Definitely better links than Daily Mirror out there, avherald.com unfortunately overwhelmed, but in terms of discussion:
- Crazy how well the carbon fiber A350 held up given that it seems to have landed pretty much directly on a Dash 8 (RIP Coast Guard team). Looks like trading long term flammability for initial rigidity lived up to the design intent.
- Excellent evacuation job, especially as it looks like on some videos that the crew was unable to shut down the right engine, rendering the entire right side unusable (severed lines given the severe belly damage?) UPDATE: they actually did use the front right exit nevertheless https://x.com/tanakamaru1999/status/1742132422005981578
- Don’t have headphones with me and in a public space, but landing / takeoff clearances should be somewhere in https://archive.liveatc.net/rjtt/RJTT-Twr-TCA-Jan-02-2024-08... if someone wants to try and find them (timestamps towards end of url come in 30 minute increments).
Re clearance/cause: VASA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fItu5qM7QfE also couldn't make it out, but it sounds like the Coast Guard Dash 8 got a not really perfect taxi instruction (neither "hold short" nor "line up and wait") to one of the other C* intersections leading onto 34R while a Delta flight occupied C1, but entered the runway anyway. The A350 got a proper clearance it read back correctly.
Also looks like all C hold short lines have embedded guard lights - ie the stop "bar" on the way to the runway should have been flashing brightly.
Whether it was perfect or not, there are only a few words/phrases that allow an aircraft to cross the hold short bars at an airport with an active control tower. "Cross", "line up and wait", and "cleared for takeoff" are pretty much it. Runway incursions are very dangerous, as this incident shows, and pilots must be very sure they have clearance before entering a runway. If anything is ambiguous in an instruction, pilots are trained to ask ATC for confirmation before proceeding.
It's also possible that there was more ATC communication that was not recorded. LiveATC comes from feeds provided by volunteers, whose receivers may be some distance from the airport and which may not receive signals 100% reliably. The investigators will have access to the official recordings made by JCAB (the Japanese aviation authorities).
Point was that if the taxi clearance didn't include "hold (short of 34R)" it might be seen as contributing factor in line with ICAO[1] or FAA recommendations.
Also quite terrifying that, given all the equipment at Haneda and according to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NbVdIoJsHY, around 2:45, with taxi lights fully visible at 2:53, the DH8 was lined up on the runway for more than a minute before being run over by the A350.
But as you say, preliminary report should already have a clear timeline of the tower tapes.
> and pilots must be very sure they have clearance before entering a runway
The word "clearance" is used uniquely in the context of landing and departing exactly to avoid mistakes and has to be repeated again by the aircraft before ATC confirms.
The terms "cleared to land" and "cleared for takeoff" are extremely specific (a regulation written in blood like many aviation rules), but "cross runway" and "line up and wait" also give permission for aircraft to enter the runway.
The word "cleared" is often used for IFR clearance delivery as well which gives you permission to navigate via a planned route to a particular point, so it's much more common than just takeoffs and landings.
True in terms of phraseology (i.e. the actual word is not used in voice ATC communications), but all ATC instructions are generally referred to as clearances.
Is "line up and wait" really the new approved terminology? Way back when I was a PP student, it was "taxi into position runway XX and hold. Acknowledge hold."
Line up and wait sounds like something you tell preschoolers to do :-)
"position and hold" was the old phraseology in the US. It changed to "line up and wait" on 2010/09/30 to match ICAO standards and because "hold (on the runway)" might be confused with "hold short (of a runway/taxiway), or "hold position (wherever you are now)".
I do love how we try so hard to disambiguate language. Especially hard when working across languages too. And it shows how badly things can go if left to fuzzy language protocols.
"Line up and wait" is, historically, the ICAO phraseology, which the FAA adopted (and ditched the "taxi into position and talk for thirty more seconds and block comms" phrase). The phrase adoption went into effect Oct 2010 in the States.
The “line up” in this case refers to an instruction given to a single airplane to position itself on the runway in preparation for departure (as in “line up with the departure runway heading”).
It is not “hey, multiple airplanes get yourself into a queue on the runway”.
There can be multiple aircraft on the runway at multiple times, so long as there's no conflicting operations.
It's used quite regularly at any moderately busy airport to reduce delays.
Examples where I've seen/heard it used in ATC comms:
Aircraft departing in sequence. eg A, then B. So: "Flight A (already lined up on runway 35L), cleared for takeoff runway 35L." (some short time later while Flight A is still in the process of taking off) "Flight B, runway 35L line up and wait"
Aircraft departing after an arrival. eg "Flight A cleared to land, 35L", and right as flight A has crossed the threshold: "Flight B, runway 35L line up and wait"
Also, as mentioned by others, when there are other movements to cross a runway between departures. eg "Flight A, at Foxtrot 5, cross Runway 35L. Flight B, runway 35L line up and wait"
Line up and wait will be used after the preceding departure has started their takeoff roll, so the following aircraft can be ready to take off once the required spacing is achieved.
It could also be used while other aircraft/vehicles are crossing the runway at other intersections.
Maybe not with big airliners. It's common for small planes to be told to line up and wait while the current aircraft (also usually another small aircraft) is in the midst of taking off.
While there many silly reasons to force people to shutdown electronics and such on planes, I think forcing people to not have any distractions during take-offs and landings is a good thing.
Over 50% of incidents (fatal and hull loss/non-fatal) occurring during landing:
Even more so: Keeping the shades open could have really made a significant difference in this case, because it could have helped the flight attendants to quickly determine the exits that are safe.
> it could have helped the flight attendants to quickly determine the exits that are safe.
For obvious reasons, ordering the evacuation, in conjunction with criteria such as which side and which doors is the Captain's job, or if the Captain is incapacitated, the First Officer. They will have access to far more data than the cabin crew will (e.g. whether the engines are safely shut down, circumstances on the ground thanks to radio contact etc.).
The Cabin Crew will not make the decision themselves unless they have been unable to establish contact with the cockpit (i.e. both flight crew incapacitated). In normal circumstances the Cabin Crew are only there to action the Flight Crew's orders.
This is not at all obvious. The pilots can't look backwards and don't have eyes in the cabin. There have been cases of engine fires and failures where the pilots had to go into the passenger cabin to examine the damage.
Communication is key, but comms might have been down, too. In cases like this the cabin crew have to be prepared to initiate an evacuation on their own, and they have to be prepared to choose which doors to use.
> the cabin crew have to be prepared to initiate an evacuation on their own
Re-read my post, because your conclusion is saying exactly what I already said with your words "be prepared to".
To repeat what I said, but in simpler terms:
In an ideal world, the Flight Crew have the responsibility for ordering evacuation and the associated parameters. End of story, no argument.
BUT there is a well rehearsed, well practiced, protocol which surrounds this !
So, at one extreme, if the Cabin Crew cannot communicate with the Flight Deck, then the decision is clearly theirs.
But before the extreme, we have the obvious scenario .... Cabin Crew act as additional eyes and ears for Flight Crew.
BUT in this scenario we are back to my main point ... the buck stops at the Captain to make the decision !!! The Cabin Crew are telling the Captain what they see, its ultimately his call.
> They will have access to far more data than the cabin crew will (e.g. whether the engines are safely shut down, circumstances on the ground thanks to radio contact etc.).
This is not remotely guaranteed. It would be more accurate to say that the pilots will have access to information that the cabin crew don't have access to and vice versa. If the cabin crew sees that the plane has stopped, there's a fire on board, and instructions are not forthcoming from the pilots, the cabin crew absolutely must initiate an evacuation sua sponte. Heck, if the cabin crew won't do it then the passengers might. People can and do freeze in the face of emergencies. When you have a fire on board all bets are off, and someone had better step up and begin the evacuation -- better that it all be orderly than not, but also better that it happen at all than not.
If the Captain says "evacuate from all doors on port side", yet the FA sees flames outside the door on the port side, the FA does not evacuate through those flames
Right! In a chaotic situation, the idea of hierarchy goes out the window. It is essential that all act rationally as much as possible and make the best decisions that they can with what information is available to them. And it is essential that all staff (flight crew, cabin crew) act with celerity as well to avoid panic among the passengers. Because if the passengers are left on their own then conflicts are more likely to arise just merely on account of the number of passengers being large, and conflicts in such a situation are very likely to be deadly.
Notably, Qantas Flight 32 back in 2010, where the flight crew had a dozen contradictory ECAM messages, and it took the second officer entering the cabin to see that an engine had blown up. https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/a-matter-of-millimeters-...
>In the meantime, the cabin crew had been attempting to get the pilots’ attention using the emergency call button, but all the pilots were so focused on the failures that they initially didn’t notice. Only now did they send Second Officer Mark Johnson to assess the situation in the cabin, whereupon a Qantas pilot riding as a passenger in the upper deck drew his attention to the in-flight entertainment system, which featured a live view of the aircraft from a tail-mounted camera. The digital stream clearly showed a much more literal stream of fuel pouring from the left wing and into the aircraft’s wake, which was also visible with the naked eye from the lower deck. Johnson proceeded down to check for himself, at which point he also observed for the first time that there were two gaping holes in the top of the left wing, surrounded by jagged metal, where the turbine disk fragments had exited.
The Airbus A350 has an external camera mounted on the tail. I believe that pilots can monitor that video feed in the cockpit so if the system is still working then they should be able to see a fire on one side. But I don't know whether that was possible in this incident.
Cabin crew play a critical role in informing the flight deck of external conditions especially fire that would preclude use of specific exits in an evacuation.
If you look into enough NTSB investigations communication is often the first thing to go during a crash. Even if everyone is still coherent technical problems alone can have quite horrific results. Using a megaphone to communicate is just not that useful in a plane.
Which is why every flight attended will stay at their assigned doors instead of comforting passengers. They seem to have quite a bit responsibility when it comes to determining if its a functioning escape route.
Makes sense, but why do we have to open the shades during take-off and landing? It's a honest question, I always heard in case of emergency for the personnel being able to see all sides, but if that's not it, what is it?
It is so the flight attendants can see outside, and also so the passengers’ eyes are adapted to outside light in case of an evacuation. You don’t want people hesitating on the slides because they can’t see.
I asked a flight attendant about the window shades once, and in addition to the visibility reasons, she also said it was to help create a uniform view. They need to scan for anything that is out of place, and having the shades randomly open or closed impedes that pattern matching.
The number of fatalities and injuries seems minuscule because it's normalised over distance traveled.
This makes sense, because air travel is the only way to make voyages over this distance. But it also doesn't make sense for the same reason -- it's stupid to compare a 6000 mile holiday flight with a 6000 mile holiday road trip, because people don't routinely make those. You're still more likely to get injured on an eight hour car ride than on an eight hour flight, but the difference isn't a factor 600.
In much the same way, air travel is also arguably moderately efficient in terms of CO2 per mile, except that it's also a super easy way -- in fact, practically the only way -- to accrue tens of thousands of miles every year, so the efficiency is kind of irrelevant.
I know people who are already at the "if driving takes less than 8 hours, I'd rather drive than fly" level. Every additional inconvenience (or psychological impediment) added to the safest mode of long-distance travel has a risk of decreasing overall safety.
It's not particularly relevant to an international flight into Japan, but the extent to which increasing annoyance/instilling fear of airline passengers causing people to drive instead must be weighed against the small safety benefit resulting from a policy of telling passengers "we think this phase of flight contains the most highly concentrated risk, so for the next 15 minutes, please put away all of your distractions, prepare for a possible crash, and try not to think about the fact that we could turn this aircraft into a tumbling, burning ball of wreckage at any moment."
Something similar was the primary justification to support the continuation of "infant in arms" travel by passengers under the age of 2, with an expected 60:1 ratio of lives that would be lost if infants were required to occupy ticketed seats vs being carried in arms.
For other people who might not have followed completely: the NTAB don’t say (explicitly) that forcing children to occupy a seat of their own would result in 60 times as many deaths. They estimated the risk of lap infant deaths as 1 every 10 years, and then they estimated that if the cost of travel increased for families, enough families would instead choose to drive that 60 infants would die in road accidents in that same 10 year period.
I once traveled for business from Salt Lake City to Fort Collins, Colorado.
1/2 hour to the airport + get to the airport 2 hours before flight + 1 hour direct flight to Denver + 1/2 hour to deplane + 1/2 hour to get bags + 1/2 hour to get rental car + 1 hour drive to Fort Collins. Total 6 hours. Seems like it actually totalled 7 but I don't remember where the extra time was.
Versus 7 hours drive time from Salt Lake to Fort Collins.
And if two people are going, you only drive one car, but you buy two plane tickets.
And my car has more legroom than a coach seat.
So, yes, flying is safer per mile, but the "under 8 hours" crowd also have a point...
That’s me. But for totally different reasons. I’m a 4-5 hour round trip by car to the nearest airport that actually flys anywhere. So unless it’s more than about a 8-10 hour drive, it’s faster (and way cheaper) to drive than fly.
We literally decided to drive from UK to Poland this year(12 hour overnight ferry + another 12 hours of driving) instead of flying, because we hate Christmas flying so much, it's always a shit show, we always end up ill because everyone is coughing, at least with driving we can take it at our own pace - we want to stop, we stop.
The statistics are also available as "per passenger-hour", which eliminates the speed factor. An 8 hour road trip is reasonable. An 8 hour flight is on the longer side.
An 8 hour flight is a normal intercontinental flight, not even particularly long (London - New York/Delhi/Nairobi/Dubai sort of distance). Longer flights like London-LA/Singapore/Joburg/Tokyo are perfectly normal, or reasonable.
I would rarely do 8 hours driving in a single day, let alone 12. Certainly couldn't do that for work, would be massively against policy.
Similar to the Jevons Paradox, where increases in energy efficiency often lead to greater overall consumption, as the higher efficiency broadens the scope of the activity.
And for anyone who remembers the electronics during takeoff and landing ban once cell phones became common it was a massive hassle for flight attendants as many passengers routinely ignored instructions.
Never really understood this "we can't enforce the rules because people routinely ignore the rules" attitude. This should be dead simple on an airplane, where the airline knows who each passenger is by seat. So have one flight attendant make one pass down the aisle warning everyone to put away their phones, then have another one follow a minute or so later just making note of which seats are still using their phones. No-fly-list them all later. After this policy became known, people would be strongly incentivized to get with the program.
Even when there was a rule that cell-phones were supposed to be turned off, studies showed that 20-25% of cell phones were still active (Possibly forgotten in pockets) - wasting time, energy, traveler patience, on something that was entirely theater (I don't believe there was ever a single incident associated with an active cell phone - which makes sense given the 10s of thousands per day that were powered on during takeoff) - seems like the worst possible tradeoff ever. The "No cell phone use during takeoff" or "No mobile phone use during flight" (China Air used to do that - very, very annoying) - bureaucracy flex just because the could.
I think the "no cellphones" rule is about minimizing distractions during critical phases of flight, not because a phone's radio is going to do damage to the aircraft. So a phone on but sitting in someone's bag is not the end of the world.
> the "no cellphones" rule is about minimizing distractions during critical phases of flight, not because a phone's radio is going to do damage to the aircraft
The cell-phone "ban was put in place because of potential interference to wireless networks on the ground" [1]. The distraction argument started making its rounds after the interference hypothesis was debunked.
Aircraft electronics were also a commonly given reason for a time. And as for distracted ions there was a period when you could read a physical book but not a Kindle.
No distraction? Do you need sub 500ms response time? I'm pretty sure that even someone watching a movie with noise canceling earphones was aware of an issue just because of physics…
If you want to make the case for adding additional safety procedures (no distractions during take-offs and landings) then you have to actually make the case. It's not enough to just assert that they seem minor if the benefit would also be minor. How much do you think this policy would reduce deaths?
Taking simple steps to be more aware of your surroundings when something dangerous is happening seems self-evident to me. Please let me know what flights are you taking and when so that I can make sure I'm not on the same plane.
My rule of thumb is "know where the exits are", and "know where the life jackets are" if flying over water. Those are the bits that differ the most plane to plane -- seatbelts are consistent, clear paths during takeoff and landing are consistent, oxygen masks are consistent, but I want to know where the exits are and how to float.
There are huge numbers of opportunities to trade off inconvenience against reduced death. For example, we could prohibit radios in cars because the music and adjustment can be distracting and lead to collisions. Or ban cars entirely since they're much more dangerous than walking and public transport. We could require everyone to wear an N95 all winter. Ban phones for the entirety of the flight, and prohibit books as well. Happy to give more examples of similarly bad tradeoffs!
If you make policy with a principle of being unwilling to trade off deaths against inconvenience in any circumstance you'll have somewhat fewer deaths and unbearable levels of inconvenience.
Furthermore, distracted or unprepared passengers impact the evacuation of others trapped behind them. I’ve participated in evacuation training for flight attendants and have personally witnessed how a bungled jump down evacuation slide led to a 5-10 second delay. This was equated with ~20 fatalities due to smoke inhalation in the simulation.
My objection isn't that the impact of banning electronics during takeoff and landing is unknowable; that's not the main issue with banning car radios, cars, or bare faces either. Instead it's that the impact is too small to be worth the cost.
I think its fair to say I misread the thrust of your argument. I still come down on the other side; I am comfortable enforcing a widespread deprivation of a convenience in order to further reduce the risk of a rare but catastrophic outcome.
Realize that if you make commercial air travel sufficiently (further) unpleasant, many of those people will choose to drive to their destinations instead.
This will cause a net increase in deaths because, mile-for-mile, driving is orders of magnitude more deadly than flying commercial.
Banning car stereos would be a good idea. Besides distracting drivers, listening to music also helps people push past their normal fatigue limit and drive for much longer than they should. Driving tired is about as dangerous as driving drunk.
I'm curious what the relevant part of that article is? As far as I can tell the only pertinent reference to passenger behaviour is the listing of "Passengers' knowledge of safety procedures and their motivation to get acquainted with them" as a factor in evacuation, which...does not really have anything to do with whether the passenger is "distracted" at the moment of an incident occurring.
I feel like people are equating "not paying attention" (which, what does that even mean for a passenger in a jetliner? not paying attention to what?) with "unpreparedness" when that doesn't really make any sense.
The inconvenience vs risk threshold here is similar to bucking a seatbelt which is hard to argue is a poor investment.
Aircraft may be very safe on a per mile basis, but those risks are extremely concentrated around takeoff and landing. Which are fast events, so the risk per second is relatively high even though flying is generally much safer than driving.
> The inconvenience vs risk threshold here is similar to bucking a seatbelt which is hard to argue is a poor investment.
It really, really is not. Seatbelts actively prevent injuries from sudden violent phenomena. "Paying attention" does absolutely nothing to reduce the forces you are subject to in the event of, say, a collision with a Dash 8 that was on your runway at landing. It helps post-incident at best.
And I have "paying attention" in quotes because I feel like people are ignoring how attention actually works when they propose things like this. Human brains actively reroute focus in response to stimuli - like, say, a collision with a Dash 8 that was on your runway at landing. That's the whole concept of "a distraction". Hell, just a car braking particularly hard is stimulus enough to capture its passengers' attention, to talk of a plane landing going wrong in such a catastrophic manner. By the time the cabin crew is even ready to begin an evacuation, whether or not a person was fiddling with their phone (or just staring into space) some seconds before the incident seems highly irrelevant.
Fast isn’t instant. At 30,000 feet there’s plenty of time, at ground level things can go very badly extremely quickly and rapid task switching increases panic.
There’s several ways paying attention directly increases safety. First many evacuations aren’t fast enough for everyone to escape so even fractions of a second directly correlate to lives. Taking the crash position promptly reduces the risk of injury most importantly disabling injuries which may slow people exiting the aircraft. Safety briefings give relevant information in the event of an emergency which means people act more appropriately.
For one thing, an evacuation is not something you begin to do the instant an accident occurs; it takes time to reach a physical state where evacuation is even possible at all. For instance, there is video footage from the inside of the A350 (taken by a passenger who was...you know...using their phone, and all 379 people on the board still exited in a timely manner). It took well over 10 seconds for the plane to even finish its landing roll-out post-collision and come to a stop. Handwringing over the fractions of a second that it took a passenger that was "paying attention" and someone that was looking at their phone or reading a book to realise that the plane had had an accident makes no sense. There is nothing either of them can do or should do until the situation has stabilised somewhat.
For another, taking the brace position is something you do with forewarning and instruction from the crew, and the circumstances that lead to that forewarning are very capable of capturing attention. Additionally, safety briefings are given when the plane is very firmly planted on the ground pre-flight (cabin crew may repeat/re-explain instructions like how to put on a life vest or how to properly take a brace position during an emergency if circumstances permit). And that's really the crux of it: the time for a passenger to pay attention is while they are being briefed or otherwise addressed by the crew, and while they can properly review their specific plane's safety information and setup. After that, there is literally nothing for the passenger to actively pay attention to.
Staring very hard at the seat in front of you or out of the window "in case something happens" is not paying attention to anything but your own anxiety. You can be prepared and be ready for alerts without literally sitting and doing nothing; the human brain may not be capable of a lot of things, but it is very capable of that much.
First electronic devices + headphones provide significant isolation from what’s going on. I’ve seen people miss fire alarms in an office environment. So it’s possible for someone to actually miss an evacuation not just fail to respond for fractions of a second.
> It took well over 10 seconds for the plane to even finish its landing roll-out post-collision and come to a stop.
Panic and confusion can last considerably longer than 10 seconds. Having even a little head start to process the situation is meaningful well past the initial event.
> taking the brace position is something you do with forewarning and instruction from the crew, and the circumstances that lead to that forewarning are very capable of capturing attention.
Most emergencies aren’t preceded by anything particularly attention grabbing. Someone engrossed with a device can easily miss what’s going on long enough to cause issues.
> Staring very hard at the seat in front of you or out of the window "in case something happens" is not paying attention to anything but your own anxiety. You can be prepared and be ready for alerts without literally sitting and doing nothing; the human brain may not be capable of a lot of things, but it is very capable of that much.
Not all tasks are equally distracting. A kid eating a candy bar is more capable of processing what’s going on than that same kid engrossed in a game trying to ignore all outside stimuli while aiming for a high score.
I agree that the case for banning electronics during takeoff and landing is much stronger than the case for banning them for the whole flight, but I'm primarily objecting to FrustratedMonky claiming that we shouldn't ever chose policies that would lead to additional deaths, regardless of the level of inconvenience that this would impose.
If you wanted to give a fermi calculation for the fraction of aircraft traveler deaths that this proposal would prevent I'd be happy to think more about this, and you might convince me. My sense that the tradeoff is not worth it is based on thinking that (a) there aren't that many deaths to be prevented and (b) banning the devices wouldn't increase the chance of survival during an evacuation by very much.
See, thing is, ypur oinion doesn't really matter when it comes to banning electronics during take of and landing, mine doesn't neither. Airlines and regulators decided that, for safety reasons, electronics are banned for passengers. Same as with red traffic lights and speed limits, it stops there.
For what it 's worth so, I don't consider people having 20 minutes less screen time to be considered a prize to be paid, let alone one big enough to change reugulations over.
> Airlines and regulators decided that, for safety reasons, electronics are banned for passengers.
Huh? Electronics are allowed on flights in most countries, including in Japan, and including on the specific flight we're talking about. We're discussing whether it would be good for regulators to ban devices and anything else distracting during takeoff and landing.
I fly a lot.
I see people using electronics for scrolling through photos, playing candy crush, browsing reddit, etc...
The point is, that allowing these activities for a few more minutes during takeoff/landing, is not providing any benefit that would justify killing even 1 person, let alone hundreds.
It isn't like someone is going to use that extra 5-10 minutes of using their device to cure cancer.
My guess is the number of lives saved by your proposal ("forcing people to not have any distractions during take-offs and landings") would be well under one annually, certainly below "hundreds". The total number of plane deaths is already low, and the fraction where a slightly more efficient evacuation would have made a difference is even lower.
I think we may also disagree about how much it matters to subject ~4.5B people annually (the total number of passengers) to an additional ten minutes of boredom? That's something like 1,000 lifetimes each year.
But do think that when a 1000 lifetimes are sliced into 5 minute chunks, those 5 minutes become less useful. It is false to equate this to loosing a 1000 lifetimes of productive effort. Like if this time is added up, it equates to killing a 1000 people.
Think because airline safety is so good, that it is easy to come up with these types of large number arguments.
I don't think that LW post says what you think it's saying? It's coining the term "fallacy of large numbers" to apply to the situation where someone is incorrectly asserting their situation has sufficiently large numbers to apply "law of large numbers" style reasoning.
I agree that 5 minutes to each of 1000 people, especially 5min on your phone on a plane, are less valuable than 5k minutes to one person. But I don't think they're so massively less valuable that we can ignore them as trivial!
Maybe I'm mistaking that with "Law of truly large numbers"
With a huge number, it is possible to make something look reasonable or un-reasonable. Wasting billions of hours of peoples time. Sounds bad, we should get rid of that.
But that is also the time when people should be watching the safety video. Which can impact a few lives. Like remembering where the safety doors are.
Maybe this is more along those lines.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_truly_large_numbers
The law of truly large numbers (a statistical adage), attributed to Persi Diaconis and Frederick Mosteller, states that with a large enough number of independent samples, any highly implausible (i.e. unlikely in any single sample, but with constant probability strictly greater than 0 in any sample) result is likely to be observed.[1] Because we never find it notable when likely events occur, we highlight unlikely events and notice them more.
The law is meant to make a statement about probabilities and statistical significance: in large enough masses of statistical data, even minuscule fluctuations attain statistical significance. Thus in truly large numbers of observations, it is paradoxically easy to find significant correlations, in large numbers, which still do not lead to causal theories (see: spurious correlation), and which by their collective number,[4] might lead to obfuscation as well
> that is also the time when people should be watching the safety video
I thought we were talking about the most dangerous parts of a flight, takeoff and landing, which are not when the safety video (or presentation) happens?
> With a huge number, it is possible to make something look reasonable or un-reasonable. Wasting billions of hours of peoples time. Sounds bad, we should get rid of that.
I agree that we're not good at thinking about this kind of scale. I think a better way to make this at a scale that works well is to look at everything on a per-person basis. So if it saves one life per year (which I suspect is high) then we're balancing 10min of boredom against 0.0002 micromorts [1], in the same range as traveling 270ft by car. Someone who would rather ride 100mi in a car with their phone than 101mi in a car without their phone is already ok with this kind of risk. [2]
[1] 1 in 4.5B chance of death
[2] 230mi per micromort, so 100mi is 0.435 micromorts and 101mi is 0.439 for a difference of 0.004 micromorts. If the journey is 1.5hr then this is 9 rounds of trading off 10min of boredom for 0.0004 micromorts. Which is twice the risk of death we're positing in the airplane example.
Typically the phones have to be off by the time the safety video is happening. I think they do this on purpose so you are paying attention. Seems like they occur very close together.
I might be assuming too much overlap, like if there is longer delay waiting on tarmac. There probably is a lot of variance in this, so maybe it isn't really good point.
I'm completely on board with making sacrifices for something greater than oneself, but since there are so many opportunities to make such sacrifices if we don't prioritize we'll spend all our efforts in places where the effects are minimal.
>Incredibly, people can walk and chew gum at the same time. This includes the ability to refocus their attention when they experience unusual events.
No. They can't. That 'refocus' you mention is proof of that.
it's getting old having to say over and over again that this isn't actually the case : humans switch contexts and lose focus -- you're not as good at multi-tasking as you think, nor is anyone.
So , people can walk OR chew bubble gum , and if these choose to they can pay contextual switching costs between the two to make outside spectators believe that they can do two things at once.
Don't fall for the ruse, there is a cost even if it's a small one.
Similarly, in a disaster i'd rather be surrounded by fit young soldiers without cell-phones -- alert and aware -- than I would be surrounded by the typical multi-variant airliner crowd that must have their attention drug away from the device by the sound of crunching metal.
It's obvious to me that a group of alert and ready people will outperform 'the other group' in an escape in nearly every metric, i'd hope that the same would be obvious to the other humans trying to escape fiery wreckage alongside me.
You're not allowed to use laptops or have the tray down because those are active physical hazards even in fairly routine landings not because of some nebulous idea of you being "distracted".
This thread was started with throw0101d saying "I think forcing people to not have any distractions during take-offs and landings is a good thing", and we've been discussing how to weigh the inconvenience and boredom of prohibiting distractions against the reduced risk of death via more efficient evacuations.
The idea of putting down your phone for an hour in total being "too inconvenient" as people seemingly willingly sign over their dignity for a $10 cheaper flight ticket is.... uninspiring.
You seem really certain that passengers would be so wrapped up in their phones that they would be too distracted to promptly realize... there was a collision with another plane, causing their plane to split open and burst into flames.
That 'prompt realization' takes actual time from an escape when it doesn't necessarily need to.
I have no problem with the idea that humans can re-prioritize; but I do have a problem that people seem to think that the re-prioritization effort comes for free, instantly. We don't work that way as humans.
There's phone footage from inside the burning plane, so apparently your theories don't correspond with reality. Always quite annoying when that happens. Been the death of many a theory.
people seem to think that the re-prioritization effort
comes for free, instantly
Here are the two biggest flaws in your thinking:
1. You seem to be assuming the alternative to "using one's phone during a landing" is some sort of highly aware ready state. In reality it's probably bored snoozing or half-snoozing. It's a red-eye flight after all.
2. You seem to be assuming that "evacuating a burning plane" is some kind of split-second thing, like a quicktime event in a video game. In reality, at least for this incident, there was a span of a significant number of seconds between "impact" and "plane slows down enough for emergency slides to extend and evacuation to begin." 30, maybe 60 seconds.... I'm not sure, but there was no real positive action for a passenger to take during that time. Shifting attention away from one's phone certainly has a nonzero time cost, but not remotely comparable to the time it took for the plane to come to a full stop.
Again, you're dealing in hypotheticals, while the actual reality of this incident (phones in use, orderly exit achieved, all lives saved) contradicts whatever it is you are imagining.
The difference between 180s and 90s is 90s: if (e.g.) ~30 people out of ~350 passengers (<10%) take an extra 3 seconds each because they are not aware of their surroundings, that time is eaten up.
1. Passengers on JL516 were not permitted to use their phones during landing.
2. I'm proposing that we start allowing them to use their phones.
3. If we did that then all 379 passengers would have died [1] because evacuation would have taken longer than the time before the plane was engulfed in flames [2]
Except #1 isn't the case: passengers were allowed to be on their phones and were doing so. And so #2 isn't the case either: I'm proposing maintaining the status quo.
And even if we had granted #1 and #2 I don't see how you get #3 because even if the extra time were entirely eaten up by 30 distracted passengers this wouldn't get you 100% dead: people don't leave in a single batch determined by the speed of the slowest person. There are multiple parallel exits, and each exit operates serially.
> And even if we had granted #1 and #2 I don't see how you get #3 because even if the extra time were entirely eaten up by 30 distracted passengers this wouldn't get you 100% dead:
You are right that it does not necessarily follow that 100% would be dead. AC 797 had a flash fire after 90 seconds, and only about half the people died. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
People keep pointing out to you that passengers were in fact using their phones to record footage of the interior of the plane (eg to let their friends/relatives know what was going on in case they didn't make it). Of course people are easily distracted by phones when they should be paying attention to other things, but virtually all people already in an emergency situation are fully present unless they're injured or caring for an injured person. I think you're underestimating people's ability to multitask when they know it matters.
I once heard a wise doctor say that even if the chance of survival for a medical operation is either 10% or 90%, the practical chance the patient is battling is always 50% because he either lives or dies from that operation.
Likewise, the chance of someone being in an aviation accident is close to nil (you're more likely to be in a car accident), but you are either going to be in an aviation accident or not (a 50% chance) and you're going to be either dead or alive from it (a 50% chance).
So you might as well at least not have your epitaph be "Killed by some bozo in the aisle TikToking" if you do end up dying.
> even if the chance of survival for a medical operation is either 10% or 90%, the practical chance the patient is battling is always 50% because he either lives or dies from that operation
I think this is rarely a productive way to think about it. For example, the chance that I might die in the next year is somewhere between 0% and 100%, and actuarial tables put it somewhere around 0.3%. [1] Should I refrain from having a kid because I'd have a "50% chance" of leaving them without a dad before they turned 1?
Well, using this logic, every day you have a 50% chance of dying, since you either die or you don't. Or perhaps every second you have a 50% chance of dying.
It clearly does not work in any circumstances. We over-emphasise the likelihood of rare events already, saying that something has even odds just because it is conceivable that it could happen is completely useless.
Which is not to say that you should not plan for extremely rare events, but you certainly should not make decisions assuming they are likely to happen.
I think you're maybe missing the point. My understanding would be something like:
My chances of being killed by a shark is basically 0%. But, if I'm in a shark cage surrounded by sharks the idea that some global probability is 0% isn't relevant. Something like that?
If I'm in a shark cage then the probability that matters is conditional on being in a shark cage, sure. And it should certainly be higher than the global probability. But I don't see how this connects to saying that anything that can go two ways is 50-50? ("always 50% because he either lives or dies from that operation")
I think the 50% part should be ignored and the message is "when dealing with an individual sample, the general probability distribution isn't that useful?" I don't actually agree with that, just trying to steel man the point a bit. I do kind of see what he means
I had a dentist explain to me that my lip could go numb with a 50% chance after my wisdom teeth removal with that exact explanation just two minutes before the surgery. I was infuriated, turns out I was on the lucky side of her coin.
I could be wrong, but I really don’t think permanent loss of sensitivity is anywhere that high. Though it sounds low for temporary loss, but then it goes away after a couple of hours or so.
It can really depend on how badly impacted the wisdom teeth are. There's apparently a lot of nerve bundles around the back of the jaw bone. If they really need to dig in there to get it out there's a risk. I've had multiple dentists talk to me about my wisdom teeth and all have talked about there being some significant risks with mine.
I recall the original context was that telling a patient to not worry because the chance of success is high isn't actually helpful, because the objective argument doesn't take into account the patient's personal perspective.
I've since extrapolated that to meaning that objective measures cannot always tell or respect the whole story, because personal perspectives can bowdlerize everything down to life or death or a 50% chance.
To put it another way: Telling someone they have a negligible chance of being in an aviation accident is worthless comfort if they end up in one.
> Telling someone they have a negligible chance of being in an aviation accident is worthless comfort if they end up in one.
It's significant comfort in all those flights where no crashes occur, and for most of the time up to and during those that do end in crashes.
Anyone who really believes they are about to embark on an activity having a 0.5 probability of killing them should put their affairs in order, but then, by the same reasoning, there's a 0.5 probability of dying while doing that!
I believe the fallacy here is using an uninformative uniform prior when a much better, empirically-verified one is available.
>because the objective argument doesn't take into account the patient's personal perspective.
Suppose a friend is afraid of crossing the street. Would it be more helpful from a personal perspective POV to tell your friend the odds of being hit by a car, or to make up the fact that you are just as likely to die today crossing that street as not dying? Because the latter strikes me as unhelpful from either an objective perspective or a personal perspective.
> To put it another way: Telling someone they have a negligible chance of being in an aviation accident is worthless comfort if they end up in one.
Sure. It’s also callous and insensitive, which is why we don’t tend to do that. But saying to the vast majority who are never going to experience a plane crash (a number larger than the number of victims by a few orders of magnitude) that it’s a coin toss is at least not very smart.
(I don't think that's what most mean when they say 'chance', but I get what you mean ;) It's similar to realizing how seating choice radically alters your (very small) chance of death by train crash.
I was going to say 'chance of death on that day' but apparently rail transport is remarkably safe and in micromorts, you're as likely to die in one day at 20 years of age as in 10000 km by rail, or (only!) 1600 km by air.
Now, it appears that 1600 km is also nearly the distance of the average passenger flight (a disappointly difficult datum to discover on the internet in 2024). Is this a counterpart to the reassuring quips comparing the chances of death by lightning: that boarding a plane doubles your chances of dying that day?
This is very silly. There are much better ways to express the idea that a binomial distribution is different than a multinomial or continuous one than to make up fake statistics.
The "excellent evacuation job" is being judged by footage taken from electronic devices. There's obviously at least some utility in these scenarios. The ones on their phones filming what they see outside are probably pretty aware of the situation. If you've crash landed, it would mean nothing that you were distracted on a device. You're not exactly trying to continue watching a movie.
I am perfectly capable of being distracted and inattentive without a phone.
I don't think there's any good way to ensure people are paying attention to the whole long landing and take-off sequence when it's basically always boring.
>Crazy how well the carbon fiber A350 held up given that it seems to have landed pretty much directly on a Dash 8 (RIP Coast Guard team). Looks like trading long term flammability for initial rigidity lived up to the design intent.
This will be the real story to come out of the incident. It was still an open question as to whether composite airframes were a good idea for civil aviation due to the fire risk. I imagine Airbus marketing teams started popping champagne corks the moment all passengers were safely accounted for.
From what I've read, this was handled terribly. There was confusion and no evacuation was ordered by the crew over the PA. The passengers managed it themselves. If it were a crew-directed evacuation they would have blocked the door leading to the still-running engine as you pointed out.
It took the firefighters over six minutes to respond to the site of the burning aircraft. In the US and Europe this would be unheard of, the fire brigade would be rolling as soon as the aircraft hit the ground.
The only reason hundreds of people are not dead is directly attributable to the Japanese being an overly polite and orderly culture.
If this were China or elsewhere in Asia there would be hundreds of people dead right now, trampled over in the chaos, while the remaining hundred or so survivors would be exiting with their roll-aboard bags in tow.
The video shows passengers sitting calmly in a burning aircraft quickly filling with smoke, I presume awaiting further instruction, which may or may not have come from the crew. The scene almost defies belief.
For a 20 second clip. It is unclear if the plane is stopped at that start of the clip, and the attendants have to assess which exits aren’t on fire, arm and deploy the safe ones, and then issue orders. Until then, staying calm and out of their way is probably good.
They got nearly 400 people out with only 14 minor injuries.
A person in the back who appears to be a crew is standing with her seatbelt unbuckled, so the aircraft is probably stopped. The behavior of the passengers also indicates that it was after landing.
> "Right after the plane touched down, the pilot felt a sudden shock, and lost control to stay in the runway. A fire took place but the pilots didn't recognise it in the beginning and learned about it [through the] cabin attendant," the JAL spokesperson said.
> There were three pilots and 12 flight attendants on board when the incident took place. The aircraft's announcement system was damaged, leaving the crew to use megaphones and their own voices to shout instructions.
> "The first thing cabin attendants did [after they realised there were] passengers who recognised that their plane was on fire, was to make them stay calm and not to stand up, which could make the escape very difficult. The announcement system was unusable so these instructions were made without it."
> The only reason hundreds of people are not dead is directly attributable to the Japanese being an overly polite and orderly culture.
Contrast this to the South Korean ferry disaster [1] where hundreds of Koreans (inb4 someone pops me with "Japanese and Korean are completely different countries..." - yes, I am aware) died as a result of being orderly and compliant. It's just an interesting counterexample where people not speaking up or questioning leadership led to their deaths.
I would not call it a counterexample. In fact we saw similar behavior here. These people escaped death by the skin of their taints. In my opinion the crew should have initiated evacuation much sooner than they did. Despite this, the passengers' behavior also prevented chaos. Any further delay would have surely resulted in casualties. It's a bit of a paradox.
> In my opinion the crew should have initiated evacuation much sooner than they did
There are aircraft incidents where the evacuation led to deaths that wouldn't have happened otherwise (stuff like fire engines striking evacuees, parts falling off the airplane, fire, etc.). An evacuation is something always considered/discussed and not automatically undertaken.
Six minutes is a decent response time for ARFF in a large, active airport with no advance warning. They can't just drive straight to the incident site; instead they have to wait for ground clearance to enter any taxiways or runways because there are still other aircraft moving around.
The rule in the USA (set by FAA) is maximum 3 minutes, preferably 2, or they deny your certification and you don't get to be an airport. So I would not characterize 6 minutes as decent. In fact, it's pretty damn terrible.
Source: 14 CFR 139.319:
Within 3 minutes from the time of the alarm, at least one required aircraft rescue and firefighting vehicle must reach the midpoint of the farthest runway serving air carrier aircraft from its assigned post or reach any other specified point of comparable distance on the movement area that is available to air carriers, and begin application of extinguishing agent.
Note that that section applies to FAR 139.319 (h)(1)(ii) which is “When requested by the Administrator, demonstrate compliance with the response requirements specified in this section.”
I read that to mean “in a planned test, must have a 3 minute alarm to application time”. That means it’s the intended performance target but a 3m30s response to an actual crash will maximally get a request from the Administrator to demonstrate a 3:00 time, rather than a revocation or lowering of ARFF Index of the airport.
Let's wait for facts (ie. the accident report) before making such statements.
> There was confusion and no evacuation was ordered by the crew over the PA.
Of course there was confusion, that is inevitable. Again, we do not have solid information on what PAs were made, but from the looks of the damage and the likely accident sequence, the main avionics bay was pretty much completely destroyed. It's fairly likely the pilots were not able to make any evacuation order by PA on account of half the plane's electronics being on fire a kilometre behind them.
> The passengers managed it themselves. If it were a crew-directed evacuation they would have blocked the door leading to the still-running engine as you pointed out.
Video clearly shows an orderly evacuation, supervised by cabin crew, who can be seen directing from the exits with flashlights and leaving last. I don't know where you got the idea it was passenger managed from. It appears that the exits facing the worst of the fire were not deployed which is additional evidence of a properly managed evacuation. I don't know their SOP wrt. running engines, or if this engine was even 'running' and not just freewheeling (it doesn't seem to be producing meaningful air movement), but it appears they made a rational decision to use the R1 exit, since everyone survived and the evacuation was pretty quick (~2 minutes).
> It took the firefighters over six minutes to respond to the site of the burning aircraft. In the US and Europe this would be unheard of, the fire brigade would be rolling as soon as the aircraft hit the ground.
I haven't found video of the very early moments after the aircraft stopped, but there appears to already be foam laid down under and on the aircraft and at least two trucks attending during the late stages of the evacuation, so I don't know where you got this 6 minutes from. Given the circumstances, the crew waiting 6 minutes to begin evacuating doesn't sound reasonable.
> The only reason hundreds of people are not dead is directly attributable to the Japanese being an overly polite and orderly culture.
Yes, the passengers are also an important part of an effective evacuation, and it is why you should not ignore the safety briefing and follow the instructions of the crew. Good on the passengers for effecting a successful evacuation in this case. You might well be right it would have gone down differently elsewhere, with the eventual report yet again espousing the importance of leaving the baggage behind and maintaining order. This is reason to praise the passengers' behaviour and learn from it, not somehow criticize it as 'overly polite and orderly'.
I am sure there were things that could have been done better, but this was a successful and quick evacuation. It's far too early to decide what went well and what could be done better, but it's pretty clear that it was a good job - everyone got out quickly and with minimal injury.
I heard that the engine 2 was still running during the evacuation and that the front door on the right was used for evacuation, that sounds really scary and I'm very glad no one was sucked into the engine.
I think it helped a lot that the plane was moving and thanks to this left the initial fireball behind it. It was also landing which means it had much less fuel to begin with.
The accident became a watershed for global aviation regulations, which were changed in the aftermath of the accident to make aircraft safer. New requirements to install smoke detectors in lavatories, strip lights marking paths to exit doors, and increased firefighting training and equipment for crew became standard across the industry, while regulations regarding evacuation were also updated. Since the accident, it has become mandatory for aircraft manufacturers to prove their aircraft could be evacuated within 90 seconds of the commencement of an evacuation, and passengers seated in overwing exits are now instructed to assist in an emergency situation.
We talk about the flamability difference between a carbon-composite and aluminium hull design. That fire had what, almost 20 minutes to burn before the cabin flashed?
Yup. I'm far from an authority on the matter (just learned about the Air Canada flight further up the thread and thought it was relevant), but I'd guess this supports the "it crashes" hypothesis.
Admiral Cloudberg has their work cut out for them again... I always love their insights (not sure if it's a man or a woman)
It's not really a miracle though. Just the system working as intended, and the many lessons learned from the lives that were lost in the past paying off.
As an example: due to this accident with many fatalities, the process for fire on the runway has been improved considerably. In that case the wind direction made a big difference in the number of fatalities, because it blew toxic smoke and fire into the fuselage while the evacuation was ongoing. Lessons were learned and procedures fixed. But it's still important to remember that those lessons were paid in blood. https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/fire-on-the-runway-the-m...
this looks like textbook runway invasion where miscommunication leads to two different aircrafts being allowed on a runway at the same time.
Reminds me of LATAM 2213, which led to the very first Airbus 320 neo being written off [1].
Essentially, clearance to enter a runway has to be expressively given and confirmed in non-ubiquitous language ("Flight ABC requesting clearance to enter runway 01").
Yet LATAM incident shows how often emergency services are often unaccustomed to thorough communication (after all they do these procedures much more rarely)
it is crazy to me that all of this still relies on humans giving verbal clearance over radio.
Shouldn’t there be a universal standard to communicate clearances to the computer systems of the airplanes and other runway vehicles? And shouldn’t there be a small, well-tested core system that makes sure clearance never conflicts?
How on earth does all this still depend on skilled individuals not making a mistake?
> Shouldn’t there be a universal standard to communicate clearances to the computer systems of the airplanes and other runway vehicles? And shouldn’t there be a small, well-tested core system that makes sure clearance never conflicts?
ATC entering instructions into a computer, then pilots reading and interpreting from their computer, and then operating their plane, probably is slower and the context switches between the computer screen and what's outside the window may lead to errors.
There are over 100,000 commercial flights each day (worldwide):
I didn’t say that anyone should enter anything manually into a computer, nor did I claim that a human reading a computer screen is how an automated runway system would ensure safety.
As an aside, humans are not doing a good job at driving cars and should leave that to the computers.
Where I drive daily I constantly have to make decisions which no self-driving car system I know about can possibly do. They don't foresee upcoming gridlocks caused by you driving completely legally but blocking (again, legally) a car from crossing to a side road, that car again blocks the car behind it, which blocks the car in front of you from doing a left turn, which means that you can't move and unlock the gridlock. That's just one on my commute. Then there's driving uphill on snow, seeing a person walking on the other side of the road and a car coming in the other direction. You foresee that this car will have some problems braking for that person (which would be the normal procedure - I'm coming the other way, that car shouldn't try to pass the person). So, what I do is to slow down and give that other driver confidence to pass. And sometimes I have to do the other thing - speeding up a bit in order to create room for another car to let that car avoid problems (if I were a computer I would have no reason to think about that).
This is also something happening all the time where I drive. And tons of other understanding-the-traffic cases.
Self-driving systems only follow the rules. That is not sufficient. When general artificial intelligence eventually arrives - that's when we get self-driving cars better than humans, in any other cases than for trivial cases. And yes, computers could drive cars in trivial places, it's just that those places are pretty much non-existing where I live and drive.
While everything you mention are signs of good, defensive driving and seeing more than "Just following the rules," average human drivers don't do what you do. And that's what the automated systems are compared to.
So again, while I think ultimately the automated systems should also do what you're talking about, right now, if the other article is true in its claims that Waymo is safer, it seems sufficient to follow the rules to achieve a certain level of safety.
[other drivers] But they do - where I live. It's very rare to see people not doing that, so much so that everyone really notices.
Edit: And the point is really that strictly just following rules (i.e. just drive if you're in the right and the signs say so) will cause accidents and worse. For others, not necessarily myself. On my commute and nearby.
There's nothing so far indicating that they have, at this point. Though I doubt predictive algorithms would work - there are all kinds of situations, all slightly different, and lots of them about understanding what someone else might be thinking. As I mentioned, I think we'll need general artificial intelligence to do this properly.
No, never been to SF, I have no idea how people drive there or what the conditions are. Except that they're very different from where I drive (except when I'm in the town centre) - roads without sidewalks, mostly no signal lights, snow a large part of the year, and other special conditions.
That is not quite accurate. There are certainly standards for airport markings, but there are many non-standard airports... especially when flying at anything smaller than an international airport.
(And yes, even airliners will sometimes land at small regional airports.)
Is that data controlled for environment? I.e. it must only compare Waymo driving with human drivers in exactly the same environment. Same road, same conditions, same time, etc. Waymo doesn't take any difficult routes.
Not to mention the fact that when it encounters a situation never seen before it just "freezes" - happened a few times and caused traffic jams.
What I give these cars is their ability to react "instantaneously" to emergency situations like automated emergency braking when there is an obstacle in the front of the car or the car in front suddenly brakes.
IMHO, there was not even enough data to draw this conclusion from the study. 3.8 million miles looks like a lot, but it is laughable for traffic safety conclusions.
And of course Waymo is going to milk as much as possible from their study, we just shouldn't trust it blindly.
We need far more data to say this with certainty. This data is from only 3.8 million miles, in carefully controlled conditions with brand new high quality vehicles.
Besides this comes from Waymo, they didn't release the data used in their study.
Of course Waymo will try to paint their cars in the most favourable light possible. Maybe they are being honest, but that's not the point. The point is that public policy shouldn't trust the allegations of a private company at face value.
> Driving doesn’t require an advanced degree in physics. It’s mostly a mish mash of fairly mundane tasks.
Generally not wrong, but when it becomes non-mundane, it can become so in a hurry.
This is why I'm sometimes skeptical about statistics that say "x% of airplane crashes are human error". Well maybe, but by the time the humans get involved the automated systems have often thrown up their proverbial hands and digitally exclaimed "Jesus take the wheel".
I think having computers take over the mundane parts may help collision rates as people can get numbed and bored by the monotony.
One has to be careful about having the right level of automation and control for the given situation, as per the famous "Children of the Magenta Line" presentation:
> “Children of the magenta line” has become shorthand for pilots who manage and monitor systems but lack the stick-and-rudder skills to fly the airplane with authority. You may hear it wielded as an epithet in a discussion of “real pilots” versus “kids these days.” But in many cockpits today, automation illiteracy may be as dangerous as automation dependency. Vanderburgh’s insights shouldn’t drive us to reject automation altogether, but rather put it in its proper place in our pilot toolkits. Just as you should hand-fly regularly to keep your stick-and-rudder skills sharp, you should also practice using the technology available in the aircraft you fly.
I'm willing to believe that computers are better at lane keeping than humans are. That's not the only scenario, though: Unfortunately, driving can go from lane keeping to making a life-or-death decision in a second, and that's not enough time for a human hand-off.
A plane's autopilot can beep and bail out to a human with a few seconds for them to get oriented and take over; a car doesn't always have that luxury.
"Is this a person walking into my lane or just a shadow?" isn't a question that comes up in the air. Until a self-driving car can minimize the probability of that detection going wrong to below human thresholds, I wouldn't feel comfortable sitting in the driver (or maybe even passenger) seat of one.
It's rarely that straightforward: most all runway collisions involve ATC giving correct instructions, but the crew mishears them, misunderstands them, hears them correctly but accidentally goes to the wrong runway/taxiway, etc etc. And there's usually complicating factors like terrible weather, diversions to unfamiliar airports etc in the mix as well. What remains the world's worst single aviation disaster in Tenerife checked pretty much all these boxes.
> The ATC computer should talk to the plane computer.
Not as simple:
1) You need to implement it for very small airplanes too, which is far from easy. In the Linate air disaster a small Cessna Citation invaded the runtime due to fog and misscomunication.
2) You need to implement it for ground vehicles too, as in the LATAM example it was a fire truck that invaded the runtime.
3) You need A LOT of infrastructural update.
4) Even if you had computers talking to computers, this may still be far from enough to avoid collisions, as those mistakes are often a matter of seconds (as in the both accidents quoted before).
5) Automation brings its own issues. One of them is complacency where attention levels unavoidably get lower as reliance on automation increases. In turn complacency can make runways more prone to such incidents in case of malfunctions/bugs.
Yes, in this case, you do need to update everything at once. At least for a given aiport. All it takes is one plane, helicopter, fire truck, or baggage transport vehicle to screw with the assumptions of the system and jeopardize safety.
No, computers aren't necessarily faster, assuming we want to achieve autonomy on the ground. Note that the average human reaction time to visual stimulus is about 250ms. Achieving this on a plane would require a great deal of cameras and sensors that would not only need to stay clean, but capable of withstanding pressure changes, high velocity winds, the occasional unfortunate airborne debris, etc. Then there is the processing power to both process each input in real-time (per plane) and train it on real-world data to recognize a variety of scenarios to act upon (per model and perhaps configuration; AA alone has about 11 active aircraft types across 953 planes). Contrast this with Tesla's investment for approximately 6 models. [1]
Achievable? Sure. Cost-effective and sustainable with current tech? Doubtful.
It's hard to know what that is. TCAS is a great example of an obvious solution to mid-air collisions - two devices seamlessly negotiate for one plane to go up, the other to go down.
One I can think of is an electronic runway "lock". ATC mark the runway as locked to a particular aircraft. The landing aircraft checks at minimums whether if the runway is locked to any other aircraft. It's harder to know how to prevent incursions at ground level, but it could be a beacon near the runway threshold and intersecting taxiways, flashing a warning in the cockpit of the taxing aircraft if an aircraft on final holds the lock. A pilot could still disregard it. Sometimes two planes can share the same runway, such as a plane lining up while another vacates, which adds further problems.
Runway Status Lights (RWSL) are close to what you're describing. If surface surveillance radar detects that a runway is occupied, it turns on red warning lights at the runway approach end and at the hold-short bars.
The nice thing is that the entire system is ground-based, no additional equipment needed in the aircraft.
However, it's complicated/expensive, so only a handful of airports have it installed.
I think you might be way underestimating number 5.
While on the first hand your point sounds very reasonable, in practice it may have more adverse effects than we may think and make the whole system more unsafe.
No, the question is what authorities and regulators conclude, after this incident is properly investigated, regarding improvements and risk mitigation measures have to be put in place. Aerospace regulations are written in blood, and almost-blood, not in public outcry.
>1) You need to implement it for very small airplanes too, which is far from easy.
No, you don't. It's easy: just don't allow small airplanes at airports with large commercial aircraft. No one needs them anyway; they're just a luxury for rich people. The only place they make sense is for very remote locations, like Alaska, where there's a need for people to pay for carriage on such a small aircraft. For normal airports that carry jumbo jets, there's no reason to have small planes sharing the runways. For exceptions like coast guard jets such as this one, these are government-owned so they can afford the upgrades.
The absolute worst thing is for an aircraft to refuse control input from the pilots, regardless their state of informedness. Lest we forget, we saw what happens when computers take priority over pilots thanks to 737 MAX MCAS.
>Then let’s make it obvious and include it in the training.
Which cuts right to the heart of the B737 MAX issue - Boeing substantially changed the design, then added sensors & software to make the changed airframe handle similarly to the old 737 airframe and claimed that this meant the pilots did not need retraining
If Boeing had been upfront about MCAS, and required that pilots were trained in what it did and how to override it then the crashes probably would not have happened.
No, we need more than this: the system must be documented and pilots must be trained for it. If the aircraft manufacturer fails to do this, they go to prison. If it's found that hiding this information was intentional, the corporate executives and everyone else in the company who knew are publicly executed by firing squad (with them aiming at their stomachs).
Airplane taxiing is manual. ATC can tell the plane to use runway A, and the plane can check that A is free, but neither will stop the pilot from accidentally steering into runway B.
And yet, aviation is one of the safest industries mankind ever built. It seems those solution in place are actually pretty good.
Edit: Something I try to take to heart, if I don't have domain knowledge, I assume that whatever easy solution I can think of either was already discarded for valid reasons I don't know nor understand or is already implemented without me knowing about it. Generally, people working in a particular field tend to be competent in that field, just assuke that more often than not they know what they are doing.
We got very good at doing aviation safety in a certain way.
The people who work in aviation are extremely skilled at doing safety in a certain way.
This is usually true for any domain. People are very experienced and extremely skilled at doing things within a certain framework.
It can still be true that there is a better way. I realise it’s hard to be on par with a century of aviation safety experience, even if the new approach is better. That’s why you need a gradual transition that focuses on enhancement rather than replacement
I can’t speak to international ops because I’m just not sure. In the US though, we have runway status lights. At all the runway intersections there are lights embedded in the runway that will tell you if the runway is safe or not. A radar based system is constantly monitoring the runway and will light it up red if there is a potential for collision. The system works independent of any input from ATC. I think it’s actually quite effective.
Unfortunately it’s expensive and so only runways at the busiest airports have it so far.
And yet in US it's also standard practice to have airplanes takeoff on the same runway at the same time if the preceding airplane is small enough to not create vortices.
Note how no one did anything wrong really in this case:
>runway incursion monitoring and alert system had failed to detect the danger as it had detected that both aircraft were in the air despite still being on the ground.
Yea, as I mentioned it’s rather unfortunate that not all airports have it yet. I’d love to see it installed everywhere. Including non-controlled airports.
I doubt your “other domains” are as safe and reliable as the aviation industry. An automated system may be possible to make, but will require a huge undertaking to bring even close to the current safety standards, and would introduce its own safety issues
An elevator is many orders of magnitude less complex than an airport, though.
Total automation can be done quite safely in some domains. Between that and a completely manual/human-operated system lies the area of augmentation, which can both be a boon to safety if done correctly, or deadly if it leads to automation complacency or false expectations around the types of situations it can successfully handle.
In the past six years there was some accidents just in the EU, at least one decapitation happened in the elevator of an hospital what I know. Or in the city were I live, a fail in a badly lubricated brake when an old person was entering (open door) sent the elevator to the top, just a few weeks after passing the monthly -supposed- maintenance service of the manufacturer.
The maintenance seriousness in aviation is superior to an elevator, but even like that, the last human layer decision should not be avoided.
For example, bad behaving sensor feeding a fin balancing algorithm introduced by the manufacturer to avoid the need to redesign an unbalanced plane to accommodate larger motors it was designed for, and pilots unable to make the plane follow their commanding due such algorithm blind decisions priority... has crashed planes.
It's largely a solved problem in aviation as well. Serious accidents get a lot of attention specifically because they are so rare and those based on clearance miscommunication or other radio misunderstanding are rarer still. So you'd be introducing a lot of additional system complexity trying to chase after ever decreasing gains. I'm not sure the end result is a net positive for safety.
Human to human open discussion is superior to computer to computer in the business of flying/navigation.
It might make sense at some point in the future where an autopilot system knows how to taxi, take off, troubleshoot issues by itself during the critical phases of flight and so on.
And like others said, aviation is one of the safest industries on the planet.
A runway may be clear when given the clearance to land. And that happens about 4NM from the RWY threshold. In the meantime a incursion might happen. Given low visibility you may not see it as you land a big airplane whose nose is a bit high up because of the flare. And even if you see it, it takes a few seconds for engines to spool up to full power in order to do a go-around.
Not really. If an instruction is unclear the pilot will ask again for a repeat. Or if the instruments show everything to look normal but the plane doesn’t feel right, the pilot will correct it, a computer will not.
Think of the 737 Max whose computers crashed two planes because of incorrect sensor data being fed to them. The pilots there tried to rescue the planes while the planes were following their logic, which was flawed.
> If an instruction is unclear the pilot will ask again for a repeat.
Except when they don't, and confirmation bias themselves into doing the wrong thing. The most likely cause of a plane crash is pilot error, and runway incursions happen shockingly often [1][2][3][4]. The only reason there hasn't been a Tenerife-style disaster is sheer luck.
Look, incidents happen all the time in any industry. And for the five examples of human error you have thousands of examples where humans performed very well.
Computers are not infailable either. So while they add a lot of safety features and ease the workload of the pilots, they should not have final authority over pilot actions. 737 Max is a prime example of why.
737MAX is what happens when you have a bad plane design because of bad regulations, and corporate execs intentionally make the existence of a plane system a secret from pilots so that they don't need retraining. An incident like that should result in prison time, if not outright execution. It is not a good example of the downfalls of an added safety feature; the MCAS system wasn't a safety feature at all, it was much more like the emissions-cheating "feature" in VW's "dieselgate" scandal.
> Shouldn’t there be a universal standard to communicate clearances to the computer systems of the airplanes and other runway vehicles?
“Communicating clearances” would actually be the easy part. The hard part is making sure that there actually is clearance. The system would need to be able to “see” the runway and to “know” about the flights that are permitted to use it in real-time. It would involve many computers, some in the air and some on the ground I assume. If the system failed the pilots would have to fall back onto something else, perhaps what they do today, so they’d still need training and practice. If a pilot made a mistake the system would need to be able to detect that and update everyone.
I worked in software in a domain vaguely related to ATC, and I've heard a few years ago that even sampling the voice commands (and routing them as VoIP) is problematic , as altering the signal through sampling and encoding can go against regulations. I don't remember the details though.
It was in a project related to ATC and area control / FIR services backup systems.
Pilots are accustomed to the immediacy of voice communication, which any electronic system will struggle to replicate. More sophisticated radio than simplex VHF has too many variables, and agreeing on an international standard would be challenging.
There have been some developments of a replacement of, or at least a supplement to, simplex radio. But none are as cheap, quick and reliable as verbal communications with readback.
Assuming (1) the replacement is a better solution, and (2) it is feasible to retrofit every aircraft in the world and switch everyone over to it.
Just in relation to (2), I can't really think of anything worse than having two communication systems on operation at the one airport - everyone must be using the same system.
Nor will it be a good argument in case of a fatal crash to say "well, it did contribute to this terrible accident, but in the long run it'll be better for everybody!".
Nobody in aviation is conservative about automation due to a lack of a desire for safety; quite the opposite. But it's just a fact that e.g. an automation system that can prevent a type of human error entirely in 99% of all cases can lead to more accidents in total, if it means that humans aren't regularly exposed to these 99% of cases which in the end train them for the 1% that the computers can't handle.
And this is, as are so many things in aviation safety, learned through blood.
You seem to have a pretty strong but not necessarily very substantiated opinion about the topic. I really suggest you read a bit about it, if you're so inclined. E.g. Admiral Cloudberg has been mentioned in this thread, it's a very good resource of accident recaps and the impulses they give for regulations and developments.
In contrary to what you're implying, "we've always done it like this" is not a principle of aviation safety.
Indeed you'd be hard-pressed to find any other globally coordinated system that is so dedicated to and successful at the gargantuan task of continually improving itself, a trillion dollar industry, and regulatory bodies all over the world. A five decades long track record of drastically reducing fatalities in the face of rising passenger miles speaks for itself.
To put it a bit bluntly, I'm pretty sure they don't need to be told that it would be "just as simple as (...), because that works for an elevator".
I think the problem might not be super simple to solve through updating vehicles.
You need to update infrastructure globally (and thus you need coordination between multiple different agencies), then you need to implement the solution at both airport and vehicles level.
That's a lot of work. In case of LATAM the Airbus hit a fire truck (which would've too required such a solution). In case of the Linate air disaster, such technology would've had to be implemented on a very small Cessna Citation model.
Maybe the updates need to be implemented at the airport level alone, quickly signaling controllers of possible violations/conflicts, and in fact most major airports have both ground radars and clear ground signals to avoid these incidents.
But it's still impossible to avoid these issues as these errors may happen in a matter of very few seconds thus not giving enough time to react to any of the involved parties.
How does the incident/accident rate in these other domains look like, then?
> How on earth does all this still depend on skilled individuals not making a mistake?
Everything safety critical always depends on skilled individuals not making a mistake, as long as there isn't full automation (in which case it depends on the people designing and implementing the automation system).
Until we do have that, mixed automation can actually make things less safe if it isn't done very deliberately and carefully, with people in operations relying on an imperfect system, and system designers on ops to catch complex and edge cases.
I agree. It’s SO antiquated. Nevermind issues with clearance there’s even issues like pilots forgetting what was ordered or ATC not catching incorrect read backs. This is just ridiculous that still in 2024 we are using technology from 1950 as the only way to give instructions. We solved encryption and authentication years ago. FAA should mandate strongly authenticated computer messages as the primary.
But you know the real reasons it’s old.
1) corporate greed and no regulation
2) legacy… it’s always legacy holding us back. All the third world countries, Russia, etc would not adopt it.
I wouldn't blame Russia for stupidly refusing to upgrade to newer technologies. Russia has its faults to be sure, but I'd sooner blame all the "freedom-loving" general aviation enthusiasts in America: you know, the people who refuse to give up carburetors and leaded gasoline in their 1940s-era airplanes?
I'd be interested in analyzing ATC transcripts to quantify the frequency of communication errors like that in day-to-day operations. Express permission, followed by an explicit (and matching) read-back, to enter a runway should be easy to identify (and the opposite as well). I see liveatc.net has audio archives, and tailstrike.com has transcripts of select accidents.
Incursion and Invasion have military links, Incursion would be brief and limited in scope, invasion is more full on long term. Both terms imply a subtle but a conscious choice in the crossing of the barrier, while intrusion is more neutral in attributing agency to the action.
Runway incursion is a technical term defined by the ICAO:
> Runway incursion. Any occurrence at an aerodrome involving
the incorrect presence of an aircraft, vehicle or person on
the protected area of a surface designated for the landing
and take-off of aircraft.
OP only quoted "Invasion", he did not reference it as "Runway Invasion" perhaps he meant the ICAO term, perhaps he took issue with the term invasion. I assumed he meant the latter, How would we know for sure?
Ambiguity while correcting someone else is not ideal.
Could the accident be linked to the clarity of radio instructions? I saw a discussion suggesting the DH aircraft might have been unsure about the correct runway to use, C1 or C5.
My aim isn't to critique the English proficiency of non-native speakers, especially those from non-Proto-Indo-European linguistic backgrounds. As a non-native English speaker myself, I understand the challenges.
However, I found it trully hard to comprehend the airport's side of the communications due to heavily accented and unclear pronunciation. Shouldn't there be a greater emphasis on air traffic controllers improving their English skills, since English is lingua franca (pun intended) of aviation.
Or perhaps this is irrelevant, considering aviation's global nature. Are pilots expected to adapt to and understand communications with strong accents?
> Could the accident be linked to the clarity of radio instructions? I saw a discussion suggesting the DH aircraft might have been unsure about the correct runway to use, C1 or C5.
From my comment in part of the discussion thread[0]:
The recording quality isn't very good, perhaps because of the location of the receiver.
--
The ATC quality of my local airport (CYYZ Tower) available through LiveATC is much better. I following some flying/pilot Youtubers, and their recordings of ATC are also quite good, so I'm not sure why LiveATC at HND is as statically as it is.
All of these ATC feeds are from SDR stations close by that monitor the same frequencies. Your local airport sounds better because someone has a better SDR rig to receive it. Generally the audio is crystal clear in the cockpit and on the ground — it’s just that the SDR stations don’t have as good antennae as the real systems do.
Yep, it's a line-of-sight transmission, so in a way the aircraft has the advantage of being a really, really tall antenna.
The volunteers running the feeds around YYZ are at the airport, IIRC. I'm in Halifax now, and the (single) YHZ feeder has had a really hard time finding a new place to set up after he lost his previous location.
There's a "feed setups" thread (or a whole forum) in the LiveATC forums, it's interesting to see how big or small the feeders' setups are!
Antenna quality is unlikely to be a significant factor in audio quality if the stations are actually somewhat close to the airport. The difference between a very good and very poor antenna is maybe 5-7 dB in the VHF airband, which shouldnt noticeably degrade quality unless you are already at the margins of signal availability. Antenna location is going to make a much, much bigger difference.
In addition to what others have said about the quality, pilots and air traffic controllers communicate using a very restricted vocabulary. They aren’t having free-flowing conversations - ATC issues commands using what’s essentially a spoken domain-specific language, and pilots echo them back. Accent should not be a major issue.
I learned to fly at St Hubert Airport (CYHU) outside of Montreal, where ATC spoke English to English-speaking pilots and French to French-speaking pilots. I lived in Montreal so I knew enough French to get by, but I could never make out more than a few words at the pace and quality of ATC transmissions plus C152 engine noise -- even in a controlled airspace, not overhearing other planes' instructions is a strange feeling.
But those French-speaking pilots probably heard their own instructions clearer than if they'd been in English.
There is a very regular sequence of phrases and that helps an enormous amount. I had little trouble understanding the VASA recording (which is surely lower quality than what was actually hitting the cockpit radios). I had a difficult time getting the word "accident", but the part that mattered operationally "the runway is closed" was entirely clear.
If you ring up ATC and tell them “I’m eating a ham and Swiss sandwich” (an entirely non-standard transmission), you’re very likely to get “say again?” regardless of the quality of the radio link or native English pronunciation and accent.
Even transmitting the ordinary items in a different sequence (altitude, route, code, destination, then frequency rather than the expected destination*, route, altitude, frequency, transponder code) will cause confusion.
* technically, clearance limit, but that's most commonly a destination.
ATC uses AM radio since it behaves well. Two AM broadcasts on the same frequency add in proportion to their strength. Two FM broadcasts tend to cut into each other randomly.
It's a case of AM being the long-term standard, and also being physically suited to the task.
That static is an artifact of the recording device being on the ground, likely without great line of sight to the transmitting antenna which is also near the ground.
Planes to ATC and planes to other planes don’t really have line of sight issues.
That's just an artifact of the (probably amateur) pickup and recording of the signal. The audio quality in the cockpit and tower is surely much better.
Whenever I listen to these types of recordings, there's so much static and it's hard to hear the words. Is this how it actually sounds to pilots/ATC operators or is their feed actually much clearer?
These unofficial ATC feeds are usually captured by volunteers or at least companies not directly affiliated with the aviation industry (similarly to services like Flightradar24), sometimes some distance away from airports, which makes ATC and aircraft on the ground really hard to hear.
What also helps a lot is that the formats of messages relayed are pretty standardized (ICAO phraseology), and knowing what phrases to listen for can help a lot.
On the other hand, it can unfortunately also cause people to hear what they are primed for – such as a landing or takeoff clearance... (Not implying that this happened here – I can't make out what's being said on the tape myself!)
I can't prove it, but I doubt most of the ATC recording amateurs have very good antennas. Also, the ATC transmitters are likely pointed upward for obvious reasons.
I dare say / guess that 2 combined factors will have helped the successful evacuation effort (especially given that these aircraft for Japan internal flights are some of the densest passenger configurations):
1. Domestic flight, with people less likely to be hauling around lots of belongings, although in Japan people already bring much less onto flights with them.
2. The well-known social expectation/procedure-abiding inclination of everyday Japanese people kicking in to enforce an orderly (and no bag-carrying) exit.
Others may have observed similarly when flying in Japan. They can regularly board a widebody plane in 15 minutes, whereas 30-40+ minutes for the US still produces departure delays. I am guessing this efficiency factors into the evacuation as well.
Versus other evacuation videos I have seen where people are actually exiting with their rollaboards. Really shocking.
I have to admit, I wonder how many lives would have been lost if this happened in America. "I have to get my laptop!" "where's my carry-on!?" "I think I left my phone!"
The big take0away here is that the 90 second rule that Airbus fought and lost with the A380 and Boeing thought about fighting with the 787 and 777 is exactly right. Sometimes every second matters.
A second take-away - emergencies are no excuse to ditch procedure and thinking about Safety. The SFO incident where a passenger was killed after exiting a vehicle by a vehicle rushing to the plane is another example.
did airbus try to fight against the 90 second rule? What changes did they make to eventually do a successful evacuation with an 800 person cabin configuration?
Airbus tried to get the FAA to relax the requirement that every possible seat offered for sale be able to leave in 90 seconds - ie, just 600 instead of the fully rated 800. Then they asked to relax it to 120 seconds. Finally, they told the FAA that their models should be sufficient. The FAA (and eventually the European equivalent agencies) said no to these asks and made them do the full test with 800 people leaving the plane in 90 seconds. They did so in ~85 seconds, IIRC.
Their last concern is that far more people get injured in tests than in reality, which was a fair point - but there were questions about the particular configuration that Airbus proposed.
Also, Airbus never sold the A380 to any major US carrier, and no carrier was ever able to fill that many seats on the A380 sustainably. So maybe Airbus was right, but for the same reasons that eventually doomed the project.
Emirates is the carrier for the A380 with the bulk of the orders going there. They also have begged for more seats given that the 380 was prebuilt for a stretch. But even emirates has never been close to the full seat count on a baseline A380, and no other airline has found the A380 profitable to the point to consider significant follow on orders. The USA accounted for half of the world wide lift when the A380 program was going and none of the major carriers picked it up.there was little demand for a new build freighter build, so that program did and the 787 Balkanized the pacific the same way as the 757 and 767 fragmented Atlantic traffic which meant even the Japanese carriers didn’t really bite on the A380.
At the end of the day the A380 was airbus trying to out-America (bigger, faster) Boeing, while Boeing stole Airbus’s big twin strategy with the 777.
That is an interesting question. An A380 has 16 exits and a maximum capacity of 853. A Boeing 737-900 has 8 exits and a maximum capacity of 188. The 90 second rule has to pass with 50% of the exits unavailable (nobody gets to know in advance which ones), and luggage & blankets strewn about the cabin. In the dark. I bet it's an interesting test to partake in.
Eh, not really. Any passenger plane design is supposed to be able to evacuate in 90 seconds. They had several minutes (at least) to get off that plane before the fire spread to the cabin.
Looking at the videos, the plane was literally doused in burning jet fuel as it was decelerating at high speed. I still find that very impressive for a plane built out of ultimately flammable materials (carbon fiber).
And passenger planes are supposed to not crash themselves in the ground, but the only other major passenger plane manufacturer couldn't even get that right. So planes working as expected and saving lives is a thing to be noted.
I wonder if some kind of "TCAS" for runways can be implemented - once the controller clears an aircraft for a given runway, some antennas start broadcasting that aircraft's identifier so any equipped planes approaching the runway can tell whether they've been cleared for it.
For planes on approach, the existing ILS antennas can be reused but I'm not sure whether that will work on the ground - do the ILS antennas cover enough of the ground to accurately target a plane that's approaching the runway perpendicularly (off a taxiway, etc)?
Two types of systems already exists on the ATC side of things. There are red stop-bar lights at each runway entry point. Pilots are trained never to cross a red stop-bar even if told by ATC. The controller has to press a button to turn the lights off, and they automatically come back on after 1 plane has passed the lights.
In larger airports with an automated system, the system monitors the runway occupancy and approach sector. If the runway is occupied or an aircraft is on final within a certain distance, the system throws an alert before the stop-bars can be turned off.
On top of that there is also an autonomous version of this system that will use red lights to indicate a dangerous runway status (e.g. aircraft on approach) at each entry point. And the other way around, an aircraft line up for takeoff (but holding) will get red lights if any of the entry points further down the runway are crossed. More here: https://skybrary.aero/articles/autonomous-runway-incursion-w...
I can't edit this comment anymore, but there has just been an update that the stop bar lights I describe above were out of service at the airport in this incident.
I'm in the realm of pure speculation here, but does ASDE-X to some extent rely on a/c having mode B transponders, which I've seen people saying the coastguard Dash-8s didn't have? If this is the textbook runway incursion it appears to be then it does seem incredible it wasn't caught by runway safety systems.
I wonder if another system can use lasers/light beams to detect obstructions on the runway? Rather than relying on vehicles actively reporting their positions (which can malfunction, and as far as I know only aircraft are equipped - cars/trucks/snow clearing vehicles don't have it), it would instead just check whether there's anything on the runway and alert the controller (and ideally any approaching planes via the ILS antennas) that the runway is obstructed?
> Yes? That doesn’t make it incorrect to call it a miracle.
It was the intended, purposefully engineered outcome for precisely such an event. Not even remotely a miracle. The airframe designers at Airbus saved those lives, not divine providence.
There is a lot of variables in an accident like this. If some of those variables were different, this could have been much worse, despite the hard work of the engineers at Airbus. That's what makes it a "miracle".
In general, I disagree that calling something a 'miracle' implies or withholds credit from those responsible for the outcome. It's very pedantic.
>All 379 passengers and crew of a Japan Airlines plane escaped a devastating fire that erupted after it collided with a smaller Coast Guard aircraft at Tokyo’s Haneda airport on Tuesday.
That's 379 lives saved, is the number not important, or is it the ratio?
It should have been 384. If 10,000 people die but 1,000,000 are "saved", do we not mourn the 10,000 people? Have a heart my man. What if you were one of those 10,000?
If a "normal" outcome for such an event would have been much closer to 1,000,000 being killed, then yes it would be wonderful if 990,000 were saved. Sure, we mourn the dead, but we can still be happy for the saved.
wonderful for sure, but not a miracle. A miracle would be "all 1,000,000 people survived". Media likes to throw words with weight behind things without. It's not a miracle, it's extremely fortunate. However, any loss of life due to preventable disaster is/should be - unacceptable. The coast guard aircraft crewmen that were struck shouldn't have been near the runway at all. They should have waived off to go-around or been better at ground operations to make sure the runways were clear.
1. an extraordinary event manifesting divine intervention in human affairs
the healing miracles described in the Gospels
2. an extremely outstanding or unusual event, thing, or accomplishment
The bridge is a miracle of engineering.
3. Christian Science : a divinely natural phenomenon experienced humanly as the fulfillment of spiritual law
Most of the people surviving an event where they would have been expected to die certainly qualifies as "an extremely outstanding or unusual event, thing, or accomplishment".
Doesn't sound like quite such a miracle right now for the unfortunate crew of the Coast Guard aircraft, with five of the six crew unaccounted for, sadly.
According to Flightradar24, https://twitter.com/flightradar24/status/1742136715253313938, the Japanese coast guard aircraft was not equipped with a ADS-B transponder. Probably because it's not a requirement for military aircraft. That can explain why the ATC and/or JAL was not aware of the exact location of the plane.
Curious, what's the rule for USCG and transponders?
USCG is part of DHS and considered a military branch (despite not being in DoD alongside the other military branches and having a primarily law-enforcement mission).
Civilian transponders would give away the position of the craft to smugglers and others trying to evade the coast guard. I would expect they would have the ability to switch off their transponders at minimum for missions.
I'm most curious about why the JAL plane couldn't see it. An airliner has a pretty bright headlight, and the CG plane should have had lighting on it as well that would distinguish it from the runway lighting.
Clearly, as usual, accidents like this require a number of things to all go wrong at the same time.
Ground control wouldn't have cleared them to hold short, or to position and hold (US: "line up and wait"). That would have been the tower, not ground. Ground is only responsible for taxiways, not runways.
The Coastguard plane was cleared to hold short at C2, but entered the runway instead from C2 as if cleared to position and hold (Edit: Or maybe they thought they were cleared to take off, but that's far less likely).
Because I think you'd appreciate it, and no pedantry intended: "Line up and wait" is the international terminology, which the US was relatively late to adopt.
It is really impressive that everyone was able to evacuate the plane. From some of the videos online you can see that there was a significant and increasing amount of smoke in the cabin. It is a testament to the evolving design of commercial aircraft. The light strips on the floor always fascinate me when I am flying. I often think about how if the cabin was filling with smoke, those lights would be the only way you have to keep moving towards an exit.
A much more informative video is https://youtu.be/6NbVdIoJsHY?t=169 ... you can see the accident aircraft enter the runway then stands there for 40+ seconds before the other aircraft lands on it. It seems like a lot of time during which controllers could have detected the conflict.
Wow, the dash-8 begins to move into the runway at 2:48, and then sits there for the rest of the time. It's really hard to spot this from this video going forwards, but it you got backwards from the crash you can see the lights from the dash-8 and work out when it got onto the runway.
Maybe the coast guard pilot thought he had permission to line up, but not to take off? Anyways, it's also pretty easy to see that it would have been difficult for the tower staff and the A350 pilots to notice the incursion and avoid the accident.
I think the wide angle of view from this camera gives a misleading impression of what it would have looked like in person. I also have no idea where the controllers would have been in this scene. Is the aircraft landing on 34R?
And 40 seconds where it should have been visible to the pilots of the airliner. I know they have checklists to run, but are neither of the pilots looking forward during final approach?
I'd be curious to know from someone with more knowledge: are there any technological improvements that could prevent this kind of accident?
It seems as though it should be possible (though perhaps not easy) to automatically detect an aircraft on runway and relay that to the approaching aircraft.
With all respect for the coast guard pilots who died, I would say this incident is the "best case" scenario we could hope for when two large aircraft crash on a runway. Had the other plane been carrying passengers the casualties could have easily been in the hundreds.
It seems odd to me that with all the safety advancements in aviation we don't have the technology to prevent this.
Some airports do have ground lighting that changes when it's safe/unsafe to enter/cross runways. No idea if that existed here. I know JFK has it, as I watched it in action the last time I had a layover.
This is why you follow cabin crew instructions and DO NOT CARRY YOUR LUGGAGE out of the aircraft in an emergency. Your luggage is not worth more than a fellow passengers life.
Contrast this with evacuation footage of western passenger planes..
Indeed. It’s a good idea to keep your passport and some small USB drives (password database, Linux image for installation on a new laptop, etc.) on your person instead of in your luggage when you fly.
>password database, Linux image for installation on a new laptop
Heh. Imagine surviving a plane crash. Everyone is busy calling their loved ones, and I'm busy setting up my new Linux distribution on a laptop bought in duty free, using the Linux image in my pocket.
From what info are you assuming that no one did? A middle school boy who was on the plane said "荷物を取り出そうという人もいた"[0], "there were also people who tried to get their luggage".
I like to think that in a real emergency (crash landing, fire visible outside, smoke entering the cabin) survival instinct will kick in and people will just GTFO without worrying about luggage. The videos I've seen of people evacuating with luggage seem a little less serious. That said, an evacuation is always serious. People often do get hurt coming down those slides so the crew only order an evacuation if they think it outweighs the risk of staying put and waiting for help.
I'd like to think so but there have been plenty of US incidents of people evacuating for an engine on fire with baggage in tow.
If you are evacuating out the door on a slide, something is quite serious. The trained professionals telling you to leave your baggage behind have more information than passengers in that regard. That is why they decided to deploy the slides.
Just because one can't see a fire doesn't mean there isn't an engine fire on the other side, or a fuel leak or.. etc. Planes are pretty big, you can't see/smell everything from your seat/window.
I mean here's some right here of smoking planes with evacuees hauling even wheelies..
> in a real emergency (crash landing, fire visible outside, smoke entering the cabin) survival instinct will kick in and people will just GTFO without worrying about luggage
Ok? What you linked to, which is a single paragraph, does not provide any proof for your claim. It says there was some speculation that people retrieving luggage caused delay, but state media and law enforcement are on record as saying there's no evidence that it had any effect, as well as there being a witness saying it had no effect.
The claim was simply that passengers will still reach for luggage even in an incident as serious as fire in the cabin. That was the case in this example, and the others linked by steveBK
Please read my comment again; I made no such claim.
GP said they could not imagine anybody even worrying about their language in a severe crash, yet in the case of Aeroflot 1492, people definitely did retrieve theirs:
> [...] prompted by video footage showing passengers leaving the plane with luggage in hand [...]
Members of my family require medication (epipen, some various pills), and I keep that along with a flashlight (in case I need to administer in pitch black) in a small haversack. I would probably try to take that with me, as I would hate to survive the crash but then have a fatal medical event in the aftermath and not have the tools. I do feel conflicted since the no luggage mantra has been drilled in for decades.
If the medical condition is so dire that medicine must be kept on hand then it should be in your pockets, not tucked away in luggage.
What is the probability of being stung by a bee or eating a bag of nuts between your seat, the slide, and the ambulances rushing to the scene to rescue people?
Otherwise by this logic, just about everyone has a reason to self-justify needing to get into their luggage in an emergency evacuation event.
Target to evacuate planes in an emergency is 90 seconds. Contrast with regular deplaning with luggage which takes upwards of 15 minutes. So the plane must evacuate at 10x speed in order to save lives.
I’m guessing you aren’t carrying an epi regularly — they seem likely to be broken if in my pocket. It’s not a pocket sized form factor.
The bag I have is about the size of two croissants — I keep it under seat in front of me or in my lap.
But this topic has inspired me to improve my process, so I would like to find a money belt or shoulder holster style bag to carry meds and epi while traveling. Basically body hugging.
Any help in finding something that isn’t from Temu, or some random drop shipper? I found one eagle creek bag but would prefer a shoulder style?
>> I would probably try to take that with me, as I would hate to survive the crash but then have a fatal medical event in the aftermath and not have the tools.
But you might just die in the fire yourself, prioritizing a hypothetical emergency over a real one. There would also be plenty of medical personnel present once you get off the plane, they probably won't let you leave the scene without talking to one.
It's fine to take something small you can carry in one hand/keep with you through the whole flight without it being a problem. It's the luggage in the overhead baggage compartments that needs to be abandoned.
> But you might just die in the fire yourself, prioritizing a hypothetical emergency over a real one
The Two Failure Fallacy is a fatal flaw of human reasoning. It's almost never correct to engineer anything on the assumption of two bad things happening simultaneously. You do your analysis based on individual/uncorrelated failure modes. And only then do you make design choices (c.f. "defense in depth", "redundancy", etc...) about how much the interactions overlap and what the tradeoffs are.
In this case, duh. Positing that emergency medical personnel are somehow unable to handle an allergy attack is silly.
Well my problem is the conditions of an airline crash (the smoke, extreme heat, etc) are triggers for our disease. It’s not a simple as a peanut allergy where you just avoid eating a certain food.
I’m not convinced that medical personnel would be on hand that quickly for all emergency landings — sure if you are at a major airport. But they may not notice someone who collapsed after being triaged away from the more severely injured.
If you're in the market for a real HN style reply, actually, almost every aviation disaster involves two or more things happening the wrong way simultaneously. Usually more than five.
Which is sort of the exception that proves the rule though, isn't it? Aviation is outrageously safe, such that all the low hanging fruit has long since been picked and they're finally cleaning up the uncorrelated failures.
Other areas of engineering aren't nearly so advanced, c.f. Fukushima, which happened because of the converse failure: the designers treated two failures (power grid failure and flooded backup generators) as uncorrelated and independent when they weren't (because tsunamis follow earthquakes).
Those drugs are still available outside of your luggage. Your need for that stuff is convenience. Everybody else on the flight would prefer to have their luggage too.
You need to break the rules, risk others lives, and grab your carryon in an airport in a major city for an epipen? How many hospitals, ambulances, and first aid stations are within 5k of you would you guess?
There is an ambulance at the bottom of the slide, 90 seconds is the target time for evacuating the entire plane in an emergency.
Having an EpiPen in the 90 seconds between your seat and the ambulance while fire is engulfing the tin can with ~400 people trying to get out 2 doors is 100% a luxury. (for the vast majority of humanity, having an EpiPen at all is a luxury)
Why? A good chunk of humanity showed via covid that they are not interested in inconveniencing themselves for potentially reducing overall harm to others.
I never said they were assholes, I just said they chose not to inconvenience themselves.
Some people wore masks regardless of how much they actually helped - on the off chance they actually helped at all - they chose to inconvenience themselves
I do more or less prefer my life (as well as the things that go along with it, health, physical safety, ...) more than some derived number of other people, for various complicated reasons. In some situations it could get as high as the single digit trillions, but it's usually in the hundreds to thousands range or even less.
People don't act at all the same after getting crashed into by another plane, barely making it to the ground in a plane filled with smoke and fire, as they do when those things haven't happened?
You don't say.
Would you say it's a good idea to throw yourself tumbling down the emergency slide and sprint away from the plane if those things hadn't happened?
This is probably well-known to others but I am surprised to learn JAL uses big aircrafts to serve domestic flights, and I wonder how common this practice is. Is there somewhere I can query by input of "passenger flights of certain aircraft like A350 on a certain date", give me results of flights, ordered by distance in ascending order? Thought about Flightradar24 but they don't seem to offer API for personal usage
Not sure about Japanese/ICAO rules but line up and wait, especially after sunset has very specific criteria attached to it. 1) runway is used for departure only and 2) safety logic gear is working. These rules were put in place in the U.S. in 1991/92 after a sever accident in Los Angeles where a 737 landed on top of a Sweringer Metro liner.
After 2019 incident of Sukhoy Superjet[1] I have my passport, the phone and the wallet on me 100% flight time. These three things I need to function, everything else can be left behind.
Why are ATC instructions given verbally over sometimes staticy channels using the always error-prone communication tech, human speech? Why not digital?
The ATC operator chooses a command from a UI: 'JAL 123' > 'Runway 34R' > 'Clear for landing'.
Everything cascades automatically from there: ATC's on-screen maps and info, airport lights, commands to all relevant planes (including 'Runway 34R' > 'Hold short').
Transmission to planes could be digital. Given the relatively few possible commands, we're talking very little bandwidth, plenty of room to ensure error correction, redundancy, etc. - and perfectly accurate reception.
All planes would show the exact command on a screen, their maps etc would update, and they could play locally generated audio of the command.
I know nothing about aviation. (I do know that entirely rebuilding matured, critical systems for the new technology is rarely a good idea - the trick is to start with one small subsystem, work out the bugs, mature it, and grow from there.)
For standard situations, text clearances might really be safer: Pilots usually just acknowledge, and augmentation systems could help warn them if they don't conform with a certain clearance.
But having a broadcast channel accessible (for listening and talking) to all aircraft and ATC can increase situational awareness for everybody. Just look at the near-miss of Air Canada 759 [1] for an example of where it might have contributed to saving hundreds of lives:
While ATC controllers might be able to issue urgency text messages quickly enough on a keyboard, pilots literally have their hands full flying the airplane. Voice is their only feedback channel, and if it falls out of use, outages might go unnoticed for critical seconds.
You'd have to read out all of these prompts and acknowledgements though, since pilots also will have their eyes on many instruments other than just datalink.
Definitely doable using text-to-speech, but that way you lose the original intonation (Did the speaker sound confused? Hesitant? Was it a different voice than before?) – and what did you gain?
> you lose the original intonation (Did the speaker sound confused? Hesitant? Was it a different voice than before?) – and what did you gain?
Good point about intonation. You gain almost perfect signal-to-noise, an error-free cascade of instructions to all (if that's needed), and immediate synchronized updates of all systems.
Maybe that's not as significant a problem as it seems from the outside. As I said, I'm in IT not aviation. Thanks for answering my questions!
I think you are swapping one issue for another. A clearance that is a button push has far less meaning and protection than standard verbal phraseology. During the critical phase of flight, attention is needed on the aircraft performance and position using the working auditory memory we can minimise distracting messages and popups close to the ground.
I think it sometimes makes sense to carry extra people to help with offloading, depending on the situation. The Dash-8 is not a cargo aircraft - it's not like you can just roll pallets on and off.
It's also possible that it would do a cargo run, and then do some surveillance operations (the JSDF employ the Dash-8 in the maritime surveillance role) to help with damage assessment.
Does anyone know what stops the remaining fuel from igniting? Seems pretty amazing everyone got off, I’m looking forward to reading the full report of what happened!
Such a high comment to score ratio is typically due to political polarization, but there's nothing politically polarizing about this, so what's the deal here?
Anyone here from one of the large CDN providers want to reach out to AV Herald and offer him some free services? It’s such a useful and informative resource. Too bad it’s super slow when accessed in AU/NZ and I guess outside US/EU.
Simple rule IMHO: keep your ID/password and a credit card on your person during take-off / landing. (Probably your phone, in a pocket, as well.)
Practically speaking as long as you can ID yourself and buy things (pay-off later), there's no property that's worth your life (or the life of other passengers).
If anything else is so imminently needed to maintain the life of you or your loved ones while traveling, keep it in your/their pockets.
Past this everyone has some excuse of medical, dietary, sentimental, economic, etc reason to grab stuff out of their luggage. This contributes to loss of life.
You have 60-90 seconds to evacuate a burning aircraft. This is 10-20x faster than a normal with-luggage deplaning. If you are fumbling around with luggage, you are a hazard to yourself and others.
If you are evacuating a plane you are seconds to minutes away from a fleet of ambulances ready to whisk you away to a nearby trauma center. No existing medical condition is going to get you before the fire will.
I don’t routinely do so but there are a few basic things that in an ideal world you should probably have on your person in some secure way—which admittedly probably requires some specific clothing.
ADDED: There probably are certain specialized critical medicines that people should carry in a vial around their necks that they’re not getting anytime soon from an overwhelmed trauma center. But that’s probably true even absent the plane crash scenario.
If someone is willing to leave home without it for a walk in the park / drinks at a bar / quick stop at the store, then they can evacuate a burning plane without it.
If it is truly that imminently required to keep them alive, they should already be in the habit of keeping it on their person.
And certainly while flying, and at the very very least during takeoff/landing on a plane. Further, absolute worst case.. with pre-evacuation warning time, reachable in under seat backpack to be moved to your jeans/shirt/jacket pocket. If you travel in clothes without pockets, now is a good time to reconsider doing so.
Lots of opportunities here to not try and lug baggage down an evacuation slide and risk your own / fellow passengers deaths.
If this is surprising to anyone reading, hope you plan accordingly now during your next travel.
Yes, lots of stuff can happen in everyday life that would mean you should have critical medications on your person.
At the end of the day your passport and credit cards situation aren’t critical in such a situation however much bureaucratic hell you may go through if you’re in a foreign country with no ID or money and not of a nationality where your embassy is rushing to help.
In general my approach is travel pants with zipped pockets.
Hmmmm, there were plenty of videos of people with hand luggage outside the plane - surely taking this luggage was against the rules and has slowed down the evacuation. I won't be surprised if TASS is just trying to cover the story. I think it was a different Russian crash were the pilots were given state medals for saving the passengers. A later investigation found these same pilots were responsible for the crash. The powers that be decided that instead of admitting they were wrong, revoking the medals and sending the pilots to prison they'll just cover up the whole story.
I don't see how that makes sense. Why would they say the people died instantly in a Russian aircraft if the truth was that they died because others wanted to retrieve luggage? Not everything the Russian government does is a conspiracy.
As a Russian I can easily envision the pathologically lying government doing this.
The Wikipedia article linked above shows that there are no verified sources except government and that government also says there's no war in Ukraine. The credibility of the source is very low in my eyes.
And generally remember the general effort to discredit West. If you want West to look more immoral than you, it's hard to do without looking more moral than West and this incident, if true, would be an example of people being VERY immoral.
As you slowly collect your bags you have no way to know that people behind you are 100% dead and beyond help. Any attempt of the government to say it's fine is just pathetic.
I feel like 'radically' reworking anything is a great first step in increasing errors while the new processes get ingrained. There needs to a measured and meticulous approach to reworking ATC if it is to happen.
I’d consider significantly raising controller wages and improving working conditions to be a fairly radical proposal in at least the US’s current political climate.
The average controller makes 120K as it is. That may not be a lot for people in the software world accustomed to making big bucks, but it's not terrible -- close to 90th percentile.
Secondly, this incident was in Japan, not the US. Feelings about US ATC should not be a factor in this situation.
Third, wasn't there a recent runway collision (wing clipped a tail) in the US where the pilot was quick to blame ATC on the radio, but it turns out that pilot entered the runway without permission? (initial conclusions are often wrong)
Disclaimer: I am a US ATC - The views expressed here are my own and not necessarily those of FAA.
Just to be clear I’m not calling out ATC specifically, as in the people who are controllers.
Rather, the entire system of air traffic control.
It seems to me if we end up in a situation where a pilot does something wrong in a sensitive area that can lead to a catastrophic outcome, we didn’t do a good job of controlling air traffic. Full stop.
The system is amazingly safe but clearly there are pockets of very poor control/decision making around runway incursions or near misses around the runway.
Pilots increasingly seem to have an iPad with some kind of apps. Do you have experience with this? In terms of redundant systems, seems kinda obvious that if you look at a flight tracker on your ipad and see a plane on your runway, you don't land...
Aside from personal devices, which they definitely wouldn’t be using during takeoff and landing, tablets that pilots carry are Electronic Flight Bags (EFBs). These run specialised software, not something like Flightradar24.
These apps usually use ADS-B as received by various community-operated receivers.
This introduces a lag of several seconds, doesn't guarantee reception in tricky situations (such as planes flying very low, as during the final approach, or on the ground), and is limited to the planes' own position fix accuracy, which is orders of magnitude too coarse for this use case.
The coastguard aircraft involved only has a Mode S transponder and so those flight tracker websites can only determine the plane's position when there's enough receiver coverage to do multilateration
- Crazy how well the carbon fiber A350 held up given that it seems to have landed pretty much directly on a Dash 8 (RIP Coast Guard team). Looks like trading long term flammability for initial rigidity lived up to the design intent.
- Excellent evacuation job, especially as it looks like on some videos that the crew was unable to shut down the right engine, rendering the entire right side unusable (severed lines given the severe belly damage?) UPDATE: they actually did use the front right exit nevertheless https://x.com/tanakamaru1999/status/1742132422005981578
- Don’t have headphones with me and in a public space, but landing / takeoff clearances should be somewhere in https://archive.liveatc.net/rjtt/RJTT-Twr-TCA-Jan-02-2024-08... if someone wants to try and find them (timestamps towards end of url come in 30 minute increments).