Alpha
Sorry if I hurt your feelings. As they say: If ya cant take the heat, stay out of the kitchen!
Now as I said, lets exchange knowledge and experience to make our industry better and safer. If you are not a member of this industry but have an interest and care to know a little bit what we do than ask questions and educate yourself but don’t come on this board and tell folks what is going on at skyguide, Swiss airspace or anything in relation to those issues.
You said:
BTW, my own experience with Swiss ATC is based on my years with the Swiss air force.
As what?
You also said on 3rd July 2002 at 11:24:
I am not too familiar with (Swiss) civilian ATC (only military ATC)
Further:
To my knowledge, there have been no terminations, no resignations, and even the Swiss Transport Minister has refused to accept responsibility for the absolute sh1thouse Skyguide operated on that fatal night.
What for? To evade responsibility before any investigation has concluded let alone begun? (on the by by I like your expression: the absolute sh1thouse)
Skyguide were, on that particular evening, in violation of their very own operating rules, including - but not limited to - the fact that only one controller was in attendance.
So there you answer your own Q. skyguide does have proper SOPs in effect. The fact that they were not adhered to or only partially implemented is and was an issue of concern at that particular time. That would be a human factor failure under these particular circumstances and not a systemic failure.
If your German (or, for that matter, French) is insufficient to understand the documents that are in the public domain on this issue, I cannot help you.
Still more familiar - thanks to private contacts within Skyguide - than you will ever be, right?
Anyway: merci vielmal, da gseht me wider was für äs Bildigsniveau i de Schwiiz herrscht
So who antagonizing who here?
You have send a link to a BFU (NTSB) document which I haven't seen before. Thank you.
Let me roughly translate some of the highlights of that report:
- The impending reduction in separation was noticed late by the ATCO.
- The crew of the TU154M followed the advice of the ATCO and initiated a descent.
- The TU154M continued the descent even though TCAS was calling for a climb.
- Thus the crew flew the opposite of a TCAS RA maneuver.
- Upon reaching FL350 the TU154M had a sink rate of 1900 ft/min
- The TU154M has left the ATCOS assigned flight level.
- The ANSP does not guarantee for a permanent staffing of all open WP during the night shift.
- The ANSP allows the second ATCO to rest during the times of low/none traffic during the night sift.
Are you relating the last 2 points as systemic skyguide failures?
These are not uncommon SOPs to my knowledge.
Yes, it leaves room for improvements and these improvements have been implemented on all fronts.
So there you have it Alpha! I said it before and I says it again! If one would want to reproduce the event of Ueberlingen willfully one would not be able to.
This was a freak accident and it just had to happen.
Now, where do you come in? What is your knowledge? What is your wisdom? What can you do to prevent such similar freaky event from reoccurring elsewhere under such impossible conditions?