The A380 captain obviously shoulders part of the blame. But the CRJ was clearly not where the controller thought it was. Did the captain of that aircraft report that his stand was blocked or that he was waiting for a marshaller? If not then he must also accept some of the blame. If he did then the controller should have passed it on.

I disagree. You cannot run into people just because they didn't tell you they were in the way.

Looking at the video, I don't think the AF pilot saw the RJ. However the onus is on him to ensure the safety of his aircraft.

Airports too small?
 

Seven Stroke Roll opines that "airplanes get too big, or airports get too small, which is easier to change?"....... The answer is not necessarily obvious.

I recollect from reading aviation history that a British Aircraft manufacturer, shortly after WWII, decided to go with making planes (for those who could afford this luxury way of travel) that were capable of landing on the existing short runways. But other companies went for long haul capacity craft that could carry a lot of bums on seats. And guess what happened?

Every major city built a bigger airport.

Parking sensors have been an option on cars for a long time. I would have thought something could have been added to the A380 wing tip to warn of obstructions. Especially as the increased span was know to be an issue for airports at the design stage. It seemed to stop quite quickly so not much warning needed?

Traffic cops
 

Earlier in this thread there was much speculation that ATC has some role/responibility in avoiding ground collisions. 'After all that's what they do in the air'.

If you have a traffic cop regulating the flow of cars at a busy intersection and you collide with a parked car fifty feet from the intersection-who's fault is it?

The buck must eventually stop with AF PIC.

S

Lets not forget that the regional jet is not a small plane, it was either a CRJ700 or 900 not much smaller than a 737.

Everybody is talking as if this was a cessna 152

What is wrong with some of you guys?

For goodness sake he was taxiing the worlds biggest commercial jet down a dark narrow taxiway at high speed and he hits another aircraft he should have seen was too close to safely pass and you blame the CRJ crew!!!

I suppose if he'd run his Peugot into the back of another car at the lights you'd blame the other car too!! :mad:

All he had to do was taxi in a straight line at a sensible speed with his EYES OPEN and NOT RUN INTO ANYTHING.......

i have to ask , why are people actually blaming the smaller aircraft? waiting for someone in hi-vis to bring them to the gate surely is the correct way to operate? and as they were not actually moving at the time and being whacked by the great big A380 ; well the lawyers will earn from this (as seen in this very thread) by saying ` well although he was moving the smaller aircraft is to blame` or ` the taxi ways are too small , as has been reported many times`.

nitpicker, you know this? And how?

The blame lies squarely in the flight deck of the A380.

Either the Captain didn't follow AF training or SOP's in this regard. Or he didn't follow plain common sense.

Or the blame lies with AF training (or lack thereof) as in the QF Bangkok over run incident.

Or the blame lies with AF rostering patterns that don't afford adequate rest for the crew in JFK.

I don't know what caused this, but whatever reasons they find, the blame most certainly lies in the AF flight deck for one reason or maybe another.

Say, Gents...

For those who affirm the blame is only on the AF crew : So, case closed ? Nothing to learn from this accident apart that AF is bad bad bad ? Whoa...
Perhaps that idea pleases you, but what's the point, regarding safer operations :confused:

I have no idea of the difficulty of taxiing a liner, let alone a super. I rely on suninmyeyes' post (#67) here, which seems balanced to my untrained eyes.

Surely there are ideas to challenge.
What about a "don't leave the taxiway if you're not going to make it to the gate" rule, for example ?
What about aids for the crew of the A380, adressing the need to see your own wingtips in a crowded environnement ?

Cheers :)
AZR

Look, let me try to once again put it into words anyone who has driven a car could understand.

Lets say you're driving along in a large car at night and you come across a vehicle sitting off to the left side of your path, you are unable to move to the right and now you're not quite sure if you can fit through. Instead of stopping and waiting a few minutes you push on through at high speed HOPING to fit through BUT lo and behold you knock off your wing mirrors and damage the other car.......

Now who do you think the Police/insurance assessors will blame?

You cannot assign blame to someone sitting on the side of the road minding their own business because you lack clear vision, judgement or indeed common sense ( in this case Airmanship )


And don't try to say "the A380 crew may not have seen the CRJ" That is no excuse and I don't believe for 1 second they didn't see the CRJ.

In many countries, if you are not properly parked off the road, insurance will not fully cover.:=

If a lorry has its ass stuck on a railway crossing because there is not enough space ahead, are you going to blame the train engineer for not stopping on time?

Many transportation rules require that one has to stay clear of intersections, crossings, channels and main ways.

If you cannot fit, do not go in. True for big, true for the small.

Just wondering about the T2 map posted by Huck in post #111 which states "A=Inner perimeter taxi clockwise" (AF was going the opposite way)
Is that something they've changed around at JFK, and would it have required any extra signage?

A few observations:

1. When trying to calculate taxi speed by using an anti-collision light that flashes, it is pretty essential to know the shutter speed of the camera in relation to the duration of the flash of the anti-coll. For example, you may have a frame rate of 25 frames per second, but your shutter speed may be 1/1000th of a second and the flash duration could be 1/100th of a second. Thus, it is quite possible that your resultant footage will be missing flashes altogether. During each 1/25th of a second, you are only capturing an image for 1/1000th of second. Of course at night it is likely that the shutter speed will be less than 1/1000th of a second, but hopefully you get my point.

2. It may well be that the PIC of the A380 is "to blame" both in principle and in law. But that doesn't mean he will be the sole cause. Blame = who will pay? Cause = what do we fix? In this case, I would be most surprised to find that there are not other contributory factors. Simply blaming the PIC will not prevent this kind of accident from happening again. Let's be clear, it's not just A380s that are involved in this kind of accident. They happen all the time with smaller aircraft too. Many big airports have procedures in place in an attempt to prevent accidents like this. That being the case at JFK, then any investigation will also look at what went wrong there. I'm pretty sure that a decent investigation won't simply blame the PIC and be done with it. You can compare driving a car to taxying an A380 if you like, but let's be honest, it really isn't as simply as that. They worked this out on railways ages ago and as a result you have signalling systems and interlocking to protect trains from one another. You could easily do something similar on taxiways, dividing them up into "block sections" and only allowing one aircraft per block. ATC wouldn't like that. Much easier to blame the PIC I suppose.

3. As a single example, here's a report from a recent collision at Heathrow. You may find it interesting, you may not.

Air Accidents Investigation: Airbus A340-311 Boeing 747-436, 4R-ADC G-BNLL

Have fun!

Rondun has picked up on something that everybody else seems to have missed - why were they instructed to taxi counter clockwise on the clockwise taxiway (A) - not that it would have made any difference because they could have been taxiing (clockwise) on A to their gate and would still have had the same wingspan from the center line of Alpha.

I wonder if two A380s taxiing in opposite directions on A and B have enough room to pass each other?

Reminds me of the freeway around Paris (peripherique). When driving clockwise around Paris (or Toulouse, they always follow Paris) you take the peripherique intérieur (closest to Paris) and anti clockwise you take the peripherique extérieur!

Prevention, not retribution
 

@AlphaRomeoZulu

Perhaps A380s should have another level of PIC for taxi, as ships do in port. That would create a LOT of new jobs
.
Well, at JFK you NEED to get in line for TO as soon as possible. Lots of AC and fewer slots. The trend at JFK is to hurry up and get in line. I know, I once experienced a TO delayed by 50+ minutes cause we had to return to gate to add fuel (Alitalia) after waiting in line too long.


Valid comment. In todays hi-tech environment, some basic collision avoidance warning would have paid dividends.

And I now agree with several other posters that we need to skip looking for a blame target(s) and get back to preventing any re-occurence. Those A380s are big MFs. This could have happened almost anywhere.

FN

Hey, Flynerd,

What a great idea "Perhaps A380s should have another level of PIC for taxi, as ships do in port."

He's called a pilot!

EXACTLY :) But with lots of local knowledge. Just think of all the new jobs!

FN

Unfortunately there will be more such incidents until the ground facilities at some major US and European airports are upgraded. These taxiways, aprons and parking bays were designed for B707's and the like, and although they can be strengthened for big aircraft, there is usually very little that can be done to widen or make more lateral space due to lack of real estate.

With this limitation and some of the ground control procedures in these places where very often the right hand (ground) doesn't know what the left hand (apron) is doing, the holes on the swiss cheese quickly line up. What to do??

A few more observations; Not until post #67 does anyone talk any sense at all, then to post #97 and 98 for a bit more sense.

If the RJ was stationary, as in parked, then the speed of AF is totally irrelevant. Speed would only be relevant if AF had been cleared to taxi subject to the RJ being clear.

AF and the RJ would have been on different frequencies, AF on ground and the RJ on the frequency of the company controlling that part of that terminal area, that is the American way. The controller talking to AF would not have known the actual position of the RJ, as far as he was concerned it was on stand.

It is common practice to park two aircraft on one stand, side by side, if they are small enough, which may be why the RJ shows to be to one side of the centre line for the stand. If the RJ had stopped short of the stand stop point it is his duty to advise this to GMC as he may be an obstruction to taxing traffic.

If the AF has been cleared to taxi along taxi way A then it is not an unreasonable assumption that the taxiway is clear of parked aircraft.

Posters such as Sevenstrokeroll and Nitpicker330 may not get the blood they are baying for.

French Cheese
 

However the blame is finally apportioned for this incident, AF does seem to have had a lot of 'holes in their Cheese' over the last few years. There must be some level of cultural problem in Training / Management.

Seem to remember that when the B767 clipped the B735 at MAN some years ago, there was inferred criticism (by the AAIB) of the B767 Captain on the grounds that, as posted above, the ANO confers responsibility for an aircraft on the commander.

Trust me, we all hear you blaming the PIC. It's great that you know who caused the accident, and thanks for telling us, time and time again, but I doubt this information will be, on it's own, of any use in preventing the next ground collision. No matter how many times you repeat it.

Instead, there will be a body of people who are more interested in discovering and learning from all the mistakes in this incident and trying to prevent future accidents. They are the same people, who over the years have developed the safety of air transport to it's current level.

Not one of these people will say: "The pilot is to blame. End of story". Not one of them will compare taxying an A380 to driving a car!

Thank goodness.

It seems to me, that if you want to prevent ground collisions, then you cannot rely on a single person, sitting up front, with limited visibility to do it on his own. He's human, he's under pressure, and he's fallible. He always will be fallible. And so will you. And so will I.

If you read the report I linked to, which relates to an incident at Heathrow, you'll see that they operate a "block" system similar to the way railways protect sections of line. However, unlike, railways, there is no guaranteed protection at the rear.

Why not?

There is so much scope here for a solution. Aircraft know their position in space, and indeed they have the ability to transmit it - Mode S for example. Given that Mode S is used in ACAS, it shouldn't really be that much more of a step forward to implement something that would work on the ground too.

It'll happen eventually. I'm sure.

Then we won't be able to shout "It's your fault" at the PIC so often.

Actually, Parabellum, Comair563 does call pretty quickly on the ground frequency and says "send the trucks, they have just hit us". Good job they weren't in a non-American speaking country, nobody would have known what the trucks are!

A few points:

1. I don't think comparisons to road accidents have any relevance here, the people, procedures, equipment and environment are all totally different.

2. A lot of posts mention holes in the Swiss cheese, but there seem to be relatively few holes needed to line up to cause this accident: the AF crew didn't realise the proximity of the CRJ; the controller wasn't aware of the CRJ's position - anything else?

I guess the granularity of these can be broken down but I think that in the most part it would point to a lack of equipment on the A380 and on the ground. Oh, and the lack of a healthy paranoia of unseen 'threats' when taxiing at a busy airport at night.

3. Should the A-SMGCS / ASDE-X have helped to avoid this? I understand the resolution may not be high enough to show a possible conflict, but it should show that the CRJ was not parked on the stand?

ITI

JFK airport was not designed for the A380 :O and they had to make quite a few adjustments to make it fit.

There are a bunch of restrictions for circulating the A380 around. Apparently, the plane was using the proper taxiway.

http://www.faa.gov/airports/engineering ... 080723.pdf

CODE F aircraft
 

Folks,

Not putting the blame on either party. Let the investigation board do that.


The A-380 is an ICAO Annex Code F aircraft. There are only few aircraft that fit that classification.... The A-380, B-747-8, C-5 and the Antonov AN-124- and AN-225 and the Spruce Goose.


When we Taxi on Non code F Taxiways we have restrictions and limitation to what other aircraft or vehichles can be on adjacent/parallel surfaces (Runways, Taxiways Gates and Ramp Areas)

In the case of JFK, Taxiways Alpha and Bravo certainly have limitations due to their close nature.

To be more precise, documentation says when a Code F aircraft is on Alpha, then Bravo is restricted to Code E or smaller. Code E= wing span of 170' to 213'. That will cover everything from a 787 and an A-330 to a B-747-400. and visa versa when a code F is on Bravo, then A is restricted to E.

These conditions and limitations are documented in the Jepp taxi charts or what ever other publication is used onboard.

In general there is no documentation stating any limitation between any taxiway and any ramp area in JFK. Certainly NO limitation between A and the Delta regional aircraft ramp.

With those 2 bits of info, it may not been thought as any reason of concern by the AF crew, since there was nothing bigger than a Code E on Bravo to worry about and there was no documented limitation as Far as Taxiway A and the ramp are concerned.

On another note, it is impossible to see the wing tips from either pilot seats on the 380's flight deck. I always wondered why Airbus did not use a wide lens to enable the Tail Cam to show the wing tips.

There is no replacement to vigilance.

The good thing is that no one got seriously hurt. Metal can always be fixed or replaced... but not people.

Very few airports were...... :)

Couple of points--

1.) The CRJ was very lucky in one respect, that the collision occurred while taxiing inbound and not out. The flight attendants were all likely seated with their belts on which likely prevented some serious injuries. During taxi out, flight attendants are typically standing and moving about around the cabin until just prior to entering the active runway. A collision then would have been much more serious to anyone standing.

2.) I'm going to guess that nobody on the CRJ was holding an infant on their lap.

3.) The accident A380 was released for flight and flew home to CDG/LFPG last night, 24 hrs after the incident. That seems awfully quick for an NTSB investigation involving substantial damage by an air carrier. Was there a rush to get the paint marks and investigation complete, as well as the airframe repairs? I'm sure another day's delay for the plane would lead to even more passenger disruptions and economic loss for AF.

Valvanuz - what a great document, really shows the thought that went into the planning for the A380 ops at JFK.

Interesting to see that taxi speeds are limited to 15mph (approx 13 knots).

@parabellum

With respect, those who have posted criticism of the AF crew and laid responsibility for the incident at their flight deck door, have an unassailable legal point. There may be contributory factors - or holes in the proverbial swiss cheese - that can be filled following an investigation. That much is not in dispute.

It is completely unreasonable to make any assumptions in the aviation business. The primary reason why have humans on the flight deck, rather than automated taxying, is because sometimes RJs, vehicles, deer, FOD or confused pax don't quite clear the taxyway. No crew can blindly follow instructions from ATC, a marshaller or their own SOPs without looking out the window.

Somebody was where they were not supposed to be or the JFK Port Authority just saw their last A380 operation. Bottom line though, the Management of US airlines have become transfixed with outsourcing of jobs and routes to the Replacement Jets (RJ's) and it must stop. JFK is an International airport meant for International airplanes not RJ'S. They will likely find fault with the RJ for not proceeding to his gate or for not completely clearing the taxiway. This will be done because of politics and not facts. Just like Air France blamed a part off a CAL DC-10 caused their ill fated Concorde to crash. They didn't follow their own procedures but in cases like this facts don't matter when deep pockets are involved. Just sayin

Did the "small aircraft" call clear of the taxiway when it was [for A380 operations] NOT??;)

That is something that will come out in the NTSB investigation. Until evidence is presented to the contrary, assume the CRJ was not anywhere it was not authorised to be.

Just been reading Valvanuz' document again. Either it is not the latest version or the A380 was going the wrong way around the Central Terminal Area (although he did follow the ATC instructions). According to the document, even departing from Terminal 4 for R/W 22R, they should turn right onto A and completely cirumnavigate (clockwise) the CTA and turn left at E - seems a hellavu a long way round! (OK there is an alternative in this case, the second option is to turn left on A and right on E, but this option is not available for departing from Terminal 1)

Done all the time at JFK.

Taxi Speed
 

Lambert, Valvanuz: Also interesting to read the reasoning for the taxiing speed maximum of 15 mph in the A380 JFK Ops Document. "Research from the sites evaluating Boeing 747 taxiway centerline wander rates demonstrated comparable taxiing speeds."

Post #22, 2nd photo. Is that le winglet from the Aircrush embedded in the port side tailplane of the CRJ? :eek:

On another note, at least they are not clipping trees anymore. (Apologies, couldn't resist) :E

In terms of how fast the A380 was taxiing... I'm sure people who filmed the video know exactly how fast it was speeded up, or whether it was in real time speed, or slow-motion.

The other thing is that the A380 seems to come to a complete stop very soon after hitting the other plane, so did notice the incident and were going slow enough to stop in a reasonable distance (given the weight and momentum of such a large plane.)

Neck injuries and whiplash are a concern for passengers in the smaller plane whether or not they hire lawyers. You can't get whipped around like that without some risk of injury, as the seat belts securely fastened wont stop your head and neck from getting rapidly tossed sideways.

This will be my only comment, as I am by no means an expert.