CatYaaak said:
A few years ago a TCAS-equipped Russian airliner blew a TCAS-equipped DHL cargo transport out of the sky in a mid-air collision in a lightly-congested, low-workload, enroute radar environment. Both TCASs were functioning properly.
Actually that doesn't describe the event correctly at all. and some similarities between these accident do exist
-one one controller on duty instead of the mandated 2
-contract employees: skyguide in switzerland, flight dynamics in lex that were tasked with doing more with less
-confusing circumstances: runway construction and taxi routing in lex vs atc server backup and disabling of controllers collision warning system.
-flight crew action different from what was expected for whatever reason: takoff on different runway than cleared in Lex, not following TCAS RA as required in Ueberlingen.
I am not assigning blame to the crew here, just pointing to facts that have been established at this time. As always the final verdict will fall at the conclusion of the investigation.
I for one am glad about any and all safety advances made and regs written based on past accidents. In a way some of our predecessors paid with their lives to advance safety for future pax and crews.
Obviously our job as flight crews is to concentrate on our end of the spectrum and strive for perfection. The reality is however that we are human and will make mistakes. I know I am far from perfect and will make errors.
What we need to do as crews is recognize the fact that we are fallible and try to have a process in place to recognize our errors and mitigate the adverse effects of our errors.
CatYaaak said:
Or maybe it's better if we pilots quit giving the engineers tragic REASONS to develop new safety devices or the FAA to write new regs since they'll be doing those things anyway, by concentrating our energy on, and figuring out how to operate ("operation" is OUR area of expertise) more safely in this imperfect world until someone engineers and mandates it into perfection.
I welcome any and all safety advances that can help crews recognize errors made -- they allow me to go home after "one of those days" when the holes in the error chain line up.
cheers
George