The Cirrus Airframe Parachute System (CAPS) is a whole-plane ballistic parachute recovery system designed specifically for Cirrus Aircraft's line of general aviation light aircraft including the SR20, SR22 and SF50. The design became the first of its kind to become certified with the FAA, achieving certification in October 1998, and as of 2014 was the only aircraft ballistic parachute used as standard equipment by an aviation company.
The more generic system is called BRS, Ballistic Recovery Systems. They deliver this as an option for many small aircraft and it's popular for experimental / home built aircraft.
One downside of the systems is that they typically have a maximum lifespan of 10 years while airframes last 50+ years. So every 10 years there is a large maintenance cost to replace/renew the parachute system. Much less an issue for a $ 800k Cirrus SR22 (like the one in this incident) than for a $ 30k old Cessna.
Thank you, I was so confused. I was thinking the pilot a genius for bringing and activating a parachute. Now I see it was just great design.
> As of 1 May 2021, CAPS had been activated 122 times, 101 of which saw successful parachute deployment. In those successful deployments, there were 207 survivors and 1 fatality. No fatalities had occurred when the parachute was deployed within the certified speed and altitude parameters
I remember when these were being tested. Some of the testing was done at the NASA Langley center, which still today specializes in airframes in addition to space... They have a whole-airframe catapult and drop system.
These parachutes have been an absolute game-changer for small aircraft pilot survival. It's unlikely this kind of collision would have been survivable for the small-plane pilot 25 years ago.
Wow, that's incredible. Goes to show that people do walk away from plane crashes with some regularity. My father was a pilot[0].
He sold his plane about 15 years ago (to a group of owners, one of which was a priest, I'm sure there's a joke in there). A few of winters later, he was called out to Romeo Airport; the pilot flying the plane that was formerly his had crashed the aircraft a few miles short of the runway in bad weather[1]. He was traveling with his daughter, a friend and, I think, his wife. He died, but his daughter was able to get free and make her way to a nearby farm to call for help. Looking at the plane, the fact that anyone survived at all let alone walked to a nearby house with minor injuries is pretty miraculous.
It's hard to impress upon folks who have never been in a small plane like that just how ... yeah ... how much it feels like you're hanging onto a kite. I have no idea the kinds of structural technologies are involved in the aircraft but I know his plane was made in the 70s and was light enough that he only had a pole which attached to the front landing gear to pull it out of the hangar. The weight is so critical that the 7-seat plane can realistically only seat 4-5 adults. I remember being shocked that they had to weigh the paint they applied when he had the plane re-painted.
[0] I'll spare the details as I have left many comments in the past about his experiences.
> The weight is so critical that the 7-seat plane can realistically only seat 4-5 adults. I remember being shocked that they had to weigh the paint they applied when he had the plane re-painted.
I used to work in general aviation. If my eyes could fly a loop in my skull they would have.
Were the occupants required to use the bathroom before flying? That's how much weight you're potentially saving by weighing the paint on a small aircraft.
They make you weigh the paint because they want you to spray on a certain thickness so they say "X oz paint, Y oz thinner/hardener" (or something like that) in order to get your mixture into the right ballpark so it will work with whatever procedure they want you to spray it on with and get the thickness/finish/hardness the OEM wants you to get.
In aviation there's a ton of treating simple systems as black boxes and "do X and exactly X" type maintenance that happens in order to smoothly transfer liability. You paint a cowl the way the OEM says not because you couldn't get an equivalently performing cowl a different way but because you don't want the NTSB coming after you trying to determine if you did it different but right or different but wrong.
The specifications to which general aviation stuff is done isn't really any more exacting than stuff in automotive or heavy industry. The service literature is just more verbose and the service procedures are more tightly defined.
I once witnessed an airplane crash that everyone survived. I was a preteen hanging around outside the Scotts Valley roller rink with a friend in the early eighties. The roller rink is next to the now defunct airfield. The airfield was lower than the rink by an embankment. We had recently been watching Jaws on Betamax and my most persistent memory is seeing only the tail crossing the field. It reminded me of a shark fin moving through the water, as the embankment was high enough that I could not see the body of the plane. Then bam, the plane hit the embankment right in front of me, caught air then crashed nose down. I think the plane was a Piper but my knowledge of small craft is limited. It was definitely a wing under. My friend ran to get his father and we all ran over to the wreck. My friend's father opened the doors and everyone but the pilot was able to get out by themselves. The pilot had hit his head on something and his face was covered in blood but alive. I found out from press reports later that was the only time I "met" Steve Wozniak.
Edit: just looked it up. The plane was a Beechcraft Bonanza A36TC.
> The weight is so critical that the 7-seat plane can realistically only seat 4-5 adults.
I think you overlooked an important factor there. The plane was indeed designed to realistically seat 7 adults.
The issue is that in the 50 years since the plane was originally designed, the average weight of adults (in the US) increased by about 18% [0] and the average adult woman today weighs as much as the average adult man in the 1960s.
> It's hard to impress upon folks who have never been in a small plane like that just how ... yeah ... how much it feels like you're hanging onto a kite.
Years ago I was doing pilot training in a Cessna 152. A coworker of mine was a retired Navy captain and instructor at the TOPGUN program, with hundreds of carrier landings in an F-14. He looked at me like I was crazy. He said those little planes were deathtraps and he'd never go up in one again.
Not long after that I had a lesson that coincided with some turbulence from the nearby coast. The plane janked around by seemingly hundreds of feet in every direction. I was scared (almost literally) shitless, and that was my last lesson. I haven't been in a small plane since.
It's hard to impress upon folks who have never been in a small plane like that just how ... yeah ... how much it feels like you're hanging onto a kite
Went up in a four man single engine chopper once. It had all the reassuring solidity of a bicycle. Never again. I can’t even imagine what the truly tiny ones are like.
In aviation load and range are always a compromise, you can fly short distance with a higher load (all passengers) or a longer distance with less passengers. The combined passenger weight and full tanks weight is always more than the Maximum Take Off Weigth (MTOW). For example the small plane that I fly the most has enough fuel capacity to fly around 2000km, but if I will the tanks I need to fly alone, there is no reserve even for a backpack. When I took my brother for a flight around the airstrip I had 20 liters of fuel in the tanks 'cause he is heavy (for an European).
I have a couple of friends that each crash landed at least twice in the past 10-15 years; one was in the hospital once, for the rest of the incidents they simply walked. In two cases it was engine failure, in one a stuck landing gear and the hospital one had an external factor.
> how much it feels like you're hanging onto a kite
The two "small" planes I've ridden in were a Cessna and an L-39. The Cessna felt like a toy, and the L-39 was a serious piece of hardware. Landings were also very different; the Cessna just got tossed around a lot more.
Wow the Cirrus is looking pretty good for how much damage it did to the Metro. Flight surfaces are still there and it's only broken in half of the parachute landing. Guessing it might not have been controllable after the collision.
Private Pilot here - just thought I'd chime in quickly;
Many aviation enthusiasts / pilots first go to is to have a look at the flight data - usually available on FlightAware / FlightRadar24 and a few other websites, plus LiveATC usually can provide recordings of the flights communications to towers as well. We should refrain from using just those data points to draw conclusions to the cause; the NTSB (and other orgs) will perform an investigation and the report will be made public (both interim, and final ones), and changes are almost always made to processes / systems, and often to the virtual or physical items that led to this incident.
There are a few more photos and insights from various folks that were there at the time and captured a few moments on the reddit thread here:
Bloody hell: the state of that Metroliner. Surprised it held together with that amount of damage, and huge kudos to the pilots for getting it on the ground safely.
For such a serious accident this seems about the best possible outcome for the crew of both aircraft. I'm not an expert so I'm not going to comment on root cause or blame here, but simply glad to read that at least everybody survived.
No deaths nor injuries involved, which I feel like this should be in the headline. I came in expecting to see at least a commercial flight was involved (how does it make to #1 on HN otherwise?) but was very relieved to see it was two small aircrafts with 1 and 2 pilots respectively and everyone survived safely.
The Cirrus overshot the centerline of the runway it was supposed to land on. The common way for these situations is for the plane to be on an intercept angle towards the centerline. That's a max 30 degree angle for an instrument approach, but this was a visual approach so it could have been a sharper angle. All it takes to make this mistake in a Cirrus (and other G1000 avionics type small airplanes) is to forget 1 button on the autopilot mode. If it isn't set to capture the final approach track (either GPS or ILS) it will continue straight ahead which in this case means into the side of another airplane.
One thing that makes it more likely is that US air traffic control makes heavy use of visual approaches, and then it's allowed to point two aircraft at collision courses on the same altitude because they can see each other. The European way to do this is to have them intercept at different altitudes so if one overshoots they pass over/under. But it results in lower capacity per runway than the US system.
Looking at the youtube video of the radar with the radio sound that someone posted below, the Cirrus is cleared to runway 17R but he turns to runway 17L.
There are 3 possibilities :
1- he mistakes one runway for the other visually,
2- he wrongly thinks he is cleared for the 17L runway
3- or he makes a too wide turn going for the 17R, intruding the 17L area.
The cirrus is the one that makes the mistake.
The 17 runways are quite close laterally (700’) , it may be either way a bad maneuver (overshooting) or chosing the wrong runway.
The metro was not expecting another traffic in approach for his runway (I understand that they were in different frequencies with different controllers).
During the approach the upper-right side relative angle position in the window of the metro, makes the cirrus hard to spot. I guess he didn’t see the cirrus at all or just barely before the crash.
The cirrus is looking at the runway to his right and the other traffic probably the whole time, the metro is in front of him, so he doesn’t see the Metro till he is on top of him.
Usually with parallel runways, traffics are kept at different altitudes till they are aligned with their runways. This way if they make a mistake, they are separated by 1000’ vertically with the airplane flying parallel.
In this case the cirrus was cleared to visual approach and informed of the cessna he had to follow first. Once he says he has the cessna in sight, he is cleared to visual approach following the cessna. In the same comunication he is informed of the metro flying to the other runway and he replies traffic in sight again.
My guess is that he either has the metro in sight at the beginning and then he forgets about it during the maneuver, or he gives traffic in sight two times.
Thinking that the second part of the message is for the same aircraft (the cessna) he doesn’t even recognize what the controller is telling him about the metro. This is possible if he is too busy flying the maneuver and not paying proper attention to the radio, he hears
“cleared for approach” and “traffic” but he mentally don’t really process the information the controller is giving him. A kind of sensory overload.
In airliners we have mandatory TCAS (traffic collision avoidance system) installed that shows you the near traffics in the screen and give you coordinated (between the traffics) automatic avoidance guidance and alarms( one traffic climbs and the other descends or keeps altitude).
In busy airports TCAS maneuver happen relatively often (a handfull of times a year) but nowadays is much harder to have a collision or a close call.
Also when two pilots are in the cockpit (like airliners) it’s easier that one is concentrated in flying and the other in the communications. It’s very common to correct and be corrected all the time during the flight.
It will be interesting to read the official report.
Edit: Kudos to the Metro pilot who was super calmed in the radio while declaring emergency and landing the plane. That is really difficult.
Edit 2: correcting the airport , KAPA (I talked about KDEN initially which has the same runways but with a bigger separation). This does make a difference regarding the mistake.
Glad no one was injured or killed. Sounds like the Metroliner pilot did very well.
I really think that we should not have flying cars until we have true autopilot (hands off the wheel, meatbag!). The thought of the "Hey y'all! Lookit this!" knuckleheads that regularly open up, roaring past my house, in three dimensions, is chilling. They are bad enough with just two.
I'll bet that the advent of true driverless tech will also be the advent of illegal aftermarket "mod kits." I can see it now...the "Hold My Beer™" line of manual override modules...
Reality is that you won't have the type of idiots that roar past your house flying cars/planes or anything of that nature unless it is fully automated because most of them aren't smart enough to pass the tests required to be a pilot.
I remember seeing some Internet post a couple of decades ago where someone asserted that the goal of ATC was to prevent midair collisions and that U.S. ATC had met this goal perfectly, with no midair collisions between aircraft that were under the control of ATC at the time.
I think the claim was qualified in some way like "collision between civilian flights that were both flying an ATC-assigned clearance at the time". (So some kinds of flights and some kinds of airspace don't require ATC clearance, and if one of them were involved in a collision, it wouldn't be ATC's responsibility, in some sense.)
My question at the moment is: is this claim plausible if you qualify or restrict it enough? Do you have to tack on additional conditions?
Is there any useful sense in which this collision was a first for U.S. aviation history?
I was camping near Whistler a few years ago and heard a bang. Looked up and saw falling debris and bodies. A wing landed not far from our campsite. Turns out a glider (low-wing monoplane) was descending and the tow plane (high wing monoplane) was climbing. They were each in each other's blind spots :(
Glad to see no fatalities here; I'm an aerospace engineer in the field of airworthiness and technical risk management so my work sees a lot of accident reports and flight safety incidents. I can say with certainty these folks (esp. the metroliner crew) are very fortunate.
I'm sorry to hear that you witness a mid-air collision -- I hope it wasn't completely fatal. In the UK, all glider pilots wear parachutes and the overwhelming majority have standardised on a collision avoidance system known as FLARM that is "glider friendly" (unlike GNSS) and can differentiate thermalling from colliding.
It's just an internal 16 channel GPS receiver with an external antenna and an altimeter that predicts the flight path and then transmits it - including a unique identifier - as low-power digital burst signals at one-second intervals. Other aircraft also equipped with FLARM receive that, compare it with their own flight path prediction, and also check for collision information with known data on obstacles, including electric power lines, radio masts and cable cars, etc. If a proximity warning is generated to one or more aircraft or obstacles, it bleeps like anything and generates bright LEDs that point in the direction of the threat. The display also gives indication of the threat level, plus the horizontal and vertical bearing to the threat -- and there are three warnings (iirc ~30s, ~15s, ~6s) -- it warns by time and not distance.
I remember the thing going off a few times; it's quite helpful and draws your attention to a region of sky immediately, including behind, above and below you. It's also dirt cheap† and is a battery-powered self-contained box with (I suspect) a microcontroller and glorified smartphone innards inside.
Whenever there is a collision involving light aircraft the question of anti-collision systems comes up. Unfortunately the powers that be have completely failed to come up with a workable standard for such aircraft. The glider people eventually just gave up on waiting and now use a proprietary system called FLARM which has fairly good adoption. There is more than one system of that type available for light powered aircraft with not very good adoption. Each system is entirely incompatible with each other, including the standardized ones used in heavy commercial aviation.
I wonder how many mid air collisions we would expect to see if see-and-avoid where entirely ineffectual, or pilots would not look outside ever except to land. I have the impression the accident numbers would not be much worse than they are.
In other words, my hypothesis is that the fact that there are few mid-airs is owed to ATC, technology (TCAS, TAS) and “big sky”, rather than vigilant pilots.
Agreed. It can be hard to spot traffic even if you know where the other plane is! With this in mind ADS-B/TIS-B seems like such an essential tool for GA pilots.
I've spent a decent amount of time at Centennial; it's one of the busiest general aviation airports in the country. There's a great restaurant on site that you can watch the runways from. After this incident, the restaurant is probably as close as I'd get to a Cirrus. :)
I don't see how this incident would make or break your impression of the Cirrus.
From the picture, the plane at rest is pretty messed up, but all occupants are safe, and pending investigation, there doesn't seem to be a sign of mechanical error involved.
Flying in (or near) small planes has a lot of risk, but I don't see how this incident would change your impression of this one manufacturer's planes.
I'm sure the chances of a collision outside of the airport is absolutely basically zero, but these small planes fly really low over my house and the downtown area all the time. They get pretty low and close for touring over the big buildings for photos and stuff, see photos on reddit all the time..
I felt erilly familiar with the details of this accident after reading the details. I dug up my browsing history and realized I watched the ATC exchange of this very collision yesterday not realizing that this had happened the very same day the video was uploaded[0]. Also props to the Cirrus Airframe Parachute System (CAPS), hope this gets implemented in more smaller (or homemade) aircrafts.
Wow, the 'can opener' effect is intense. Insane that the plane held together, so much structural loss.
Reminds me of the Aloha Flight 243. My mom's cousin was the pilot and hearing his first hand account was pretty crazy. Fun fact, he got to be an extra in the made for TV movie of the event.
[+] [-] nickcw|4 years ago|reply
From:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cirrus_Airframe_Parachute_Sy...
The Cirrus Airframe Parachute System (CAPS) is a whole-plane ballistic parachute recovery system designed specifically for Cirrus Aircraft's line of general aviation light aircraft including the SR20, SR22 and SF50. The design became the first of its kind to become certified with the FAA, achieving certification in October 1998, and as of 2014 was the only aircraft ballistic parachute used as standard equipment by an aviation company.
[+] [-] t0mas88|4 years ago|reply
One downside of the systems is that they typically have a maximum lifespan of 10 years while airframes last 50+ years. So every 10 years there is a large maintenance cost to replace/renew the parachute system. Much less an issue for a $ 800k Cirrus SR22 (like the one in this incident) than for a $ 30k old Cessna.
[+] [-] JohnJamesRambo|4 years ago|reply
> As of 1 May 2021, CAPS had been activated 122 times, 101 of which saw successful parachute deployment. In those successful deployments, there were 207 survivors and 1 fatality. No fatalities had occurred when the parachute was deployed within the certified speed and altitude parameters
[+] [-] maweki|4 years ago|reply
This mostly clears it up.
[+] [-] dmix|4 years ago|reply
https://www.cirruspilots.org/Safety/CAPS-Event-History
[+] [-] shadowgovt|4 years ago|reply
These parachutes have been an absolute game-changer for small aircraft pilot survival. It's unlikely this kind of collision would have been survivable for the small-plane pilot 25 years ago.
[+] [-] Aeolun|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jonplackett|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alister|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mdip|4 years ago|reply
He sold his plane about 15 years ago (to a group of owners, one of which was a priest, I'm sure there's a joke in there). A few of winters later, he was called out to Romeo Airport; the pilot flying the plane that was formerly his had crashed the aircraft a few miles short of the runway in bad weather[1]. He was traveling with his daughter, a friend and, I think, his wife. He died, but his daughter was able to get free and make her way to a nearby farm to call for help. Looking at the plane, the fact that anyone survived at all let alone walked to a nearby house with minor injuries is pretty miraculous.
It's hard to impress upon folks who have never been in a small plane like that just how ... yeah ... how much it feels like you're hanging onto a kite. I have no idea the kinds of structural technologies are involved in the aircraft but I know his plane was made in the 70s and was light enough that he only had a pole which attached to the front landing gear to pull it out of the hangar. The weight is so critical that the 7-seat plane can realistically only seat 4-5 adults. I remember being shocked that they had to weigh the paint they applied when he had the plane re-painted.
[0] I'll spare the details as I have left many comments in the past about his experiences.
[1] https://aviation-safety.net/wikibase/43894 - "Pilot Error"; I recall my Dad saying "all plane crashes are pilot error"
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piper_PA-32_Cherokee_Six
[+] [-] throwaway0a5e|4 years ago|reply
I used to work in general aviation. If my eyes could fly a loop in my skull they would have.
Were the occupants required to use the bathroom before flying? That's how much weight you're potentially saving by weighing the paint on a small aircraft.
They make you weigh the paint because they want you to spray on a certain thickness so they say "X oz paint, Y oz thinner/hardener" (or something like that) in order to get your mixture into the right ballpark so it will work with whatever procedure they want you to spray it on with and get the thickness/finish/hardness the OEM wants you to get.
In aviation there's a ton of treating simple systems as black boxes and "do X and exactly X" type maintenance that happens in order to smoothly transfer liability. You paint a cowl the way the OEM says not because you couldn't get an equivalently performing cowl a different way but because you don't want the NTSB coming after you trying to determine if you did it different but right or different but wrong.
The specifications to which general aviation stuff is done isn't really any more exacting than stuff in automotive or heavy industry. The service literature is just more verbose and the service procedures are more tightly defined.
[+] [-] BashiBazouk|4 years ago|reply
Edit: just looked it up. The plane was a Beechcraft Bonanza A36TC.
[+] [-] qayxc|4 years ago|reply
I think you overlooked an important factor there. The plane was indeed designed to realistically seat 7 adults.
The issue is that in the 50 years since the plane was originally designed, the average weight of adults (in the US) increased by about 18% [0] and the average adult woman today weighs as much as the average adult man in the 1960s.
[0] https://www.newsmax.com/US/average-weight-man-woman-obese/20...
[+] [-] hirundo|4 years ago|reply
Years ago I was doing pilot training in a Cessna 152. A coworker of mine was a retired Navy captain and instructor at the TOPGUN program, with hundreds of carrier landings in an F-14. He looked at me like I was crazy. He said those little planes were deathtraps and he'd never go up in one again.
Not long after that I had a lesson that coincided with some turbulence from the nearby coast. The plane janked around by seemingly hundreds of feet in every direction. I was scared (almost literally) shitless, and that was my last lesson. I haven't been in a small plane since.
[+] [-] rubicon33|4 years ago|reply
By comparison, there are some horrific crashes today that drivers are walking away from. [1]
[1] https://youtu.be/YpNdoV6xv2s
[+] [-] ip26|4 years ago|reply
Went up in a four man single engine chopper once. It had all the reassuring solidity of a bicycle. Never again. I can’t even imagine what the truly tiny ones are like.
[+] [-] AdrianB1|4 years ago|reply
I have a couple of friends that each crash landed at least twice in the past 10-15 years; one was in the hospital once, for the rest of the incidents they simply walked. In two cases it was engine failure, in one a stuck landing gear and the hospital one had an external factor.
[+] [-] dehrmann|4 years ago|reply
The two "small" planes I've ridden in were a Cessna and an L-39. The Cessna felt like a toy, and the L-39 was a serious piece of hardware. Landings were also very different; the Cessna just got tossed around a lot more.
[+] [-] sillysaurusx|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dkarras|4 years ago|reply
A photo of the airborne metroliner with fuselage blown open: https://imgur.com/gallery/yKPOWR0
[+] [-] EricE|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lujim|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] londons_explore|4 years ago|reply
A tube is only strong when complete. Cut away half the tube and bending resistance probably goes down ~10x.
[+] [-] _s|4 years ago|reply
Many aviation enthusiasts / pilots first go to is to have a look at the flight data - usually available on FlightAware / FlightRadar24 and a few other websites, plus LiveATC usually can provide recordings of the flights communications to towers as well. We should refrain from using just those data points to draw conclusions to the cause; the NTSB (and other orgs) will perform an investigation and the report will be made public (both interim, and final ones), and changes are almost always made to processes / systems, and often to the virtual or physical items that led to this incident.
There are a few more photos and insights from various folks that were there at the time and captured a few moments on the reddit thread here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/flying/comments/nauck8/mid_air_just...
Note - it's incredibly rare for a midair not to result in fatalities so an incredible amount of luck all around.
[+] [-] gresrun|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bartread|4 years ago|reply
For such a serious accident this seems about the best possible outcome for the crew of both aircraft. I'm not an expert so I'm not going to comment on root cause or blame here, but simply glad to read that at least everybody survived.
[+] [-] franciscop|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FatalLogic|4 years ago|reply
Remarkable that the Metroliner held together, despite that terrible damage, and they landed it safely
edit: interesting photo of the landing from the Reddit thread linked elsewhere https://imgur.com/gallery/yKPOWR0
[+] [-] t0mas88|4 years ago|reply
One thing that makes it more likely is that US air traffic control makes heavy use of visual approaches, and then it's allowed to point two aircraft at collision courses on the same altitude because they can see each other. The European way to do this is to have them intercept at different altitudes so if one overshoots they pass over/under. But it results in lower capacity per runway than the US system.
[+] [-] omegant|4 years ago|reply
The cirrus is the one that makes the mistake.
The 17 runways are quite close laterally (700’) , it may be either way a bad maneuver (overshooting) or chosing the wrong runway.
https://es.flightaware.com/resources/airport/APA/APD/AIRPORT...
The metro was not expecting another traffic in approach for his runway (I understand that they were in different frequencies with different controllers).
During the approach the upper-right side relative angle position in the window of the metro, makes the cirrus hard to spot. I guess he didn’t see the cirrus at all or just barely before the crash.
The cirrus is looking at the runway to his right and the other traffic probably the whole time, the metro is in front of him, so he doesn’t see the Metro till he is on top of him.
Usually with parallel runways, traffics are kept at different altitudes till they are aligned with their runways. This way if they make a mistake, they are separated by 1000’ vertically with the airplane flying parallel.
In this case the cirrus was cleared to visual approach and informed of the cessna he had to follow first. Once he says he has the cessna in sight, he is cleared to visual approach following the cessna. In the same comunication he is informed of the metro flying to the other runway and he replies traffic in sight again.
My guess is that he either has the metro in sight at the beginning and then he forgets about it during the maneuver, or he gives traffic in sight two times.
Thinking that the second part of the message is for the same aircraft (the cessna) he doesn’t even recognize what the controller is telling him about the metro. This is possible if he is too busy flying the maneuver and not paying proper attention to the radio, he hears “cleared for approach” and “traffic” but he mentally don’t really process the information the controller is giving him. A kind of sensory overload.
In airliners we have mandatory TCAS (traffic collision avoidance system) installed that shows you the near traffics in the screen and give you coordinated (between the traffics) automatic avoidance guidance and alarms( one traffic climbs and the other descends or keeps altitude).
In busy airports TCAS maneuver happen relatively often (a handfull of times a year) but nowadays is much harder to have a collision or a close call.
Also when two pilots are in the cockpit (like airliners) it’s easier that one is concentrated in flying and the other in the communications. It’s very common to correct and be corrected all the time during the flight.
It will be interesting to read the official report.
Edit: Kudos to the Metro pilot who was super calmed in the radio while declaring emergency and landing the plane. That is really difficult.
Edit 2: correcting the airport , KAPA (I talked about KDEN initially which has the same runways but with a bigger separation). This does make a difference regarding the mistake.
[+] [-] ChrisMarshallNY|4 years ago|reply
I really think that we should not have flying cars until we have true autopilot (hands off the wheel, meatbag!). The thought of the "Hey y'all! Lookit this!" knuckleheads that regularly open up, roaring past my house, in three dimensions, is chilling. They are bad enough with just two.
I'll bet that the advent of true driverless tech will also be the advent of illegal aftermarket "mod kits." I can see it now...the "Hold My Beer™" line of manual override modules...
[+] [-] simonswords82|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] schoen|4 years ago|reply
I think the claim was qualified in some way like "collision between civilian flights that were both flying an ATC-assigned clearance at the time". (So some kinds of flights and some kinds of airspace don't require ATC clearance, and if one of them were involved in a collision, it wouldn't be ATC's responsibility, in some sense.)
My question at the moment is: is this claim plausible if you qualify or restrict it enough? Do you have to tack on additional conditions?
Is there any useful sense in which this collision was a first for U.S. aviation history?
[+] [-] mlac|4 years ago|reply
It looks like the Cirrus wasn't flying to what the ATC cleared...
[+] [-] gkanai|4 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ph7OR6C90w
[+] [-] na85|4 years ago|reply
Glad to see no fatalities here; I'm an aerospace engineer in the field of airworthiness and technical risk management so my work sees a lot of accident reports and flight safety incidents. I can say with certainty these folks (esp. the metroliner crew) are very fortunate.
[+] [-] azalemeth|4 years ago|reply
It's just an internal 16 channel GPS receiver with an external antenna and an altimeter that predicts the flight path and then transmits it - including a unique identifier - as low-power digital burst signals at one-second intervals. Other aircraft also equipped with FLARM receive that, compare it with their own flight path prediction, and also check for collision information with known data on obstacles, including electric power lines, radio masts and cable cars, etc. If a proximity warning is generated to one or more aircraft or obstacles, it bleeps like anything and generates bright LEDs that point in the direction of the threat. The display also gives indication of the threat level, plus the horizontal and vertical bearing to the threat -- and there are three warnings (iirc ~30s, ~15s, ~6s) -- it warns by time and not distance.
I remember the thing going off a few times; it's quite helpful and draws your attention to a region of sky immediately, including behind, above and below you. It's also dirt cheap† and is a battery-powered self-contained box with (I suspect) a microcontroller and glorified smartphone innards inside.
†(by aviation standards)
[+] [-] upofadown|4 years ago|reply
* https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/pemberton-b-...
Whenever there is a collision involving light aircraft the question of anti-collision systems comes up. Unfortunately the powers that be have completely failed to come up with a workable standard for such aircraft. The glider people eventually just gave up on waiting and now use a proprietary system called FLARM which has fairly good adoption. There is more than one system of that type available for light powered aircraft with not very good adoption. Each system is entirely incompatible with each other, including the standardized ones used in heavy commercial aviation.
[+] [-] xattt|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FabHK|4 years ago|reply
In other words, my hypothesis is that the fact that there are few mid-airs is owed to ATC, technology (TCAS, TAS) and “big sky”, rather than vigilant pilots.
[+] [-] ericpauley|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cmckn|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] toast0|4 years ago|reply
From the picture, the plane at rest is pretty messed up, but all occupants are safe, and pending investigation, there doesn't seem to be a sign of mechanical error involved.
Flying in (or near) small planes has a lot of risk, but I don't see how this incident would change your impression of this one manufacturer's planes.
[+] [-] dillondoyle|4 years ago|reply
I'm sure the chances of a collision outside of the airport is absolutely basically zero, but these small planes fly really low over my house and the downtown area all the time. They get pretty low and close for touring over the big buildings for photos and stuff, see photos on reddit all the time..
[+] [-] vertis|4 years ago|reply
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ph7OR6C90w
[+] [-] throw0101a|4 years ago|reply
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5tb2dVWJqc
[+] [-] HHalvi|4 years ago|reply
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5tb2dVWJqc
[+] [-] MobileVet|4 years ago|reply
Reminds me of the Aloha Flight 243. My mom's cousin was the pilot and hearing his first hand account was pretty crazy. Fun fact, he got to be an extra in the made for TV movie of the event.
https://www.thisdayinaviation.com/tag/robert-l-schornstheime...
[+] [-] ardit33|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
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