Posted on 06/17/2015 6:47:12 PM PDT by Talisker
He going to have some 'splaining to do. I'd hate to be in his shoes. At least this didn't end in a tragedy.
And if both 737s took off from Midway they wouldn’t have seen each other until it’s too late.
“Wanna get away?”
“Wanna get away?”
From it all?
I have flown in and out of Midway on SW probably close to 500 times. Had only a few incidents.
I did have a flight I was on going into MCI where another aircraft taxied onto our runway when we were on final — that was fun. Was on a Execu-Jet when we had a fairly close miss with a cargo plane as we were climbing out once — but nothing like that on about 1000 Sw flights.
That actually did happen back in the 70's. A center controller that used to work at the center I worked at was an AA hire. She gave a clearance on an airway that was lower than the lowest MEA (minimum enroute altitude), due to opposite direction traffic. Then she forgot about the guy. Her relief caught it right away, but by that time the aircraft was too low to hear the controller and he was headed right toward a mountain. For whatever reason, the pilot didn't realize his predicament and slammed into a mountainside. The AA controller acted as if nothing had happened and that it certainly wasn't her fault. In the end, the pilot should have known where he was and that he needed to climb to avoid terrain and would be considered to primarily at fault. But no doubt the NTSB would have considered the controller's actions to be a contributing factor.
“Couple that with only only one tower freq for all runways at MDW,”
That’s outrageous, small controlled GA airports with parallel runways have separate discrete active runway frequencies. What the hell’s with Midway?
I think modern aircraft are already equipped. Pilots have been able to communicate digitally with their companies for a long time. And avionics has been able to give maps with other aircraft for a long time, too. Even portable avionics can do that for a few thousand dollars.
Collision control on the ground is just as big an issue as in the air, especially at these busy airports where they do crazy things like operating on intersecting runways.
The FAA is taking forever to implement the NextGen system.
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