.
Austin airspace isn't nearly as busy as you make it out to be.
And in the context of this incident, arguing that KAUS needs to be upgraded to a Class B is kind of non-sequitur. A class B wouldn't solve anything except to make the area airspace wildly more restrictive.
> I fly in this airspace. (KAUS and KSAT and KDFW)
> KAUS might be the most classic example of Class C airspace in existence. They only have 3 App/Dep positions with a spare 4th, and the top of the charlie is 4500 feet. I can overfly that in a light sport.
> Austin airspace isn't nearly as busy as you make it out to be.
Fair enough, local knowledge FTW. I made a suggestion - "it might be time to upgrade to Class B" as a systematic solution for an airspace that appears to be getting busier. It certainly appears to meet the FAA criteria based purely on stats.
> And in the context of this incident, arguing that KAUS needs to be upgraded to a Class B is kind of non-sequitur. A class B wouldn't solve anything except to make the area airspace wildly more restrictive.
You must have missed the part where I mentioned that Class B designation comes with staffing changes for ATCs which would presumably positively impact such occurrences :-) Maybe the alternative is better training, better operations in mornings, better rules around ATC IFR ground ops. 140+ dead people is 140+ dead people. Let's see what the NTSB says.
Also, with the plans to expand the airport with more gates, I'm guessing changes are coming to that airspace regardless [1][2]. Though the additional 17C-35C runway appears to be past 2037 [2] Pg 17, [3].
> > I fly in this airspace. (KAUS and KSAT and KDFW)
If you're flying in and out of KDFW you should have no trouble with a future Class B KAUS :-)
> If you're flying in and out of KDFW you should have no trouble with a future Class B KAUS :-)
Given my experience navigating the already PITA Bravo shelves in DFW (don't bust through those without an explicit clearance) and/or getting a Bravo clearance which adds to significant pilot workload, I'll take just flying over the charlie at 5500 and taking it easy while on flight following :) Also remember that Bravo airspace traditionally extends to 10,000 feet or more, so the considerations there for VFR traffic are significant.
Some bravo clearances are easy: "Cleared into the Bravo, direct to KXYZ, 4500 feet", others are "Expect vectors" and now you are flying around under direct control of a controller vectoring you around numerous aircraft for 45 minutes or more... yuck (or fun).
Austin’s airport is actually surprisingly small. It’s a single domestic terminal with just 25 gates and basic two level departures/arrivals, and a tiny south terminal that I believe has international arrivals facilities.
When I visited I remember thinking ‘how the hell does this place handle the influx for south-by?’
No, but I figure an airport servicing a metropolitan area with nearly 2 million people would be using all the best practice risk minimization approaches.
What scares me about this is that I have no idea how common or uncommon this is, and what other airports are in a similar situation.
If you are not involved directly with any of that professionally, it is better to treat it the way non-developer treat the OS. Assume it will work as intended because loads of highly trained professionals take care of it. Added benefit ehen it comes to aviation: strict and sensible regulation (the MAX disaster notwithstanding).
> If you are not involved directly with any of that professionally, it is better to treat it the way non-developer treat the OS. Assume it will work as intended because loads of highly trained professionals take care of it. Added benefit ehen it comes to aviation: strict and sensible regulation (the MAX disaster notwithstanding).
Allow me to chime in and respectfully disagree with this sentiment and the metaphor.
As the saying goes - the aviation (just as the automotive) industry saves lives (as in "advances security") one accident at the time. It would make sense that close calls like this Austin near mass casualty event should contribute to the future safety as well. In that context, it's absolutely legitimate to be suspicious and ask safety-related questions, including in a HN comment or in real life - instead of shutting someone down.
Speaking of the developer-OS metaphor - any non-rookie developer should be aware of not only the security and vulnerability of one's own software but also of the security and vulnerability of the underlying OS, infrastructure and even hardware. The number of building blocks gets larger by the day and nearly each building block is becoming increasingly complex. Yes, there are professionals working on each those blocks yet there are new CVEs and associated attacks all the time (incl. ransomware). If we add 0-days into consideration (a.k.a. "the unknown unknowns" in the software context) IMHO we should be able to conclude that the used developer-OS metaphor is not helpful.
The older and more experienced we all become, the more should we be cognizant of the potential risks (not only in our particular industry niche) and we should welcome and consider a normal, widely accepted practice to challenge the status quo and pose questions that should overall increase the number of brains and eyeballs on the problem and (unknown) unknowns - be it vulnerabilities or security risks, especially to our bare lives.
And what makes anybody think this incident will not be properly reviewed, analyzed and suitable mitigation actions identified? And why do people on HN always think they know it better than the actual experts in this field, while just expectung users of their products, I just asse in most cases that is some piece of software, to worry about the details at all?
Well, I'm fucked if I assume that it's working as intended, and fucked if I don't, because as you say, I'm entirely reliant on professionals doing their job correctly when I'm flying.
And that professionalism seems to have failed in parts in this circumstance. (And has been well noted to have failed in many other circumstances with often tragic consequences.)
All that aside, I still want to understand why the Austin airport doesn't have ARIS? Cost/benefit? Not mandated by the FAA?
I'm afraid that "shush, and leave it to the professionals" isn't a very compelling argument.
No idea about Austin airport. Regarding professionalism and failure, the Austin incident is actually proof of the system working as intended. There was, by the looks of it, only one real mistake made, maybe two. Training of everyone involved, including the ATC, prevented those mistakes from creating a cascade of failures that could have let to two hull losses and 100+ dead passenger on the Southwest flight.
For fatal accidents to happen in aviation and aerspace, more than one thing has to go wrong at the same time. Single, isolated failures are no longer sufficient to cause serious accidents.
I don't think Austin is proof of the system working as intended, the only thing that saved them was the FedEx flight being able to take action at the last moment during their approach, if the fog was a little thicker and they couldn't see the Southwest flight on the runway as early as they did it would be a catastrophe.
That's just luck, not a system that's working as intended.
No, that is good training on behalf of FedEx, Southwest (knowing you have a plane above your own during take off and still follow ATC guidance is no easy feat) and the ATC (knowing you fucked up, staying calm and giving the correct instructions and keep everyone alive is again no easy feat). And training of operators absolutely is part of the overall system.
A safe system is resilient to errors. The controller made a mistake - that happens, the system should deal with it. But in this case, a crash was averted only because the fog lifted. It was pure luck. Ground movement radar, a runway incursion warning system, or a different landing clearance protocol could all have provided the necessary safety buffers.
When you’re up to the last “hole” in the cheese, that’s a failure.
If the wings fall off my plane mid flight, I jump out with a parachute, and I land without injury then the "overall system" of plane-plus-parachute-plus-training has succeeded.
However, the plane component of the system failed, because the wings aren't supposed to fall off.
The aviation industry in the US is subject to federal regulation, meaning that the scope and purpose of its regulation is laid out by statutory authority granted to the FAA by laws passed by congress, who are elected by the people of America.
In other words, aviation regulation exists to serve the interests of the people.
If the airport or airline industry is trying to cut corners or save money at the expense of the safety of passengers, the interests of other air users, or the people who live under flight paths, items the job of congress to grant the FAA the authority needed to stop that - or to ensure that it is using its already-granted authority effectively to that end.
And ultimately the only check on whether or not that is happening is the electorate’s oversight of its congresspeople.
So yes, you can take an interest in how the airline industry is regulated, as a passenger or a random person who has planes fly over your head from time to time, because you have a say in making sure it’s not captured by industry and allowed to compromise your safety.
The airport and the airlines don’t make any decisions about ATC. That is controlled entirely by the FAA. The airlines and airports don’t pay for it either (directly anyway)
They designate the class of an airport not by the number of people living in the metro area around it, but based on the complexity of the airspace and the density of the traffic.
Austin probably isn’t a class b because while it may be an airport for a large city it doesn’t see a ton of traffic as it isn’t a huge hub. The regional hubs in that area are DFW and Houston and are way more traffic.
It’s also worth noting that making a this a class B airport wouldn’t have changed anything in terms of how the arrivals and departures are controlled at the runway level.
In spite of what happened with Boeing, the FAA is usually very good at airspace safety.
I have bad news for you. If the FAA were contemplating adjusting the requirements for certain classes of airport or the rules applicable under certain conditions at certain classes of airport, that perhaps airport operators and airlines whose costs and operations might be impacted by such a change can take part in a process called lobbying where they apply pressure to the regulator to make sure those changes don’t adversely affect them.
Lobbying can be good, of course! Airports and airlines likely have good knowledge about how regulations impact their operations!
But it’s the job of Congress in theory to represent their constituents’ interests - not merely their constituents who own airline stock or work for airport ground handling companies but all their constituents - to make sure that the framework the FAA correctly takes into account the competing interests of ensuring an efficient and high capacity aviation industry, as well as making sure that passenger safety is maintained.
As you say, the FAA has a good record of doing this.
But individuals saying ‘well I’m sure the industry knows best’ is precisely what leads to regulatory capture and that leads to the situation where airports are permitted to accept heavy automated landings under conditions where maybe they really ought not to without additional ground safety equipment in place.
Airlines are generally the ones asking for these safety upgrades before anyone else. They would love if every airport had Cat. III approaches on every runway, and there were designated parallel runways at every airport.
Airlines like higher classed airports since it frequently means the ability to handle more traffic safely, and better service from ATC.
Opposition to airspace changes are ALWAYS nimby's. ALWAYS. Go look at the public comments for any proposed change.
Wut? Because I’m aware of how the software world works I’m worried about literally every other professional endeavour. If it works it’s because it’s been refined over many years, or because of duct tape and spit.
No, I'm dead serious. To usr another example: surgery. Just assume people cutting you up know what they are doing, even if you do not have the slightst clue.
"What follows is an account of how Martha was allowed to die, but also what happens when you have blind faith in doctors – and learn too late what you should have known to save your child’s life. What I learned, I now want everyone to know. In a small way, I hope Martha’s story might change how some people think about healthcare; it might even save a life."
Eh, i know surgery videos of people who know what they are doing.. so i can verify what they do in best/good times. (Recommend ARD/Alpha for those heart transplant videos)
The daylight of observation keeps all involved honest.
Then i also know horror stories from someone thrustworthy, about surgeons throwing extracted body parts after nurses in high stress situations. No, i will not name names, but life and death situations need a perfect team and you dont always got that perfect team.
And surgery quality being dependant on the actual execution of the surgery (chief surgeon is not automatic the best individual contributor to surgery).
You want the most hours on the knife guy for best outcome, not some administrator with white coat.
Also you want to be near univesity clinics, they are spearheading new stuff, the more you get away from them, the operation technique is depending on the age of the doctors education and the hospitals financials to keep up to date, send doctors to regular re-trainings and try new things. Then there are lawsuits, they keep the people responsible, but also risk averse.
So if you are in a high risk situation, in a lawsuit rich country you are fucked, cause nobody will try the dice throw when worst comes to worst.
Trust in systems working, is upkept by untrusting agents.
So like in capitalism, were the price aware negotiate the deals down for the crowd who does not want to haggle.
Finally: The infrastructure & hierarchy of hospitals (in europe), as we know them today, emerged largely from the two world wars were lots of nurses and doctors were integrated into army structures. Which means it suffers from the same inefficency and structural problems those armies back then suffered from. Now you have the MBA process micro optimization on top of that, so i wouldnt trust that machine blindly..
One issue with that is that "aviation" includes a lot more than commercial airliners - it also includes inexpensive, Spartan general aviation aircraft. The cost of such a system would be prohibitive.
Just look at the rollout for ADS-B In/Out if you're curious how difficult that might be to implement.
At least one of the planes in this situation was equipped with the system that lands the plane automatically in almost zero visibility. It’s not a stretch of imagination to see how that can extend to the system that tracks planes on approach to the airport and steering on the ground and extrapolates their trajectories at least for the typical braking/abort time forward. These are not general aviation, these are planes carrying tons of cargo and hundreds of people.
What you’re talking about is called a collision avoidance system and it exists and both of these planes have it.
It doesn’t alert you to planes on the ground because it would never stop going off. How is the system supposed to know that the pilot approaching the threshold as you land is going to stop? It can’t so it would issue an immediate correction alert and you have to go around.
No, no and no. Safety critical systems must be validated to be safe in the operational domain and for that they must be deterministic. AI is anything but that.
AI is entirely deterministic. ChatGPT and StableDiffusion and friends are fed endless amounts of random seeds along with every input to keep them from just saying always the same thing.
"Deterministic" only insofar as it's repeatable, but their behaviour is not predictable. If the behaviour is not predictable, how can it be validated as being correct?
If for a given set of inputs there is a deterministic output, then the overall behaviour to a series of inputs is just as deterministic and predictable.
I'm not sure what you mean with "is not predictable" when you also admit that it's repeatable.
Predictable as in, can say in advance what it will do.
Repeatable means you get the same output a second time, given the same input. Predictable means you can say in advance what it will do, and can then check the output against your prediction.
If you can't predict the outcome, you can't validate the process, and can't guarantee its performance.
I think the point is that reality is essentially a chaotic system. That is, yes, you can repeat a failure from an input once you've seen it, but the search space is too big to enumerate beforehand.
That entirely depends on what exactly you implement here, it's entirely possible to implement an AI with continuous & linear properties, meaning that you can extrapolate it's behaviour between a set of inputs with decent accuracy and it won't suddenly change it's behaviour between continuous & linear inputs.
But AI isn't different than existing software systems either. Both will take an input from reality and take actions upon it.
That's useless in this case. You need to be able to prove that it will work with all inputs, and there are too many combinations of inputs to exhaustively enumerate.
There is no way to determine that a non-trivial neural network won't drastically diverge in output due to small changes in input (eg one pixel attacks on image classifiers). This is true for all current models I know of.
Almost all neural network implementations have continuous outputs (ie the nodes in the output layer produce a value between 0 and 1). That doesn't change the above issue at all.
This is much less of an issue with traditional methods
A generative AI may well be deterministic and generate repeatable output for a given inpiut, but that doesn't mean the output is correct for every input. It may merely generate the wrong answer consistently.
Roughly, they are asking whether you can take an AI system and effectively reduce it to an analytic function and tell, without actually running the AI, what the output is going to be with a particular input.
Looks like the Piper M600, Daher TBM 940, and Cirrus Vision all have auto-land capabilities through the Garmin G3000 system. But it doesn’t seem to be as sophisticated as what is described for the airliners. It’s more of an emergency system.
Yeah, but at least at this airport, they almost always use separate runways. They COULD share, but that sounds like making perfection the enemy of improvement.
Because adding more technology doesn’t always makes things work better. I like this idea but the problem is you’ve just added another point of failure.
Sure it may avoid this situation, but how many aircraft lifted off and landed at airports in the same day? In America I’d hazard a guess at aground the tens of thousands. Any new system has to reduce the complexity or risks of flying and that’s very hard to do.
I’m not an aviation expert either but it’s assume that some form of system exists for this also in a more manual form.
Hand-waving about "people" == "simpler" == "better" aside, read about TCAS.
Humans in the loop are a SPoF if they're there:
1. Solely to read information over a lossy, slow medium like analog radio. Digital data between ground and air systems should be the primary means of comms with voice radio as a backup channel for clarification and stating intent.
2. To flawlessly plan and avoid collisions between dozens of objects moving at high speed in 4 dimensions. Never going to happen. These should be done and verified mechanically, continuously.
Humans should be guiding and assisting mechanical, reliable automation of decision-making rather than playing telephone or doing long division on paper when calculators exist.
They likely mean { X, Y, Z, T } three spatial dimensions and time which are four orthogonal dimensions.
That said, it makes the "moving in" redundant and is shy a few dimensions if you want to go full descriptive phase space diagraming given velocity and acceleration in each spatial dimension are missing.
I suggest you take your objections up with the authors of, say,
A Four-Dimensional Space-Time Automatic Obstacle Avoidance Trajectory Planning Method for Multi-UAV Cooperative Formation Flight
or any number of other similar papers.
Many prefer to think of an objects path as a trajectory in space-time (four dmensions) and for two ojects to "collide" their paths must coincide within that 4-D space within an Epsilon for some value of WTF.
But as ... you yourself ... note above, the planes aren't moving in four dimensions. If time is one of the dimensions, all the planes are doing is existing.
The path of the plane is a static curve in 4-dimensional space, yes.
But the plane is not located at any point in the 4-dimensional space, and the position in 4-dimensional space that it doesn't have is not changing over time. Both of those things are required before you can describe the plane as "moving" within the space.
There is no secret backup time that will allow you to track the plane's hypothetical motion along an explicit time dimension. That's not a thing.
I confess. I literally had no idea what you were intending to convey with those two sentences so I restated alternatively what I intended to convey in the hope it might make clear my position (if that was an issue for you) or that I might learn more from your response.
> Where do you think you're contradicting me?
That's not a thought that I thunk.
Therefore I have no response.
> But the plane is not located at any point in the 4-dimensional space
Every point along the 4D path trajectory of the plane in {X,Y,Z,T} is a literal {X,Y,Z} location of that plane at time T.
> Both of those things are required before you can describe the plane as "moving" within the space.
I certainly did not describe the plane as "moving" within R^4.
> There is no secret backup time that will allow you to track the plane's hypothetical motion along an explicit time dimension.
I utterly fail to understand what you intend to convey here.
Although I note that the actual (not hypothetical) velocity of the plane projected onto the time axis is very likely to be on the order of approximately one second per second.
Hard disagree with the notion this adds a degree of failure.
From a layman's perspective, it replaces one primary degree (pilot-control coordination) with another (a technological solution) and delegates the staffers to supervisory roles. That is a risk reduction due to the increase of confirmations and the independence between the staff decision and the software's decision.
Expecting mechanical accuracy from humans is a fool's errand.
ATC should be wearing VR goggles, visualizing approach and takeoff routing as it maps to flown with machines spotting the dangers similarly but differently from TCAS.
I interned at a VR lab at NASA Ames in the late 1990s. This very idea (ATC operations in low-vis conditions using VR or AR) was what fed their grant proposals. It has always been 20 years away; some of the things I learned:
1) VR itself can lead to spatial disorientation and will introduce its own control issues.
2) A significant percentage of people (~1 in 4) cannot use VR without motion sickness. This is independent of #1. Modern VR (Oculus etc.) at first claimed to be better, but guess what, plenty of people still get sick. Sinus congestion can cause this even in the tolerant.
3) Position reporting of planes today is nowhere near accurate, reliable, or real-time enough to present a whole picture of runway ops. This is fixable with enough $$$...but who pays?
4) I suspect "VR ops" procedures from the FAA would take years to be developed and approved, without some kind of urgent mandate.
My gut feeling is that we'll have automatic ground traffic control at major airports by the time the necessary systems are in place, and skip the goggled humans entirely.
And the VR goggles help them read the minds of pilots about the speed in which they move their planes around on the ground, and when?
Move fast and break things has no place in aerospace nor aviation, just rolling whatever fancy new tech is there is not done for reasons. And this behavior made aviation as safe as it is today.
There is nothing wrong with a layman’s perspective in any industry, and aerospace is not certainly not the sole domain of safety critical systems. An aerospace layman might still bring insight from other areas, which was the case here IMO.
You have been repeatedly dismissing people in this thread, but HN is about being curious. “Leave it to the professionals” is neither satisfying nor interesting.
Curiosity is about learning, isn't it? Nothing wrong with asking questions, or following discussions and learn something new about an industry or domain you don't know a lot about.
Throwing ideas out to improve things, without properly thinking about the the root causes for incidents, not waiting for official investigations to be run, and all of that based on some audio recordings and headlines, or news coverage at best, is neither curious nor allows people to learn something. So yes, at a certain point, leave it to the professionals (whom else would one leave it to anyways?) is exactly the right thing to do. And maybe listen to people with more knowledge on a subject (probably not me in that case so).
Insisting on pre-formed "layman" opinions about something as peculiar as aviation, or aerospace, is the opposite of curiosity.
How are we supposed to learn if you just tell everyone to “leave it to the professionals”?
If you don’t agree with something someone posts, contribute to the discussion by explaining the issues. Why shouldn’t the ATC be sacked? Safety culture. Why shouldn’t they install ground radar? Complexity. Etc.
Appeals to authority are the worst kind of arguments because they don’t help us to understand what to expect from them.
The Southwest crew here is also to blame, they knew a plane was on short final to their runway in terrible visibility and for some reason took their sweet time taking off.
You’re assuming situational awareness, but they would have been running checklists preparing for takeoff, and may not have heard how far away the fedex was. I didn’t think they took overly long, and they weren’t instructed to hurry.
The Southwest flight announced that they are ready after presumably holding short of the runway to do exactly what you just said. ATC also informed them that there was a 767 3 miles out right after reading the take off clearance. The Southwest crew read back the take off clearance, so presumably they also heard the bit about the other plane. Even without being instructed to expedite the departure, they should at least have realized that they don't have a ton of time on the runway.
More will surely be revealed in the follow up investigation and right now it's all armchair piloting. But I too am a little surprised the Southwest flight took its sweet time to do anything and was seemingly unaware of what was going despite being explicitly informed.
Totally agree we should wait for the investigation. It’s going to be very interesting.
To your point though, we also don’t know what was going on in the cockpit of the 737. Even if they were aware of how close the FedEx jet was, it’s entirely possible something went wrong that caused them to delay the takeoff roll (assuming it was delayed).
There are plenty of things that could have gone wrong on the ground. Separating traffic is the ATCs job and clearly there was a loss of separation. Very hard for me to see how this could be Southwest’s problem particularly since they weren’t yet airborne.
Commercial pressures. Holding for Fedex would have added a few mins, maybe lost them their place in the queue, etc. It's not a reason to act unsafely, but it is a factor.
> Commercial pressures. Holding for Fedex would have added a few mins
They spent a minute extra before starting their takeoff roll; it wouldn't have hurt to wait an additional 5 minutes. Commercial flights build in a generous margin for ground ops these days. I doubt this was a factor in this specific case.
> maybe lost them their place in the queue, etc.
They were at the runway already, there's no way for them to have lost their place in the queue for that runway 18L [1].
> They were at the runway already, there's no way for them to have lost their place in the queue for that runway 18L [1].
Sure there is, enter the runway at bravo, right turn foxtrot, left on alpha and join the conga line. Happens all the time at places like JFK (admittedly Austin is not JFK).
>> They were at the runway already, there's no way for them to have lost their place in the queue for that runway 18L [1].
> Sure there is, enter the runway at bravo, right turn foxtrot, left on alpha and join the conga line. Happens all the time at places like JFK (admittedly Austin is not JFK).
This routing appears to require the SouthWest aircraft to enter the active runway with FedEx Heavy on Final to that end, presumably the problem we're trying to avoid ...
In both cases, SW would be well within their rights to say "unable to comply".
> Why cannot descending plane lay a claim on a runway in some computer system and a cabin in Southwest - blare a horn for pilots trying to steer into a claimed runway?
Because you have unions protecting the manual, error-prone job of human operators.
More or less the only real Six Sigma safe industry humanity managed to create. And still, every incident turns everyone into safety and procedurural experts, even before the official incident reports are done.
As much as this frustrates me, it has always been like that, and always will be like that.
^1 At the point and time of power generation. Safety may not apply if your ground water was poisoned by a Uranium mine. If your town happens to have its cancer rates triple you probably started smoking or something. You will not be eligiblefor compensation.
At this day and age it is bewildering to see all of this running on human communication essentially. Why cannot descending plane lay a claim on a runway in some computer system and a cabin in Southwest - blare a horn for pilots trying to steer into a claimed runway?