infrequentflyer789 writes:
It is precisely like the surgeon handing the kid the scalpel and saying "cut here, this long this deep". The surgeon is making the decision and supervising and standing ready to attempt to patch things up when the kid nicks a major artery.
Oh, for pete's sake!
This same tired and inaccurate analogy has been fluttered around all the forums.
It is NOT the same thing.
This is comparing a physical action which would cause an instant physical reaction to a communication between humans which could be corrected before being acted upon.
Apples to sardines.
Nicking an artery would IMMEDIATELY let blood out, and would require a lot of physical work to fix.
You can't tell an artery "disregard, here is the correct incision."
The boy wasn't issuing heading changes / altitude changes.
Planes don't immediately leap into the air upon being given clearance for takeoff. A lot of posts try to make it seem like an aircraft cleared would reach V1 before ATC had the next opportunity to communicate with it. Possible, I suppose, but unlikely.
Dad was obviously in control.
Had the boy started to say the wrong thing or say it at the wrong time, he would have been IMMEDIATELY over-ridden.
Did dad make a bad guess re: the sh*t storm it would create? No doubt. This is a purely "made for FOX" event with lots of potential for all the dire words and all the calls for heads to roll.
Could all the "holes in the cheese" have lined up just-so to create an incident? Perhaps. If either of the guy's kids had undiagnosed Tourette's Syndrome, who knows what could have happened!
But I think it's prolly better having a doting father / son (or doting father / daughter) combo doing this than having a controller who is doing it merely to impress a girlfriend into giving him a knobjob later...
At least the dad / kid duo won't be as fundamentally distracted by "non-aviation" considerations.
Also, I've read more than a few posts regarding "pirate" transmissions possible using hand-held VHF.
The bulk of these posts seem to excoriate the pilots in New York for not rejecting the kid's tx out-of-hand for simply being a different voice, hence, possibly a "pirate" transmission.
I'm fairly familiar with comm in general. In most cases, it's pretty easy to tell a different voice in the same location from a different voice in a different location, although I don't think this 100% universal or error-proof. Certainly, it depends upon the background noise in all three locations.
But I would think that the sonic quality of the mics and transmitters and the acoustic environment in a control tower would be quite different from those of a hand-held unit outside or in a car.
A question I'd like to ask "the drivers" is this: How hard would it be for you to tell the difference between the real controller you've been talking to and a spoof?
Note, it's merely curiosity, and perhaps it will spark some interesting debate.
I'd also like to thank a few posters for their ribald sarcasm - fire the dad, burn the house, pilots will fly planes into the ground if ATC tells them to, et cetera. I've gotten a few laughs from y'all, keep up the good work!
