How many more “Close Calls”
The attached file is a copy of an article that appeared in last week’s USA Today. It describes another near miss over Indian Airspace and casually mentions in it’s closing paragraph that there had been some 20 near collisions in Indian skies since November 1996.
Now it doesn’t need an Einstein to realize that one of these days it won’t be a near miss but a full hit.
With “Freeflight” and the implementation of full Fans still a decade away, are we just going to sit and wait for a disaster to happen. The Airway system and communication system over India (and many more places in the world for that matter) are completely outdated and not capable of handling today’s traffic volume. A friend of mine, who is a leading design engineer in navigation equipment, told me that he sometimes had sleepless nights realizing that the equipment designed today was so accurate that, used in the present ATC environment, would one day contribute to a midair.
We cannot sit idle and wait for some beancounting bureaucrat in organizations like ICAO and JAA to change and adapt ATC procedures to create a safer environment, and avoid such disasters from happening. We all know that changes will not come soon, and only after several disasters will somebody wake up and actually start to do something.
I believe, and have argued this before, that we should start a discussion to come up with some ideas and/or procedures as to how to implement the legal and authorized changes in the present system. With the many aviation forums that we have today,let us use these forums to encourage positive discussions, resulting in policy changes, and increased safety.
For the time being, Offset Tracking is an individual choice, to increase separation, and is being used by more an more pilots (as per several articles in Flight International). But as long as these procedures remain someone’s individual technique, it might and will work for that crewmember, but is not used to it’s full effect as it is not an official procedure.
Offset Tracking, Parallel-Oneway airways, direct INS and GPS routes are all procedures that can be implemented fairly easily and without great financial inputs. Why is it not happening, and what are the political forces stopping it from happening?
Where do we start, and what is the procedure to follow?
The irony of the situation is that, while we are flying a multi-million dollar piece of equipment into the 21st century, screaming at the top of our voices over some outdated piece of HF equipment, trying with 100 other flyers to get our position known to an Indian ATC controller, you can step back into our luxurious passenger cabins, where every passenger today can swipe his creditcard through his individual armrest satellite phone and have immediate 5/5 duplex phone connection with anybody in the world.
I wonder if we have got our priorities right.