I would hope it is close to unknown here, too. What I am taken by is that if you listen to the ATC audio link in the newspaper article (legal in the US
), the controller seems pretty nonchalant in telling Brickyard 3329 to head 180...
There has been some discussion of this on LiveATC:
kdca tuesday | LiveATC.net
As pointed out in post #3 of that thread, the audio archive of the incident time is only 24 minutes long, whereas usually those archives are 30 minutes in length.
I suspect that in the six minutes of audio apparently missing from the LiveATC archive there's some rather dramatic vectoring going on.
You'd also expect
somebody to have reported a TCAS RA in such a situation, wouldn't you? If the recording is complete, why don't we hear that, either on LiveATC, or in the audio provided with the news story?
Quote:
...(pretty much making a 180 turn from its established approach heading to RW 1). Either this is a lot of sang froid, or she didn't realize:
The inbound plane and the first of the outbound planes were closing the 1.4 miles between them at a combined speed of 436 mph, a rate that meant they were about 12 seconds from impact when the tower controller recognized her mistake.
Or, possibly, the article is wrong about close they were.
Also linked in that post is the Flightaware track:
FlightAware > Republic (RW) #3329 > 31-Jul-2012 > KPWM - KDCA Flight Tracker
I suspect the "nonchalant" heading of 180 was the latter turn to the south, after the initial avoidance manuvering.
I hate to suspect that something has been intentionally deleted there at LiveATC, but Occam is telling me otherwise...