Hurray for Air Traffic Controllers

JetBlue has scare at Logan Airport: MyFoxBOSTON.com

Fast Thinking Boston Air Traffic Controller
Saves Hundreds of Lives on Two JetBlue Planes

I love competence.

"JetBlue hold. JetBlue 1264 hold right there. JetBlue 1264 Hold! Hold!"

JetBlue 1264 at Boston's Logan Airport with 91 passengers plus crew was taxing to the gate the night before Thanksgiving (back in November, 2010.) It should have gone left but instead went right.

Fail.

The ground controller spotted the error and had I264 stop literally seconds before it would have entered an active runway, with another JetBlue aircraft speeding in from the right on its take-off roll at well over 100 miles-per-hour, faster and faster.

JetBlue 1264 stopped three to five seconds from a two-aircraft fireball with hundreds of lives up in flames. (Watch the video -- judge for yourself.)

The ATC had been on the job 32 years. Experience, competence, counts.

Well done, sir. Well done.

FOX25 in Boston has more.

There's more...

Continental Connection Flight 3407 Crashes Outside Buffalo, 49 Dead

Continental Flight 3407 crash outside Buffalo NY. February 13, 20092. Photo AP.

All 48 On Board Dead Plus 1 On Ground
No Warning To Controllers Before Crash

On final approach, commuter airplane Continental Connection Flight 3407 crashed early this morning outside Buffalo roughly five miles from the airport. There was no unusual communication to ATC controllers prior to the crash.

ATC Recordings grabbed live at the time.

Listen for "Continental 3407" or "Continental Connection 3407" talking to ATC. It's a few minutes before you hear the pilot and a solid ten minutes or more before the plane falls off the channel and ATC starts trying to figure out what happened -- which happens FAST. All this while dealing with all of the other traffic on channel... as it isn't as if anyone knew an incident was about to occur.

Yahoo

"The whole sky was lit up orange," said Bob Dworak, who lives less than a mile from the crash site. "All the sudden, there was a big bang, and the house shook."

The 74-seat Q400 Bombardier aircraft was carrying 5,000 pounds of fuel and apparently exploded on impact, Erie County Executive Chris Collins said.

Firefighters got as close to the plane as they could, he said. "They were shouting out to see if there were any survivors on the plane. Truly a very heroic effort, but there were no survivors."

The twin-turboprop operated by Colgan Air was flying from Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey to Buffalo Niagara International Airport in light snow, fog and 17 mph winds.

Prior to the crash, the voice of a female pilot on Flight 3407 could be heard communicating with air traffic controllers, according to a recording of the Buffalo air traffic control's radio messages shortly before the crash captured by the Web site http://www.liveatc.net. Neither the controller nor the pilot shows any concern that anything is out of the ordinary as the airplane is asked to fly at 2,300 feet.

A minute later, the controller tries to contact the plane but hears no response. After a pause, he tries to contact the plane again.

Then the controller asks the pilot of a nearby Delta Air Lines plane to see whether he can see the Continental flight. The Delta pilot says no.

About three to four minutes after that, he tells an unidentified listener to contact authorities on the ground in the Clarence area.

"You need to find if anything is on the ground," the controller says. "All I can tell you is the aircraft is over the marker (landing beacon), and we're not talking to them now."

Later, he tells all aircraft monitoring the same frequency: "We did have a Dash 8 over the marker that didn't make the airport. He appears to be about five miles away from the airport."

I watched an Apache helicopter burn at a refueling station. It went up FAST.

AP reports 5,000 pounds of fuel exploded with the plane. Wouldn't be nothing left of nobody. Or anyone anywhere nearby.

It'll be months till we know. My guess -- icing. Listening to the ATC tape, pilots were reporting ice. Those little commuter jobbies, if you get a buildup of ice, you can get screwed really quick. Second guess, a localizer failure (guides you into the runway) or trouble with the plane's auto-land feature.

Problem with all this technology is if it fucks up on you, you are truly fucked. It can fly you right into the goddamn ground or aim you straight into another plane on the same jetway 41,000 feet in the air and you hit them head on as you've both got perfect GPS down to 10 foot accuracy well within the wingspan of both aircraft. So if your jets get programed to fly on the wrong routes, kiss your asses the frack goodbye. This actually happened down in South America about a year ago; took out one plane completely when the wing ripped off after the collusion...everyone on that plane died, duh. The second plane, a business jet survived, barely. The drivers got charged locally with criminal charges which is pure bullshit. Finally they got out of country. I don't remember their current status. VF did a wonderful piece on it a few months back.

My point is, we don't know what happened here. It could have been a short on the localizer flying them into the ground. Could have been a flame out with no time to deal. Could have been... we don't know. They came up short by five miles and everyone died.

Yes, the pilots on the commuter flights are well trained. They go into the box just as often as anyone else. They know what they're doing. There is a pilot and a first officer on each one of these aircraft, BOTH of whom are fully qualified to fly the plane under any conditions.

Given the choice between flying out of Buffalo or getting in an SUV and driving down to New York City through a storm, I pick flying. Massively safer.

Tat Tvam Asi.

There's more...

700 Days Without a Contract

One of the great things about the GNB community is all the ideas you all share in the comment threads and in emailing me (us). My recent focus/obsession with the plight of airlines, pilots and air traffic controllers, lead one reader to send me an amazing set of links to blogs written by Controllers and I also found some by pilots.

The reader asked, "Why doesn't the progressive b'sphere ever tune into the frequency of any of the excellent air traffic controller blogs?"

Why indeed? I think it is largely that that are so many outrages, so many evils and incompetencies perpetrated by this administration in the last 8 years and the conservative agenda of the last 30 that it is hard to follow even a small % of the topics that need covering.

While looking around the great blogs she sent me to I found this fact.

Air Traffic Controllers who keep everyone of us safe when we fly have been operating without a contract for over 700 days!

Don Brown from Get the Flick is asking for our help.
Write your senator. ASAP!

Senator _______,

I am writing to ask you to sign on as a cosponsor of S3416 -- The Federal Aviation Administration Employee Retention Act.

The FAA's controllers have been without a contract for over 700 days. Controllers are retiring faster than the FAA can train new-hires. Please help resolve this situation now -- before any more damage is done to our National Airspace System.

Please become a cosponsor of The Federal Aviation Administration Employee Retention Act.

======================

Copy the text above and then click here to find your Senators. Fill in the blanks, sign your name and you’re done. Time yourself. You’ll be done in less that 5 minutes. I promise it won’t hurt.
--Don Brown

Don is a retired controller trying to help his former colleagues and expose all the BS that puts Americans in danger every time we fly. He is a patriot for sure and his blog is quite interesting though at times, very scary.

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To the Highest Bidder

I am sure it will surprise you to know that there is a scheme a foot to auction off the runway take off and landing spots at high traffic airports like JFK in New York. And of course it will surprise you even more to know that George Bush and Co. are behind the new plan.

Apparently this new competitive runway plan has to do with busy flight schedules but even more it has to do with having not enough air traffic control staff.

The Bush administration’s decision to impose caps on flights at the three major airports in the New York area, and its plans to auction landing slots at the three airports in a first-of-its-kind experiment to handle congestion, are the subject of intense debate at a House subcommittee hearing in Washington.

Senator Charles E. Schumer, a New York Democrat who has been a persistent critic of the Department of Transportation and the Federal Aviation Administration, excoriated both agencies on Wednesday morning, saying the Bush administration had resorted to “ideological, market-based theory,” while doing little to fill vacancies among air-traffic controllers.

“Instead of focusing on real, tested solutions to solve this problem, like upgrading decades-old technology and hiring an adequate number of controllers to staff New York’s towers, the D.O.T. continues to miss the point,” Mr. Schumer said. “To make matters worse, the F.A.A.’s treatment of controllers has lead to an unprecedented rash of retirements thus compounding the problem.”

At many air-traffic control towers across the country, more than one-third of the staff consists of trainees, Mr. Schumer said. Developmental trainees comprised 25 percent of all controllers nationally as of December 2007, up from about 15 percent in 2004, he said.

Ok, so far my airline/ airport reading and writing have turned up-- unsafe fueling practices, bad FAA leadership, and moves to privatize/ profit-ize critical airport systems as well as a lack of trained and skilled staff. This is in addition to new bag charges, water charges, seat charges and extra fuel charges. I think we are looking at some major impending crashes here. (pun intended)

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