willadvise, I can well understand the concerns you express in your examples. However, they illustrate very clearly why line pilots, ATC and the regulators haven’t been able to get together and solve this problem to date. Put simply, it is ignorance of each other’s problems and concerns and a lack of will so far by those in a position to do something constructive towards addressing them.
The designers of the most commonly used Flight Management Systems foresaw your objection as you detailed in your examples. Offsetting isn’t possible in a STAR or a SID. The feature is not selectable until the SID had been completed and if an offset is still in place on descent, it is automatically deleted at the beginning of the STAR.
To repeat the main thrust of my argument: as line pilots, we don’t perceive a big problem in an ATC environment where a controller is actively vectoring aircraft on radar, particularly in a ‘first world’ environment. The arousal level of all concerned in these phases of flight is usually high enough to have at least one set of eyes sufficiently on the big picture to prevent glaring mistakes being made. (I have to say there are exceptions even to this, and ‘Murphy’ is always lurking in the shadows ready to catch even the sharpest controller or pilot out, as seems to have been illustrated by the recent very near miss between the loosely formating F15 with the Britannia 757 over the UK late last month. If initial explanations of this incident prove to be true, is there anyone out there who still places his total trust in TCAS to provide separation?)
It is the other ten hours of a long haul flight, (or the forty minutes of a short haul flight), where arousal levels are not quite so high, where co-ordination between ATC agencies may be poor or non-existent, (between semi-warring agencies for example, like Larnaca and Ankara), where we want to see something done. There have been more than a few incidents already attributable to the super accuracy of modern nav systems, some of them in so-called ‘first world’ countries, even the U.S.A. In Africa, offsetting’s been recognised as an easily-achievable and much-needed fix. Do we have to wait until hundreds more die in one more single catastrophe before we slam the proverbial stale door and adopt it elsewhere in the world? It’s not as though it hasn’t happened on a large scale already – it has, but so far, ‘out of the Western media’s eye’ in places like India or Africa. So far in the West, thankfully it’s only been commuter or charter aircraft involved, like the accident over the Grand Canyon in the U.S. If it ever happens to two widebodies full of Western tourists or businessmen, you can bet the media and the lawyers! will be screaming “Why didn’t you as an industry do something to prevent this when you knew the problem existed?”
We’re not in any way accusing you as Air Traffic Controllers of being sub-standard in the performance of your jobs. We’re just acknowledging that we are all human. It’s all too possible for a pilot to misread a clearance or acknowledge a climb or descent instruction for another aircraft with a similar callsign. It’s just as easy for a harried controller to miss or misread the information passed to him on an aircraft entering his airspace. It happened off the east coast of Africa a couple of years ago and the crew and passengers of two jet aircraft paid the ultimate price.
Murphy' Law says that if such an error does occur, the errant aircraft will almost certainly be in conflict with some other aircraft. Twenty years ago, such an error might have gone unnoticed except in some pilot’s or controller’s annual fitness report. Today, thanks to the extremely accurate nav systems most of us use, that same small error could have catastrophic consequences. Offsetting in the cruise phase of flight (when not under radar vectors) would put in place a ‘bugger factor’ that might help prevent one small mistake leading to a catastrophe.
If we could just talk, (and maybe more importantly, listen) to each other, as we’re doing on this thread, we might get around the misunderstandings that could give an outside observer the impression that we’re all too busy defending our individual pieces of turf to do what’s best for all of us.
Somebody on another thread mentioned the 'Titanic' principle of management - where each department is perfctly happy so long as its deck chairs are all neatly arranged. Meanwile the overall 'ship' is sliding gracefully under the waves. The same might be said of this argument.
Edited for typos.
[This message has been edited by 410 (edited 05 December 2000).]