Originally Posted by
BFSGrad
The situation was actually more visually complicated.
And I think you can drop the "visually".
For the ATCO, there wasn't only the flow of arrivals, but a good number of (no delay) departures, all this on intersecting runways and, not shown on the screenshot, in the seconds (a few dozens of...) prior to the accident, the ATCO was handling at least 3 helicopters (Mussel7 / Medevac / PAT25), even not counting the police helicopter working in the SW corner as depicted in the screenshot.
And all this on three* separate frequencies, not fully cross coupled, so TWR was receiving on several occasions, simultaneous/parallel incoming R/T calls (* based on info from other posters in both threads here on pprune & NTSB info - but I still have doubts PAT25 was on UHF, although 3 or 2 freq's, doesn't really matter in this accident's context)
And simulations by VASAviation and the likes, are heavily edited (as they correctly indicate in their comments), so they easily give the impression that traffic and R/T comm's were relatively light...