Hello, gents. This is my first post on this particular site, but visitors to ‘Reporting Points’ may recognise my ‘handle’. If I may use a few random quotes from this thread to illustrate my pet cause, the introduction of offset tracking (which I accept would not have prevented this particular tragedy):
From ’Fox3snapshot’: “…my point is that it is still important not to forget the basics of our procedural standards and build a bit of "fat" into the program to allow for, poor comms, possible language problems, co-ordination failures, radar failures etc.”
From ’120.4’: “The first lesson I learned at the college was that in this game sod's law works double but because things rarely go wrong, we have come to expect that they won't.” (my boldface)
From ‘Flanker’: “I was unfortunate enough to have a close, opposite direction same level (FL330) airmiss… Luckily we were VMC and I saw the guy coming.”
Finally, one last quote from this thread:
“This could never happen in UK airspace...”
My bet is that until a week ago, there would be many of you who would have said: “This could never happen in
Western European airspace...
Some of you may care to take the time to read the following two submissions that have been on the Pprune Tech/Safety board for more than five years now:
http://www.pprune.org/go.php?go=/pub/tech/MidAir.html
and
http://www.pprune.org/go.php?go=/pub/tech/MidAir2.html
So do we wait until the scenario ‘Flanker’ gave us in the quote above actually results in a head-to-head midair before we lock yet another proverbial stable door behind a long gone horse? Or do we all, pilots and ATCOs alike,
INSIST upon the speedy implementation of an embedded offset for all operations above 10,000’ for appropriately equipped aircraft?
I urge anyone reading this to consider this suggestion beyond (what seems to be) the immediate knee jerk reaction of saying “it can’t be done”. It is not a slight on the professionalism of ATCOs, just an acceptance that mistakes can – and, as has just been proven, do – occur in the most professional organisations. Why do we insist on placing pilots in a position of quite literally dodging speeding bullets when the technology is staring us all in the face that would ensure those ‘speeding bullets’ will pass exactly ‘.n’ miles abeam of them – every time?