Runway Incursion part IIX

Acrofox said:
Sorry, RPA crew, but you guys Foxtrot-ed up. Bad instruction, but it was clearly "Cross 4 at J," and read back as such. Pure expectation bias—you can't be cavalier when crossing runways.

That said, ATC error was a contributing factor for sure.

Ugly.
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I'm not sure what's going on these days with ATC. At a Bravo airport, I saw 3 airliners go missed in the past week. All in blue bird VFR. All around 200-300 feet AGL. All uncomfortably close to the departing traffic that was still on the departing runway over which the misses were climbing. Kinda spooky.
 
greg1016 said:
You may disagree but you have it the other way around, ATC will get the causal, RPA will get contributing. It sounds as though there may have been a controller change, but it might just be the radio recording. Taxi instructions must be specific, and that is where the chain starts. The RPA was cleared J, F to RY 33. There is no "change to" or "revised instructions" J crosses 4 but so does F. They were told to hold short of RY 1 at F, then told to cross RY 4 at J, with no indication that their taxi instructions or runway assignment had been changed. If there was in fact a controller change, the briefing could have been incomplete or perhaps it was misunderstood by the relieving controller. In any case, the primary blame goes to the controller who told them to cross one runway when they were last told to hold short of a different runway. Those runways have center lines that are <1300ft apart so both runways can be crossed in one clearance instruction, although I assume the clearance would be cross ry1 and 4 at F, I do not know.

YES the flight crew COULD have prevented this, but it was a bad instruction that CAUSED it.

Even if there had been an ATIS broadcast that was omitted from this video. It is still on the controller to ASSIGN a new runway and issue specific instructions.
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I get as a tower guy (not sure if former or current) you see the controlling error as a big mess up but I would be very surprised if an official investigation found that to be the primary causal factor. The pilots were never cleared to cross runway 1 ever. Their initial clearance was hold short of 1 and then they were cleared to cross 4. At the end of the day that is the primary issue and the improper atc communication is a strong contributor. I think a lot of these pilots are way to nonchalant about their rwy crossings in general.
 
Hate to say it but these recent incidents are creating that chain of events that will end very badly sooner than later.
 
On the DCA one, ground lost situational awareness and lost track of the departure runway/clearance limit assigned to RPA. Ground assigned them runway 33 but then thought they sent them to runway 1 where the other guy was departing, hence the “cross 4 at J” instruction. RPA heard “cross a runway” and crossed the runway in front of them. They were both wrong, but ATC was wrong first.

The ORD one was hilarious in how professional tower was with the whole thing.

*looks up from newspaper*
“Oh hey look that United is turning the wrong way into departing traffic”
*nonchalantly issues some altitude limits and turns*
“All better”
And two local controllers had this reaction simultaneously and basically team worked the problem. Impressive.
 
inigo88 said:
On the DCA one, ground lost situational awareness and lost track of the departure runway/clearance limit assigned to RPA. Ground assigned them runway 33 but then thought they sent them to runway 1 where the other guy was departing, hence the “cross 4 at J” instruction. RPA heard “cross a runway” and crossed the runway in front of them. They were both wrong, but ATC was wrong first.

The ORD one was hilarious in how professional tower was with the whole thing.

*looks up from newspaper*
“Oh hey look that United is turning the wrong way into departing traffic”
*nonchalantly issues some altitude limits and turns*
“All better”
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Jeebus! With ALL the Kings horses and computers and ADS-x applications, can't we automate most of the process to limit ONE slab of pavement to ONE plane at ONE time?? (hint: it's a pretty simple algorithm)
 
form810 said:
Jeebus! With ALL the Kings horses and computers and ADS-x applications, can't we automate most of the process to limit ONE slab of pavement to ONE plane at ONE time?? (hint: it's a pretty simple algorithm)
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I mastered Simon Says when I was five.
 
form810 said:
Jeebus! With ALL the Kings horses and computers and ADS-x applications, can't we automate most of the process to limit ONE slab of pavement to ONE plane at ONE time?? (hint: it's a pretty simple algorithm)
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It is, but I still prefer competent humans. :)

In the DCA case I know ground (at least used to) write the clearance limit / runway assignment on the paper strip, but a lot of facilities are stripless now. Not sure what other tools tower has to maintain that SA these days, @greg1016 do you guys have cool touch screens now or something?

Another interesting airport configuration note is that a lot of larger airports like LAX, ORD etc tend to have the local controller own the taxiways between runways. This seems to work pretty well because generally the same person who just cleared someone for takeoff on a runway isn’t then going to clear someone else to cross the same runway (at least in theory). In the DCA case ground issued the cross runway 4 monitor tower instruction, but I wonder if things would have been different if tower owned that stretch of taxiway J between runways 4 and 1. It’s a very small nuance but different facilities seem to handle that differently.
 
inigo88 said:
On the DCA one, ground lost situational awareness and lost track of the departure runway/clearance limit assigned to RPA. Ground assigned them runway 33 but then thought they sent them to runway 1 where the other guy was departing, hence the “cross 4 at J” instruction. RPA heard “cross a runway” and crossed the runway in front of them. They were both wrong, but ATC was wrong first.

The ORD one was hilarious in how professional tower was with the whole thing.

*looks up from newspaper*
“Oh hey look that United is turning the wrong way into departing traffic”
*nonchalantly issues some altitude limits and turns*
“All better”
And two local controllers had this reaction simultaneously and basically team worked the problem. Impressive.
Click to expand...

Classic ORD for sure. I used to go there a lot, and they (ATC) were just unflappable no matter what was happening. I finally went back to ORD a couple months ago, first time in almost five years. Absolutely nothing changed, they were still awesome!
 
inigo88 said:
It is, but I still prefer competent humans. :)

In the DCA case I know ground (at least used to) write the clearance limit / runway assignment on the paper strip, but a lot of facilities are stripless now. Not sure what other tools tower has to maintain that SA these days, @greg1016 do you guys have cool touch screens now or something?

Another interesting airport configuration note is that a lot of larger airports like LAX, ORD etc tend to have the local controller own the taxiways between runways. This seems to work pretty well because generally the same person who just cleared someone for takeoff on a runway isn’t then going to clear someone else to cross the same runway (at least in theory). In the DCA case ground issued the cross runway 4 monitor tower instruction, but I wonder if things would have been different if tower owned that stretch of taxiway J between runways 4 and 1. It’s a very small nuance but different facilities seem to handle that differently.
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Yeah, we're on the same page there. Competent humans are always good. Especially when they are the ones issuing to the orders to the goats in the pasture. I'm just wondering how hard it would be to add some addition functions to the goats' ear tags so those competent humans might have increased awareness of every goat's position and movement at all times.

And, by the way, whatever happened to RWSL? Just not implemented everywhere? Not working? Being ignored?
 
inigo88 said:
It is, but I still prefer competent humans. :)

In the DCA case I know ground (at least used to) write the clearance limit / runway assignment on the paper strip, but a lot of facilities are stripless now. Not sure what other tools tower has to maintain that SA these days, @greg1016 do you guys have cool touch screens now or something?

Another interesting airport configuration note is that a lot of larger airports like LAX, ORD etc tend to have the local controller own the taxiways between runways. This seems to work pretty well because generally the same person who just cleared someone for takeoff on a runway isn’t then going to clear someone else to cross the same runway (at least in theory). In the DCA case ground issued the cross runway 4 monitor tower instruction, but I wonder if things would have been different if tower owned that stretch of taxiway J between runways 4 and 1. It’s a very small nuance but different facilities seem to handle that differently.
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Every airport I know of is still using strips. CLE was to be the first to adopt electronic strips but I do not know if that has happened yet. MHT only writes the assigned runway on the strip if it is other than the main service runway. We don't have enough traffic to worry about runway changes. JFK is the same, runway only is written if it is not the main service runway. In the case of JFK, the climb out instructions are runway specific, and those are written on the strip by clearance delivery.

Glad someone around here agrees with me, thanks. I understand the pilot perspective, and the pilots on this forum are consummate pros, so I understand why they'd be upset and assign blame to the RPA.
 
cmac88 said:
Any pilots here want to speculate on what got plugged in to screw it up that bad? Controllers did a great job like nothing happened.
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The flight numbers first of all. They’re all bouncing between 4 UAL flights, all with 4 digit flight numbers in whatever sequence. Some sound similar to the others and the numbers are getting spit out pretty quickly (on both ends). I got lost 30 seconds into this.
 
SeanD said:
Hate to say it but these recent incidents are creating that chain of events that will end very badly sooner than later.
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I hate to be "that person," but that's not how accident event chains work. These incidents are showing weaknesses in the system, and that the system isn't in good shape, but they have nothing to do with the creation of causal links.
 
cmac88 said:
I get as a tower guy (not sure if former or current) you see the controlling error as a big mess up but I would be very surprised if an official investigation found that to be the primary causal factor. The pilots were never cleared to cross runway 1 ever. Their initial clearance was hold short of 1 and then they were cleared to cross 4. At the end of the day that is the primary issue and the improper atc communication is a strong contributor. I think a lot of these pilots are way to nonchalant about their rwy crossings in general.
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I actually LIKE the fact that both sides want to blame their own side. That's actually a good thing for safety culture, I feel.
 
GypsyPilot said:
Classic ORD for sure. I used to go there a lot, and they (ATC) were just unflappable no matter what was happening. I finally went back to ORD a couple months ago, first time in almost five years. Absolutely nothing changed, they were still awesome!
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I love flying into ORD. Amazing controllers.
 
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