David Megginson wrote:I might be thinking of a different incident, but my understanding is that both the German and Russian planes were equipped with TCAS, and both units functioned correctly alerting the German plane to descend and the Russian to climb. Unfortunately the Swiss controller made the mistake of ordering the Russian plane to descend, the Russian pilot made the mistake of following the verbal order when standard practice is to never override a TCAS warning. In addition the error was not caught because there were no backup controllers at the Swiss facility and a piece of equipment meant to catch such errors was down for repair.
Erik Hofman wrote:
I know that in Europe they recently added a requirement for collision detection after two civilian aircraft hit each other when the ATC had given inappropriate directions.
Is that a requirement for TCAS, or for something else in addition to TCAS?
Every passenger plane visiting Europe must have one of them installed (including military aircraft carrying passengers).
The copilot on one of those planes was a Canadian, so we heard a fair bit about the crash in the news. The worst part was that Swiss ATC tried to cover up their mistake, but the ever-efficient Germans happened to have tapes to prove the Swiss controller's error.
Yes, it wasn't perfect but to my knowledge it wasn't an error for the air traffic controller but rather a management problem involving scheduled (and unscheduled) maintenance.
That said, I'm sorry to hear that the Swiss controller died. Was it in any way related to the accident?
One of the aircraft was full with children from Russia and the are holding a Russian suspect.
You can do the math.
Erik
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This reminds me of the concept of a "radar assisted collision", a relatively common occurrence in shipping that for many years actually made it more likely for two radar equipped ships to collide when passing then two non-equipped ships. Another case of adding incorrect data to correct data and causing a bad decision.
Now what was that original topic again :?
Josh
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