Runway Incursion part IIX

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.

That sounds like O'Hare. I always enjoyed flying in there because the controllers are always on their A-game, and the pilots tend to be as well... it's a place that you kinda know stuff is gonna go down, and everyone just follows the system, or adapts it to fit the situation.
 
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.

I like when tower owns the taxiways between parallel runways. Keeps from constant frequency changes just to exit one runway and taxi up to and hold short of another, just to contact tower again.

Have seen some airports where ground owns the intermediate taxiways, and also keeps you for the crossing of the runway after having coordinated with the local controller for that runway.
 
I like when tower owns the taxiways between parallel runways. Keeps from constant frequency changes just to exit one runway and taxi up to and hold short of another, just to contact tower again.

Have seen some airports where ground owns the intermediate taxiways, and also keeps you for the crossing of the runway after having coordinated with the local controller for that runway.
As it should be. Switching back and forth is asinine.
 
Re:ORD
A few years ago some controllers from ORD won the overall Archie League Award when a plane was given runway heading off one of the 10s (not the northern one though), and instead dialed in 010 on their heading bug and flew right at another departure on 10L. Tower was split north and south at the time.
 
Yeah some of our stuff runs on something that resembles windows 95 instead of DOS, the radars are their own beast
 
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