quote:

Originally posted by Balzé Halzé:
A few more holes in this Swiss cheese, and I feel like we're fixing for another major air disaster in this country.

1) The primary function of ATC is to maximize traffic volume. At least in terms of the pressures put on them. There is always a balance between safety and schedule, but it is simultaneously impressive and scary how many aircraft the controllers get sequenced. Both enroute and on the ground.

2) Communications are frequently compromised by stupid pilots. Many times you'll hear a controller trying to talk to one aircraft while one or more others are stepping all over the channel. Also, too many pilots are not clear in their speaking. Either they mumble or speak quickly.

3) There is at least one controller just monitoring in the tower at busy airports, specifically to catch errors made by controllers or pilots. They do catch a lot of undesirable situations before they go too far.

4) There is a simple fix to the problem of multiple people trying to transmit at the same time, which I have proposed numerous times via various channels but always been told it is not possible within the FAA certification environment. Every modern aviation radio has an automatic squelch. It detects if a signal is being broadcast by someone else by listening for an incoming signal stronger than some threshold. If not, the pilot hears silence rather than static. If there is a signal, the pilot hears it. That same squelch could be used to disable the radio from transmitting. e.g. if someone else is transmitting then nobody else can transmit. For emergency functionality it could have an override (several simple ways to do this) where it could transmit even though squelch detects someone else is already transmitting.

Item 4 would eliminate 99% of stepped on communications. You can hear this problem in numerous videos of actual near miss events.

Juan Browne's reports are invariably fascinating, and sometimes--as in this one--very scary. I greatly appreciate the peek into the ATC world. Sometimes--as in the recent fire in Japan--I don't see how foreign speakers can communicate well enough in English to get the job done safely.

https://www.americanthinker.co...t_up_to_the_job.html

Listen to the screaming in the tower at about 50 seconds into the second video.