Comment by deathanatos | Hacker News Reader

Comment by deathanatos | Hacker News Reader

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"US ATC System Under Scrutiny" "Fatal crash brings attention to shortage" "There are simply not enough air traffic controllers to keep aircraft a safe distance from one another."

Like, perhaps there is merit in arguing for more controllers or more pay for controllers, and perhaps that would lead to a safer airspace, but the attempts to implicitly tie the fatal crash to ATC in this case seems pretty poor form, here. What we know from the ATC transcripts[1] already tells us that ATC was aware the helicopter & the plane would be near each other well in advance of the crash; ATC informed the helo, the helo responded that he had the aircraft in sight. Time passed, the ATC gets a proximity warning (labelled as "[Conflict Alert Warning]" in VASAviation's video), ATC immediately acts on it, again reaching out to the helo, the helo again confirms they have the aircraft in sight, and moments later we can hear on the ATC transcripts the crash occur as people in the room witness it and react in horror.

To my armchair commenting self, the ATC controllers seem to be exonerated by the transcript, and I'm going to otherwise wait until an NTSB report tells me why I'm wrong to break out the pitch forks on them.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3gD_lnBNu0

I’ll bet the final NTSB report lists as a contributing factor that there was only one controller that night; a second controller might have had the time to notice the altitude was too close, or vector the helicopter behind.

No. There are also rules on who can do what.

Put another way, military aircraft, especially certain military aircraft, can do things that civilian aircraft can't.

If I were piloting a helicopter in that airspace, that ATC transcript would have been significantly different.

We should be looking at root causes. Which means we should ask the uncomfortable questions about the deference given to some military/government aircraft. But we don't want to ask those questions. So we keep quibbling around the edges by talking about ATC or Reagan firing everyone or even the ridiculous suggestion that maybe the civilian airliners could be in a hold pattern at certain times.

It would be humorous if it wasn't so tragic.

>Staffing at air traffic control tower ‘not normal’ during Washington plane crash, FAA report reveals

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/dc-plane-c...

>on Wednesday evening was also monitoring planes taking off and landing, according to the FAA report reviewed by The New York Times. These jobs are typically assigned to two different people, the outlet reported

But:

>However, the National Transportation Safety Board said they will not speculate on the causes of the crash and will release a preliminary report on the incident within 30 days.

So perhaps its not staffing. Although I don't really know what world the report is going to be going out into in 30 days.

Ultimately, I would expect the report to lay blame on both ATC and the helicopter pilot. The degree to which that blame should be allocated will be determined by the investigation. A less likely factor that could conceivably be uncovered would be some sort of controls failure that should have alerted one or all of the impacted pilots and controllers.

The entire point of Human ATC is that those rules are breached regularly in normal operations and we still expect traffic to be routed safely despite that

One complaint I've seen is that the ATC should not have let the helicopter do visual spacing in that regime, that it was somewhat careless and unsafe and possibly discouraged. If the ATC operator was overloaded with work, they would be incentivized to "outsource" the spacing management to the helicopter who would then be able to screw it up by "seeing" the wrong plane. I can see the merits of the argument but it would take the NTSB to have the right knowledge to confirm or deny it.

that it was somewhat careless and unsafe and possibly discouraged

This is what I mean. Clearly, people are unfamiliar with what actions certain military/government pilots are able to take in that airspace. It's rules. It's not about being encouraged or discouraged or overworked or underworked or rainbow farting unicorns. That's not how ATC works.

I would want to change the rules that allow military pilots to do this sort of thing. Or at least, have a reasoned conversation about why it's necessary to allow them to do this sort of thing. But that sort of conversation is difficult. So everyone wants to talk about everything else instead. The issue being that everything else is very likely not the root problem.

I hope when the reports do come out we can stop this nonsense about ATC, or Reagan being a moron, or civilian airliner holding patterns or whatever else and actually have the hard sit down on that issue.

The real problem is that the problem could happen. Even if the helicopter ATC guy was present, and HAD vectored them behind and they HAD complied, or X or Y or Z or whatever had prevented this accident, it would have happened eventually.

The problem isn't that the controller didn't notice they were too close; it is that less than 1000 feet of separation is considered fine and normal and commonplace. It's too close and leaves no room for error.

You're just highlighting a different aspect of parent's concern: there shouldn't be special-casing for military aircraft in shared airspace.

Do you have a description of or citation for the rules you’re mentioning? I’m curious what they are.

How could this be anything to do with Reagan firing them? The Reagan thing was 1981. Air traffic controllers have a mandatory retirement age of 56. Anyone under the age of 56 in 2025 would have been under the age of 12 in 1981.

> How could this be anything to do with Reagan firing them?

Echoes.

The fired workers were replaced as rapidly as possible. That would result in massive change in the age distribution of controllers. It takes a few years to train a new controller so lets assume the youngest new hires were 22. New controllers have to be 31 and under.

Let's take the best case and assume all the new controllers are 22 through 31 and are evenly distributed in that range, and started in 1982. The group will start reaching 56 in 2007 and finish reaching 56 in 2016. That's over 11000 controllers retiring over a 10 year span.

I haven't been able to find data on the actual distribution of ages for the replacements. I'd guess that it was skewed younger, which could make that echo narrower. Maybe 11000 controllers retiring over 5 years.

If they hired enough people to replace those that group too will show up as another echo, but more spread out.

Also you know... seeing a job get absolutely decimated by a labor hating President might make future candidates less likely apply to a hostile job where asking for better conditions mean you will lose your livelihood.

They rehired anyone willing to go back to work. No one was required to lose their livelihood.

The union's problem was that they assumed air traffic control was so important they could dictate terms and then they got called on it and lost. Public sector unions don't really work because the other side of the table is the government (and by extension the public), so the two possible outcomes are that the union gets screwed by the government or the public gets screwed by the union.

That theory assumes you can train >10,000 new air traffic controllers all at once in 1982 but then can't train their replacements over a period of ten years as they retire.

For that to be the case there would have to be some more proximate problem compromising the ability to replace air traffic controllers at the rate it was possible to in the 1980s. Like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42939941

I would bet on "Normalization of deviance", such a close altitude separation should probably just not exists (default is 1000ft).

If it had become a norm then a second controller would probably not change anything.

I think the ATC is “exonerated” in the sense of it not being their fault, however that does not necessarily mean a fully staffed and more attentive ATC team wouldn’t have prevented the disaster.

Noticing aircraft flying off assigned course is exactly the type of thing that a resource constrained ATC would be guiltless in NOT noticing, but that a non-constrained ATC probably would notice.

Obviously if ATC were fully staffed and this happened, it wouldn’t be worth seriously looking into, but there’s a reason the intended staffing levels are what they are, which can basically be summed up as “cognitive burden.”

This is pretty much right, by the book. It seems clear that there were multiple confounding factors: a high risk, under-resourced training mission performed by relatively inexperience pilots operating as a normal transport mission as far as the controllers were aware.

I think we're going to wind up talking about SOP and whether visual separation is permissible in this class of airspace when using NVGs or under other conditions present in this mishap, e.g., on nighttime training. There are companies (lufty for instance) that, by policy, prohibit visual separation at night.

There might be some scrutiny on the controller for approving visual separation in the first place, and I think that'll get into weeds of how he should have known the risk factors for the helo. Still, as Juan notes, it didn't sound like thoughtful consideration, but like rote call and response.

This would have been prevented if the helo had to take vectors. There would be no talk of visual separation. The controller was aware of how tight it was, and if it were simply a rule, he would have told the helo to hold present position, waited for an appropriate place in the sequencing, and then given a clearance.

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