The Vigilante and the Air Traffic Controller
Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford
Pushkin Industries
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 31 March 2023
⏱️ 35 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Air traffic controllers are meant to stop aircrafts from flying into one another... and if they fail, computer systems are installed to warn pilots of a coming collision. But sometimes these humans and computers give conflicting and confusing advice. Who to believe?
When a cargo plane and a Russian airliner collided in just such a situation, the authorities scrambled to work out how to prevent a repeat of the disaster... but a grieving father decided to seek revenge on those he held responsible.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Pushkin |
| 0:13.0 | Japanese Airlines Flight 907 is flying from Tokyo to Okinawa. |
| 0:19.0 | It took off 20 minutes ago and it's almost completed its climb to its cruising altitude. |
| 0:25.0 | Close enough that the Farsen seatbelt sign has been switched off and the cabin attendance a serving hot tea. |
| 0:33.0 | The year is 2001. |
| 0:36.0 | The airspace around Tokyo is busy. |
| 0:39.0 | Another Japanese Airlines plane Flight 958 is coming in from South Korea. It'll soon begin its descent. |
| 0:47.0 | The flight paths of 907 and 958 are going to cross. |
| 0:52.0 | That's not a problem of course as long as there are different altitudes. |
| 0:56.0 | But they're currently on course to be at pretty similar altitudes. |
| 1:01.0 | No need to panic. This kind of thing happens all the time. |
| 1:05.0 | We simply need one of the planes to go a bit higher or the other to go a bit lower. |
| 1:11.0 | As long as they don't both do the same thing, they'll be fine. |
| 1:17.0 | Modern airplanes have an automated system for situations like this. |
| 1:21.0 | It's called T-CAS, the Traffic Collision Avoidance System. |
| 1:26.0 | T-CAS kicks in now. |
| 1:29.0 | In the cockpit of Flight 958, it tells the pilot to... |
| 1:33.0 | Descend, descend, descend, descend. |
| 1:37.0 | The pilot starts to descend. |
| 1:41.0 | In the cockpit of Flight 907, T-CAS tells the pilot to... |
| 1:46.0 | Climb, climb, climb, climb. |
| 1:50.0 | But down on the ground, a 26-year-old trainee air traffic controller has also noticed that flights 907 and 958 are on a collision course. |
... |
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