These terms are a common practice when ATC wants you to push the tincan nosing this way or that way,-depending of the taxi routing you are expected to have. To avoid numbers and headings,it is often given that way. And as with so many practices,these may grow to misunderstandings. Tail facing is a good example of what could happen. Mental pictures are a bit dangerous to use,because they are so easily misunderstood. I have met many medical pro,s who are sometimes confused of which is Left or Right. It happens as long as we are humans.

Maybe I am being mischevous but being an old Africa hand you could be forgiven for assuming that SACAA wrote the body of the report and ACSA wrote the summary. Whatever happened, it is embarrassing that the summary perversely leads the reader to form a different (and incomplete) opinion on causation than they would if they read the main report on its own. It needs to be fixed and re-issued if it is to be credible on the world stage. I won't hold my breath.

P

BA Changes Briefings, Sim Training and Chart Provider After B747 Accident
 

I came across a link to a report on the actions BA have taken: BA Changes Briefings, Sim Training and Chart Provider After B747 Accident

Anyone else had problems with their nav data supplier? Its very worrying if you can't trust your charts.

Wonder if anyone had ever raised an ASR on the lighting at that junction.

I would think experimenting outside of Jeppesen/LIDO zone is a very brave (but not neccesarily smart) move. I've seen Navtech charts and I sympathize with everybody that has to use them every day.

Now of course everybody makes mistakes, but the idea of using Jeppesen or LIDO is that they hold a majority share of the market, so they have enormous amount of customers - and the possibility of somebody noticing a mistake is much more likely than with a provider that holds 5-10% of the market. In my experience dealing with both Jeppesen and Navtech, Jeppesen takes fixing the problems much more seriously and expeditiously.

One lesson to come out from this for airports is that runway / movement area inspections by ARFF are no good for electrical or pavement inspections - IMHO.

This is not to detract from the valuable job that ARFF do in emergency responses, nor the value of their routine inspections. But this accident has shown, like other accidents I know of, that such "drive-by" inspections are limited. Their frame of reference is to detect gross deficiencies such as wheels, flaps, cargo doors, etc., lying on the runway, or other obstacles such as dead animals. That is as far as the ARFF are trained to do, and as much as can be expected from their inspection.

Overrun:

I agree with you on these points. Having never been as far south as JNB in my flying days, I am not is a position to say who does what at that airport. However, I can say what happens at KLAS/LAS and how things are done there. We do have an ARFF unit and they have certain duties but NONE of them include runway/taxiway inspections and certainly not lighting on the airfield. Here those items are run by the county's department of aviation, airside division, specifically the Airside Operations Coordinators. It is their job and mandated by FAR 139, to take care of all those inspections. Those inspections are done routinely once per shift, three times daily. After inclement weather or an incident, more often. It is all documented in a shift log and if any deficiencies are found a work order is generated or if it's critical, the duty electrician or airfield mx are called out. The coordinators are the inspectors and the airport has a dedicated team of mx workers, electricians, bldg. mx, airport equipment mechanics etc to draw from.

During swing shift, an additional lighting check of the whole airfield is made after the sun goes down, including all runways and taxiways. On graveyard, the runway inspection is even more thorough for lights, FOD, spalls and takes up to 15 minutes per runway! Again, all of this is documented. We work very closely with ATC and in fact, while ATC "controls" aircraft, it is only the AOCs that have the authority to close a runway or taxiway for safety reasons. Matter of fact, last time we did that was last month for our longest runway (25R-7L) when we had that BA 777 mishap that closed the runway for a little over 8 hours :)

Finally, just to make sure the airport is run safely and up to spec, we have a team of FAA airport safety inspectors come look at us for 3 consecutive days each year, trying to find a reason to slap us with a fine or revoke our certificate. Maybe the team in JNB should come visit us for a week.....

alexb757,

McCarran (Las Vegas) Airport always struck me as a professional outfit. In fact, if one ever wanted a neat summary of what should be done, your post is it.

From the link:

Is/Are BA now doing a 10 minute 'human factors briefing' on each flight? :confused:

I can see briefing the taxi route, gotchas etc., but 10 minutes each time discussing the fine points of Swiss cheese models, situational awareness and threats? After the next mishap will the briefing include fatigue mitigation techniques and sleep apnea awareness protocols perhaps?

Read the wording in the link again. I can't see how you have made that interpretation.

Help me parse it then. Is it a 10 minute briefing only done once during training as part of the simulator course?

I think so. Haven't done it yet.