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Comment by nutcracker46 | Hacker News Reader

The report identifies good preventive measures. Autotuning the ILS would be handy, as would an aural alert for lateral deviation, perhaps announcing, "Localizer, Localizer."

The crew may have caught the closure of 28L and planned better with a review of NOTAMS before top of descent and including them in the approach briefing.

When I'm up there, and sleepy, I ask for a coffee and pull out the NOTAMS for one last look before we pull up the approach in the computer, manually set up the radios, and do the briefing.

On final approach, more precise ground based monitoring would be nice to have in case things are fubar in the plane.

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Just for SFO you have 84 NOTAMs.

!SFO 06/079 SFO OBST RIG (ASN 2017-AWP-3368-NRA) 373740N1222224W (0.5NM NE SFO) 41FT (34FT AGL) FLAGGED AND LGTD 1806201400-1811010100

This is a flagged and lighted obstruction half a mile way that is 34 feet above ground level.

Now put in a full route and takeoff airport and maybe if you have had some stops during the day. The NOTAM seems a bit long. Then if are overseas and have to deal with the BS political notams. Check out greece and turkey notams.

...THE REF (B) TURKISH NOTAM A3009/16 LTAAYNYX (111139 EUECYIYN JUL 2016) HAS NO GROUND, CANNOT PRODUCE ANY INTERNATIONALLY LEGAL EFFECT WITHIN ATHINAI FIR/ HELLAS UIR AND IS CONSIDERED NULL AND VOID.

I'm curious how many pilots fully read all NOTAMs, locate them geographically to understand where they are etc etc on every flight.

Indeed. 'Notices' can be almost anything.

I was doing simulated flights over the continental US recently. Even small airports may have a lot of NOTAMs. Some are important (for instance, warning about objects close to some parts of the runway, or issues with a runway, or even animals or birds), but many others are completely useless.

Noise abatement restrictions ironically add a lot of NOTAM 'noise'. There should be a separate category for these, as these are not safety related.

Outputting that in lower case could be a small step to making them easier to parse, and therefore more likely to be read. I find the text you posted tiring even to look at.

THE REF (B) TURKISH NOTAM A3009/16 LTAAYNYX (111139 EUECYIYN JUL 2016) HAS NO GROUND, CANNOT PRODUCE ANY INTERNATIONALLY LEGAL EFFECT WITHIN ATHINAI FIR/ HELLAS UIR AND IS CONSIDERED NULL AND VOID.

The ref (B) Turkish NOTAM A3009/16 LTAAYNYX (111139 Euecyiyn Jul 2016) has no ground, cannot produce any internationally legal effect within Athinai FIR/Hellas UIR and is considered null and void.

How much experience do you have reading all-caps text? It isn't necessarily a burden to people who are used to it, which all airline pilots are.

I'm sure prior experience is a big factor, but I could see how the greater height variances in lower case text can make it easier to read.

Yeah, good luck with changing hundreds of established, life-or-death-systems, most of them actually embedded in planes in the airline industry worldwide, at the same cutover date, to suddenly support mixed-case script.

Have a one-hour watch to understand what kind of beast you are wrestling here: https://media.ccc.de/v/31c3_-_6308_-_en_-_saal_1_-_201412281...

  good luck with changing hundreds of established, 
  life-or-death-systems, most of them actually
  embedded in planes

Seems to me that's precisely the sort of thing the NTSB _is_ supposed to be able to do?

Of course IMHO a mere change of case doesn't go far enough.

You do realize that US planes still have to be able to fly to countries other than the US, and vice versa, right?

This was 100% my read as well. NOTAMs are terribly formatted and have no priority distinction between ones which are essentially useless, and ones with meaningful consequences.

Had a project once where we were trying to parse NOTAMs so we could program a GPS with a warning indicator if you were about to fly into a restricted airspace.

Turns out that people type what they want and the parser ended up needing to be almost a full AI. The exclusion zone around DC is a nightmare to parse for example.

The recommendations look like important steps, especially the concept of a system that alerts pilots to runway surface non-alignment. I have to wonder, though, does it always take a close call like this (or worse) to bring up such a proposal? Does the NTSB also study otherwise safe flights to identify risks in pilot, tower, or ground crew human factors and make proactive recommendations?

>does it always take a close call like this (or worse) to bring up such a proposal?

At this point yes. There is a saying that "FAA regulations are written in blood" as a result.

It seems conservative on the surface but at this point the current system is incredibly safe and making changes without clear huge upsides isn't worth the risk of unintended consequences.

Pilot attention is at a premium during landing. The computer shouting "localizer" at you during an approach because you're misaligned might be the straw that breaks the cognitive burden's back while you're trying to deal with another crisis.

Also, what Air France 447 showed us was that excessive automation becomes a problem when it is assumed to always work. The recommendations about more systems are all very well but there are 1000s of international airports who are either not going to have these systems or sometimes they won't work. What is critical is that pilots follow their checklists and that 1 action would have prevented this happening despite the fact that the other systems could have warned about it.

Making NOTAMs and the like more clear just seems like good design. They should certainly be able to prioritise information or only show what is relevant for a particular flight/aircraft/location/approach so you only have to read 3 things instead of 50.

As others pointed out there are fundamental problems with the system and usability of NOTAMs. Its a little absurd that theyre always used to blame the operator (“should have read the NOTAM”) when a flight briefing might have 10s or 100s applicable ones and a VAST number are junk. It reeks of retrospective blame seeking.

That said there is some traction around this. And some interesting alternative takes (https://opsfox.net), which have their own problems.

How difficult is it to see what's happening on the ground at night from a plane? I've never been in a cockpit at night. I'd have to hope that taxiways are marked in some explicit way to make it clear that they're not runways, like with an X or some pattern of lights that's not on runways; or have all runways marked with an obvious pattern that indicates "land here" (so if you don't see that, you know you're not landing on a runway). Don't the runways have their names labeled in lights near the entrances? (Or is that only paint?)

I guess I'm surprised that it took so long for the pilots to see that there were other planes where they were landing.

Is it routine to keep binoculars in a cockpit? Could they have seen what was on the ground sooner if they'd looked through binoculars briefly (after noticing unexpected lights?)

The numbers are not labeled in lights. Although this pic is blurry, this is SFO with both runways open: https://i.redd.it/hguxuyztxzdz.jpg

The night of the accident, the left runway was closed and lights were turned off.. and they were expecting two runways and to land on the one on the right. There's still no excuse for this happening with two ATP-rated pilots that have done this type of landing thousands of times, but you can kinda see how it is possible at least.

This also isn't unheard-of. For example, Harrison Ford had a similar issue where he landed his private plane on a taxiway at an airport with parallel runways.

Large airports have fancy lighting schemes and are pretty obvious in good weather.

Small airports or bad weather at night are a different story - I would not fly into a new airport the first time in those conditions. Think 10x - 100x the risk.

Binoculars might be ok for the non-flying pilot to use, as long as he doesn't drop them on the floor and bind any rudder pedals.

"Localizer, localizer" seems too obscure - "Landing on taxiway" is much clearer.

It's interesting to listen to the radio chatter for this near-miss [1]. The air traffic controller misses a few chances to notice that something isn't right but when the pilot on the taxiway says in plain English, "Where's this guy going? He's on the taxiway" the problem immidately becomes obvious.

[1] https://youtu.be/ZW-ETmZU0u8

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