Here's the view of the ATC's radar screen.
Posted on 12/20/2016 6:36:34 PM PST by george76
ALTADENA, CA -- An air traffic controller error sent a jet from LAX into the flight path of another plane and flying low over the mountains above the San Gabriel Valley...
an EVA Air Boeing 777 that left LAX around 1:20 a.m. heading to Taipei was given an incorrect instruction by a controller based in San Diego to turn left instead of right.
That sent the airliner toward the mountains above Altadena, as well as toward the flight path of an Air Canada plane that had just taken off.
Audio traffic indicates the same controller realizing the problem and telling the airliner to "Stop your climb" and several times to head southbound.
"EVA 015 Heavy, what are you doing? Turn southbound now, southbound now. Stop your climb," the frustrated controller says after the plane apparently does not heed her initial instruction.
Several times the controller tells the pilot to head south. More than a minute later, she is still trying to get him to change direction.
The EVA crew eventually pulled up and got onto the right flight path.
...
some residents say they were startled late at night by the ominous sound of a large jet that seemed to be flying too close to the ground. They said they don't get low-flying planes in their area because of the nearby mountains.
"It sounds like it's getting lower and lower and really loud, really big," said Altadena resident Kate Sullivan. "Like a really big fricking jet is going right over the house really slowly."
Her main concern is Mt. Wilson nearby, which rises 5,700 feet above the ground.
(Excerpt) Read more at abc13.com ...
Here's the view of the ATC's radar screen.
The airplane did, however, come too close to an incompetent air traffic controller.
In busy airspace, pilots must maintain their own SA. The pilots are responsible for their own aircraft and where they fly. I learned that the hard way as a young Captain flying my single-pilot fighter into NAS Brooklyn. The controller gave me a vector when I was at 800 feet and then forgot me. I called on Guard when I found myself cruising over Manhattan at 800 feet. The base CO met me on arrival at Floyd Bennrtet. I was vindicated when they played back the tapes.
Aviation, Navigate, Communicate. That’s always been the order in all flying.
TV
Police: Air traffic controller was sleeping while pilots' calls went unanswered [ BOISE]
FAA purged “some 3,000 qualified candidates with degrees in air traffic control and FAA accredited degrees” in order to … racially diversify the country’s air traffic controller pool.
Those 3,000 individuals now had to “compete” with “with thousands of people the agency calls ‘off the street hires’”.
Someone needs to bring this to Trump’s attention.
The Mountain States Legal Foundation (MSLF) filed the suit on behalf of CTI graduate Andrew Brigida. He achieved the highest possible score on the FAA’s air traffic control aptitude test but was ruled ineligible by the FAA’s new personality test.
MSLF’s President William Perry Pendley called the Biographical Questionnaire “the epitome of psychobabble.”
http://www.thecollegefix.com/post/25708/
Flight path in case anybody wants to see the loop they made. Zoom in on LAX.
http://flightaware.com/live/flight/EVA15/history/20161216/0730Z/KLAX/RCTP
Gee, I wonder what her race and qualifications are?
Her attention to her job was a little LAX.
Sum Ting Wong..
First Officer Wi Tu Lo
Someone made a Yuge major faux pas, allowing the audio of the incident to be released.
That's all I'm sayin'
It seems though, that the EVA pilots did not recite the transmission back to the controller. Otherwise, it seems, the controller would have realized the error much sooner.
FWIW, Asian pilots defer to authority and hierarchy more than Western pilots. This has lead to accidents as they hesitate to question authority.
In this case, the controller’s instructions were obviously in error, since it put the aircraft into the flight paths of at least two very busy runways. But the pilot did not question.
The controller screwed up doubly by not instructing the pilot to “turn left heading 180” once she saw he was off course. Instead she used terminology that probably confused the pilot. There is a reason for the precise language of pilots and air traffic control.
OMG! When you keep zooming in at the most northern part of the route (when they finally turned) you break partially through the weather radar and can see how close they came to Mt Wilson. If this woman and those Boise controllers all are those people hired under the Obama change in policy then everyone responsible should be fired. I don’t want affirmative action when it comes to hiring of air traffic controllers.
I forgot. You need to go in and select terrain in Flight Aware. If I knew how to post photos here I would post a screen shot. They had to have had the AWS go off. Any pilots here comment on that turn? Is that steep like they knew they were in danger? Hope the pilots had a change of underwear.
Years ago I had ATC vector my nighttime approach on a 180 from another departure. Though we had separation, we could see each others landing lights as he went above and I went below. Found out later that the controllers were bored and sometimes made a game of “merging the dots”.
They must have been above 5500 ft (the top of Mt Wilson). Flight Aware is showing the track almost right at the peak.
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