Final Report: Near-hit F15C vs F70 2012/04/19 Sylt

[PAX_Britannica]

Apologies if this is covered in another thread.

Some quite unusual comments in the report:
http://www.onderzoeksraad.nl/uploads/phase-docs/411/18c5e705b0c42012041rapport-bijna-botsing-en-def.pdf

If USAF(E) was an Airline ... ?

[sb_sfo]

Nothing particularly unusual about US armed forces refusing to cooperate with other countries' civil investigations. Remember the cowboy that took out the tram lift cable near Aviano?

[Cows getting bigger]

One can hardly pile huge amounts of blame on the F15 guy. This reads like one monumental airspace coordination and planning cock-up.

[Ian W]

One can hardly pile huge amounts of blame on the F15 guy. This reads like one monumental airspace coordination and planning cock-up.

Lots of assumptions made -


'it is an active danger area so its sterile for us'
'Everyone knows we allow IFR flights on upper air routes through _our_ danger areas'
'I am receiving a radar service so I will be vectored clear of any traffic'
'The exercise aircraft understand our non-standard phraseology'
etc


The plan is to move away from 'static' airspace reservations and air routes toward 'business trajectories' and Flexible Use of Airspace. Exercise areas will be explicitly set up with their own rules and the controllers' conflict detection software will provide deconfliction advice to ensure that aircraft that do not meet the reserved airspace rules avoid the airspace volume. That is the theory anyway :)

This means that grandfathered-in letters of agreement and memoranda of understanding and even locally developed quick fixes - will be replaced by the FUA protocols. So this type of administrative 'misunderstanding' should not happen in the future airspace systems.

Currently that is the vision for ~10 years time in European airspace.

[PAX_Britannica]

One can hardly pile huge amounts of blame on the F15 guy. This reads like one monumental airspace coordination and planning cock-up.
Not sure the F15 pilot comes out completely squeaky clean. But the F15 pilot and his/her controller do seem to have been rather dropped in it.
Two days before the aircraft proximity occurred, he [fighter controller] had expressed his concerns to the fighter allocator regarding the conditions of the exercise, i.e. the location of the regen airfield close to an active airway and the airway itself. The fighter allocator had informed the liaison officer at Leeuwarden Air Base about this. This message did not result in any changes.

[10W]

The crux is whether the F15 pilot received and acknowledged his restriction to fly not above FL320. If he did, then he failed to comply and directly caused the incident. If he didn't, then the fighter controller didn't ensure separation and is the causal factor.

The other planning screw ups and differences of opinion on airspace status and responsibilities are aggravating factors.

It would have been nice to have the RT transcript to see what took place between the fighter controller and the pilot. It would answer the main question.

In my experience, the USAF are usually pretty good at providing information regarding civil vs military incidents to help investigations. Not sure why they were not forthcoming this time.

[5LY]

20 years ago I had a near miss with an F-16 over Nurnberg. I could hear the noise of his engines as he passed just under my nose climbing. I'm sure he was messing with us, but it was a shock. I had a 737 full of pax. I filed a near miss report. A few weeks later a report came back saying that according to the Americans I was mistaken.

They cooperate when it suits them.

[Schnowzer]

Classic visual in an IFR environment. The fighter is used to operating visually and probably felt comfortable that the collision risk was minimal, the airliner used to IFR felt very differently. The min sep for the fighter would have been 1000' head sector and 500' stern all axis which is not very compatible with 5nm and 1000' vertically.

Not right but just the way it is. It takes the mil to start flying heavies before they realise how vulnerable you can feel. Another example is clipping zones hitting low level.

[ShotOne]

It does seem to indicate a certain contempt that USAFE refused to provide any information to the enquiry. And I doubt if an airliner infringed a military restricted area they'd say "...that's just the way it is". That said, it sounds more error chain than individual negligence.

The most worrying part though, is that it seems to have come as a big surprise to the exercise organisers that the airways( which hadn't been closed) had aircraft using them!

[Herod]

Sly. I have to agree with you. Many years ago I was involved in a formation of three F111s. Two went down the portside and one the starboard. I filed an airmiss report and it was downgraded to a sighting, because according to the USAF "the airliner rocked its wings, indicating it had seen the formation". Considering that the time between sighting and passing was less than five seconds, how much wing-rocking can the average airliner do?