OK,
Pre Ueberlingen, many operators had ops manual phraseology allowing the crew to disregard an RA under certain circumstances. Post Ueberlingen that option no longer exists.
Much comment has been made regarding the differences in training philosophy that led to the accident.
The thing is, even before Ueberlingen, every source I ever saw gave specific advice that an aircraft should NEVER be manouevred in the opposite sense to an RA.
Loss of flexibility about following an RA (pilots discretion) is, imho, a bad thing. I've talked about this before on several threads, and I am not going to rehash the arguements or get into a pissing contest with anyone who slags me off for saying that following an RA may not be the safest course of action. The simple fact is that TCAS has good info about some threats to your aircraft, but there are a bunch of things it doesn't know about. As such 99.9% of the time its a good bet to follow the RA but as Pilots we should retain final control of our aircraft to cover the 0.1%. Thats why they pay us the big bucks, if you don't like it get off the jet and let them replace us entirely with computers.
At Ueberlingen, what did the Tupolev crew need to do to avoid the collision?
Well...... nothing in fact. Thats right, not a thing.
All they had to do was NOT manouevre in the opposite sense to their RA. Unfortunately they did, not once, but twice.
Ueberlingen type events had happened before. They were standing out in the JAA TCAS transition program newletters (but fortunately with horizontal separation saving the day). The simple fact is that most TCAS nasties contain at least one, and often several, manouevres opposite to the RA. This is the key point, focussing on the need to follow an RA is missing the point, and sooner or later somebody will find themselves in a situation where they can't follow it, or to so so will be unsafe, and then they'll be in a double bind.
ATC Watcher: Are there still 6.04 users flying around?
I agree with the 'add a turn' concept. It used to be part of the training offerred to controllers at LATCC (I spent a fair bit of time talking to their terminal training team when I put our companies TCAS program together). However I believe that they don't suggest this anymore.
Airmen: Absolutely. Over use of the traffic display is a common error.
joernstu: Mode S contains the basic architecture and message formats to downlink RA data to ATC. Apologies if you already knew that. Last I heard (which is a couple of years at least out of date) it was being trialed at a couple of places. I don't know what the current state of play is, anyone know?
pb