Controller Linked To Crash Murdered...

AVWEB ^ | 022804 | N/A

[Archangelsk]

Controller Linked To Crash Murdered... Random Act Or Revenge...

On Tuesday, an air traffic controller who worked for Skyguide, the Swiss airspace agency, was stabbed to death in his home in Kloten, near Zurich. The victim had been the sole controller on duty in July 2002 when two airplanes collided in Swiss airspace over Lake Constance, killing 71 people, many of them Russian schoolchildren. He was a 36-year-old Danish citizen, a father of three, and was never publicly identified in connection with the crash. Police said a dark-haired man in his 50s rang the doorbell at the controller's home. When the controller answered the door, a fierce and brief argument ensued. The controller was stabbed and the attacker escaped on foot. Yesterday, some news reports said the police think the suspect is the father of one of the schoolchildren who died. A group based in Russia representing the interests of victims' families expressed dismay over the attack. "The relatives understand that one can't return the victims of the air crash and the death of the dispatcher would only harm negotiations with the governments of Germany and Switzerland," Yulia Fedotova, a spokeswoman for the group, told Pravda. "We don't want to think that the death of the air traffic controller was connected with the investigation into the causes behind the crash, but it is possible that he became yet one more victim of the catastrophe."

[Archangelsk]

Just (aviation) damn.

[Archangelsk]

Ping.

[raloxk]

"He was a 36-year-old Danish citizen, a father of three"

The thing that shocked me most about this story is that a Danish person has three children

[Aeronaut]

[ApplegateRanch]

More shocking still were other reports that he had a WIFE!

[Criminal Number 18F]

The thing is, the error was only half the controllers. Yes, he told the Russian plane to do the wrong thing. But the Russian pilots acted on what the controller told them to do, and not on the contrary commands coming from their TCAS.

In that instance, you are supposed to ignore the man and obey the machine -- the machine is (as in this case) less fallible. But the natural human reaction is to trust the human more.

This sounds like it is tailor made to be a CRM scenario. Can you do interactive ATC with a live human in the Frasca sims, or do they only give you a canned result? What about the MD? (I am assuming that the CRJ sim is still too ate-up to be trying anything but a handful of canned scenarios still).

In fact, it would also be a very, very good, publishable research experiment. Put crews in the box, and give them an escalating situation culminating in contradictory TCAS and ATC inputs. My hypothesis is that in most cases, crews not specifically trained for this scenario will trust the human over the machine.

d.o.l.

Criminal Number 18F

[Archangelsk]

Unfortunately, the Russians were trained to listen to the controller. An unfortunate validation of Pavlov.

[patriot_wes]

"More shocking still were other reports that he had a WIFE!"

Hey.. Rosie has a wife!

[COEXERJ145]

Apparently the killer was a Russian national who's family died when the TU-154 collided with the DHL 757-200F.