PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - 'Hundreds' of close calls (merged)
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Old 18th Oct 2006, 08:27
  #28 (permalink)  
Andu
 
Join Date: Aug 2000
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Peuce, as has been said by others quite some years ago on this site, the current situation is akin to walking directly in line with a machine gun that the shooter assures you is 'safely' aimed over your head. Or driving down the highway at high speed with your lights off straddling the centreline *knowing* that no one's coming the other way because some traffic cop has assured you over the phone that he's stopping all opposite direction traffic.

Sometimes, the cop gets it wrong or the machine gunner slips with his aim. Wouldn't it be easier - or smarter? - to drive on one side of the road or stand out of the machine gunner's azimuth?

JUST
IN
CASE?

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****su, like many other ATCOs, you seem to take the offset idea as a personal affront to your professionalism. It's anything but - just a all too easy to implement last ditch LIFE SAVER if all the other 'holes in the cheese' line up one day - as they unfortunately do.

It would be so damned easy to implement. The offset kicks in whenever LNAV is selected. If track select or or heading select is active, the aircraft points directly at the next waypoint. If that's too simple, surely it wouldn't be too difficult to have the offset disabled when the aircraft is within certain lat and long co-ordinates, (the busy areas ATCOs say offsetting would be a problem).

154 Brazilians would still be alive today if the suggestion, I think pushed very heavily by 410 on this site ten or more years ago, had been implemented. And they're not the first. The Luftwaffe and USAF crews who died off the West African coast in very similar circumstances would also still be with us.

If the 154 dead had been US citizens, I'd be guessing that there'd be a class action suit hitting the courts within weeks against ICAO for not implementing offsetting years ago.
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