Posted on 07/10/2010 8:03:10 AM PDT by Willie Green
Alarmed by a spate of near-collisions involving airliners, the government is trying to find out why air traffic controllers and pilots are making so many dangerous errors.
In recent months, there have been at least a half-dozen incidents in which airliners came close to colliding with other planes or helicopters — including in Chicago, Houston, San Francisco, Burbank, Calif., and Anchorage, Alaska. In some cases, pilots made last-second changes in direction after cockpit alarms went off warning of an impending crash.
"This spring we had several close calls that got everybody's attention, and I think that's the thing that really keyed us into taking at look at some of the risks, try to identify what we're missing," Robert Tarter, vice president of Federal Aviation Administration's Office of Safety-Air Traffic Organization, told employees in a conference call kicking off the new safety effort.
Just last week, a United Airlines flight waiting to land at Reagan National Airport near Washington came within less than a mile of a Gulfstream business jet that was climbing after taking off from another nearby airport. The United pilot can be heard on an air traffic control recording saying to his controller, "That was close," according to Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., a passenger on the United flight who has listened to the recording.
(Excerpt) Read more at npr.org ...
Hope Obama doesn’t call for a moratorium of the airline industry until he’s confident there will be no more accidents.
High speed rail is hard to sell in a land where terrorists are bred. All it takes is a brick on the track and all hell breaks loose.
I wonder what the cost difference would be to create smaller, regional airports, to handle short-hop flights and alleviate congestion in the large "hubs," versus creating a large network of high-speed rail lines.
I’ve always wondered how many of these were affirmitive action hires that are not very smart.....
High speed rail is hard to sell in a land where terrorists are bred.
Huh???
The United States breeds terrorists???
All it takes is a brick on the track and all hell breaks loose.
Tossing a brick out the window on any major metro Beltway during rush hour traffic will have the same effect.
Are you proposing that we ban bricks???
The experience level both in the cockpit and on the ground is abysmally low by comparison to just a few years ago.Wages and working conditions are worse now than they were 20 years ago so it is harder to recruit talented people. Add to that higher volumes of traffic and it is a disaster soup on the boil.
Oh, for crap’s sake.
I don’t see why not. Everything else is banned.
create smaller, regional airports, to handle short-hop flights and alleviate congestion in the large "hubs,"
It wouldn't work.
It's the air corridors that are congested, not just the "hubs".
We have to make more room in the sky by traveling on the ground.
Just last week, a United Airlines flight waiting to land at Reagan National Airport near Washington came within less than a mile of a Gulfstream business jet that was climbing after taking off from another nearby airport.
More collectivism pushing tax payer funded, passenger trains from the usual suspect.
Being a compassionate conservative, I will assume Willie Green isn’t being paid to push this tired, collectivist crap.
As a test, I hereby ask this fellow FReeper to examine the success of Southwest Airlines and compare it with AMtrack - or any other rail service.
Compare passenger ticket costs per mile, tax payer subsidy costs per mile, tax payer investment per passenger mile.
If this doesn’t bring an admission that rail can’t compete with airlines. I will have to conclude that facts are not what drive this FReepers continual stream of posts pushing trains over planes.
One last question, Willie - Are you aware that airlines are part of the private sector and trains are government sector?
I thought I read in Popular Mechanics a while back that they were considering a combination of new air traffic control methods and smaller regional airports to get a handle on things. I think the idea was the new air traffic control methods would vastly change the air corridors that you mention.
Near Misses In Skies Raise Questions On GroundWhat happens when you nearly miss something?
“It’s the air corridors that are congested, not just the “hubs”.”
Yuppers - and that is the fault of government trough feeders. ALPA once asked that approach and descent corridors be established at airports. What they got was the “inverted wedding cake” and that led to the present debacle.
Only at hubs is the air crowded. The rest of America has empty skies. That should be clear to the meanest of intellects, given the number of planes and the immense number of cubic miles of American airspace.
As usual, the gooberment agency involved in this issue, FAA, is little different that all such collections of “fast food rejects”.
As an example, I discovered an unknown failure in a Republic RC-3 aircraft, commonly called a “SeaBee”. A forged aluminum part attaching the elevator to the control arm which moves said part had developed a crack.
The crack led to a type of flutter which caused a corkscrew motion of the entire place. Fortunately, the flutter was self dampening or I would have died in the ensuing uncontrolled flight into the ground.
FAA didn’t issue an A.D. even when given the written description, photos, and shown the failed part. Repeated calls also failed to induce those trough feeders to act.
Word was passed amongst the owners of those planes, but no FAA action occurred.
Count on gooberment trough feeders to feed, not work, Willie. And you want us to support more egregiously overpriced gooberment intrusion into transportation?
Trains can’t work - costs, technical inferiority, primitiveness, ad nauseam.
As a test, I hereby ask this fellow FReeper to examine the success of Southwest Airlines and compare it with AMtrack - or any other rail service.
Southwest Airlines to make first flight today from Northwest Florida Beaches International Airport
Published: Sunday, May 23, 2010
Jeff Amy, Press-Register
WEST BAY, Fla. -- After you've spent $318 million to build an airport in a swampy pine forest so far out of town that it's past the Boon Docks Restaurant, maybe another $40 million isn't too much to guarantee good air service.
That's what backers of Northwest Florida Beaches International Airport believe. The St. Joe Co. and local governments plan to give Southwest Airlines tens of millions of dollars in coming years to entice the flagship low cost airline to fly to the airport near Panama City.
I bet not many tourists are flying Southwest to Panama City when the BP gulf oil tarballs hit the beach just a month later: Tar Balls Wash Ashore on Florida's Panama City Beach
"The St. Joe Co. and local governments" would've been a lot smarter giving $40 million to Amtrak to restore Sunset Limited service along the Gulf Coast.
Yeah, we know there are NEVER fatal train accidents.
I don’t agree with you, Willie, but we can be sure that there will be little or no federal money spent on upgrading FAA navigation systems when the current situation can be used to justify high-speed boondoggles.
Yes, the US breeds, harbors and imports terrorists. We sometimes jokingly call them The Amish around here. The democrat party is famous for stealing my money in order to purchase their votes.
Tossing a brick out the window on any major metro Beltway during rush hour traffic will have the same effect.
As a train full of people traveling at 200mph?
Are you proposing that we ban bricks???
No, but people who use bricks to commit acts of terrorism should be fed to swine.
This if from the link you posted.
“”Southwest was intrigued about creating a beach portal for their network,” St. Joe’s Wilson said.
Earlier this month, Southwest reverted to its traditional subsidy-free position when it said it would begin flying to Greenville, S.C., and Charleston, S.C., in 2011 without any assistance. The move came as state officials were debating subsidies.
The last line is the clincher for my position. Even when gooberment money was in the offing, SW Airlines went in on a free market basis.
I agree with you on the ST. Joe using tax monies to further development. When Gulf American Land was developing Cape Coral, they used existing facilities.
When Port of the Islands was being developed to provide landing strip and overnight facilities for the huge land development called Golden Gates, they company built its own facilities.
However, thanks to enviro-socialists in gooberment, 250,000 American families will not have a home built by the free market.
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