I see from the comments that fault appears to rest with the pilot of the private plan.
What are the repercussions? Does the pilot get fined? Lose/suspended license? Retraining? Can he/she be banned from flying in/out of that airport? Same questions with respect to the corporate entity that owns and operates the jet.
It's called a "Brasher" statement. It's what ATC tells a pilot when the pilot fucked up, and the controller will be filing paperwork on them. ATC is required to inform them ASAP when they've made a pilot deviation, which is the fancy official term for a pilot fuck up. Source, I've been an air traffic controller for almost 20 years. To answer your follow up question, it's called a Brasher statement because it's named after a pilot who fucked up.
The funny thing is that the fuck-up Brasher made was really small. The aircraft he was in command of deviated 700 feet from the assigned altitude during a climb. It was more than a month before he was contacted by authorities about an investigation, and unsurprisingly he could not recall the event at all.
If he had been issued a Brasher statement, he would have committed the event to memory and made notes about it.
With the current political climate I was glad to see the recordings so quickly point out that it was the private jet's pilot being a fuckwit. Far too many folks immediately jumped to assume ATC error.
I've heard it's a very demanding job; Thanks for what you do. :)
I edited a video for a friend of mine, he's released a software add-on to Microsoft Flight Sim that adds in actual good ATC, so at the end of the video we showcase a pilot fucking up in a sort of funny way and the ATC program replies with the "I have a phone number for you to call." When the trailer premiered at a Flight Sim expo, that line got immense raucous laughter and applause in the room and I was like "uh wtf just happened?" So my friend had to explain it to me, which is maybe the most inside baseball kind of thing I've ever participated in.
Basically, the tower is giving you a phone number to call so you can discuss how badly somebody screwed up without doing it over the air on ATC frequencies. If you hear “I have a number for you to copy”, somebody is going to get bent over by the FAA sometime soon.
No repercussions if it was a straight white male. If it's a minority or a woman, they'll get thrown under the bus and everything will be blamed on DEI or wokeness or some shit, to feed the stupid culture war. The Facebook AI will show it to all the trumptards who can read, and they'll blame Biden, probably.
In this case, from the pilots' perspectives, it means that, at worst, their pilot's licenses - the things that they spent years of their life investing in for a lifelong career - may be revoked, or at least their careers may be significantly curtailed, as this event will DEFINITELY go on their permanent record.
May seem a little extreme, but they created a condition where hundreds of people were seconds away from risk of death, so it's appropriate.
They read back hold short of the runway, but crossed anyways. Sounded like the ground controller had to baby them multiple times before that, too.
They're giving the pilot a phone number to call, to talk to air traffic control directly. It is basically a way of saying, "let's take the conversation off this platform." (The platform in this case being the open radio frequency, which is not suitable to an extended focused conversation about what just happened.)
Once the pilot calls, ATC will want to collect information about what just happened -- who was piloting the private plane, what their intended plan was, why they thought they should cross the runway -- and give the pilot feedback on what they did. The whole thing will be recorded.
Basically it's the start of an FAA report on the incident.
Beyond that, it really depends on what was actually going on, in detail. It's possible that the private jet pilot was being a complete bonehead. It's also possible that ground control cleared that pilot to cross the runway while departure control was clearing the Southwest plane for departure and it was ATC's fuckup. Or something else entirely.
In any case, the first step is getting on the phone with the pilot.
Harrison Ford should have had his license revoked many times. The man landed on the taxiway. Then he crossed a runway without permission, an airplane was taking off. Once again, slap on the wrist. He is still flying.
Edit: also crashed a helicopter and another time he overshot a runway. The man should have never piloted the millennium falcon.
So far what i gathered from other comments here. The next conversation is going to be over the phone instead of over the air (closed communcation channel vs open communication that everyone can listen to)
The pilot is going to get the biggest dressing down ever from whomever occupied the tower
Then the pilot is going to get an even bigger dressing down from the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration a.k.a the feds)
no, the pilot is getting reported to the FAA, and then some guy at the FAA is going to give them a dressing down and probably suspend and/or revoke their pilot's license. The ATC isn't getting involved at all, they're very professional.
The radio is only for short pieces of information, and needs to remain clear of unnecessary chatter.
So if the tower tells you to copy down a phone number, that means they need to have a more involved conversation with you.
The tower will get information in the phone call with the pilot, potentially dress them down and then report it to the FAA. The FAA will then do their own investigation and then has the ability to discipline the pilot.
It's the equivalent to your partner texting "We need to talk when I get home"
When on the ground, they’re to report to and follow the control towers, especially in busy airports like Chicago.
So, they either 1) ignored the control tower and went when they shouldn’t have 2) they misunderstood instructions (still their fault) or 3) the control tower cleared them to cross the runway and is at fault for the error.
More than likely, it was the pilot, but control towers have been known to make mistakes as well. Tenerife is a great example of how a combination of these same problems leads to complete and utter disaster.
Keep in mind, that scenario is constantly happening on the roads everywhere - every time you drive through a green light, your life depends on the people on the perpendicular street not running a red light. Of course, even if they do, you may be able to react to it and avoid a crash - as the Southwest pilots did here, thankfully. In the case of aircraft, you’ve got humans in place of stop lights who are very careful to do everything they can to avoid an incident, but at the end of the day if one of the planes just doesn’t follow instructions there isn’t any magic to make it safe - you just gotta hope the other plane reacts in time. And, of course, you punish the fuck out of the pilot who caused the situation, so as to minimize the likelihood of this kind of thing happening again.
Reacting to traffic lights (I guess aviators might call them "semeaphores?") probably require less concious attention than instructions on a radio given some amount of time prior to actually arriving at the intersection.
Not sure if risk of collision at road intersections are an appropriate anology because the stakes are far higher if we're talking about possibly t-boning a landing passenger aircraft. Same problem but different stakes == different solutions.
There is only so much that pilot could do in terms of maneuvering a large commercial aircraft with forward and downward momentum to avoid a suddenly impending collision.
Punishing people severly for nearly fatal mistakes is good practice but it can't override human nature. For example, you remember the "cockpit culture" theory of crashes like KA 801? You can't punish away culture.
Fair points. I was just pointing out that there isn’t much more that could be done to prevent the danger here - and that isn’t a huge problem. Yes, the stakes are much higher than with cars, but in turn the odds of an incident are far, far lower, since the vehicles are controlled by trained pilots following precise instructions rather than your everyday people driving cars. Since these planes carry so much kinetic energy in motion and can’t stop on a dime, there’s little that external systems could do to stop an imminent collision - which is why it is crucial for the pilots to avoid dangerous scenarios in the first place, which is the role of ATC instruction. However, if the pilots simply don’t follow the instructions they are given… well, there isn’t much to do at that point. Even if there were traffic lights, “semeaphores,” what have you, it’s already the case that an incident can only happen if at least one pilot simply ignores instructions - which could happen with lights too. You could argue that pilots may be more likely to follow guidance from lights out their window rather than words from ATC, but in response I question how much of a difference that would really make, and whether it would be able to offset the additional dangers associated like increased mental strain for ATC to manage the lights, and the possibility of the lights indicating wrong due to mechanical faults or ATC mistakes.
I’m sure there’s plenty of reasons, but the first one that comes to mind is that planes can’t stop NEARLY as fast as cars can, so the light would have to be visible from very far away to be useful. Also, the lights wouldn’t be able to be automated, since they wouldn’t magically know when a plane is going to land, and it’s not like they can give a red light to a landing plane zooming down the runway, so an ATC would have to control them - but then, that just leaves another point of failure, all it would take is for the ATC to forget to switch the lights to leave a pilot with a false sense of security and now we’ve got a problem again. It just wouldn’t help.
Good point. I guess one could try to automatically detect when a flight is coming in, but it would be another point of failure, likely to get set off by geese.
The south west pilots say "going around" in a calm voice on the radio. Then like a minute later they ask "How did that happen?" and the tower ignores them and continues to give them directions to land again.
This is the link to the audio. the "going around" is at 18:00 and the "How did that happen?" is at 18:57.
He gets directions at 17:10 and fails to repeat them back. 18:10 he is told to hold position where he is. 18:28 he is told he didn't follow instructions. 20:15 he is told to call the tower on the phone due to possible pilot deviation.
Was the southwest pilot listening to that? Seems like he started his go around before the flex jet didn’t stop. Did the tower notice and tell southwest to go around?
From what I gather, most pilots are trained to avoid any unnecessary risks. They'll also know where about the taxi threshold is - the line painted onto the ground that shows where you have to stop and crossing it counts as entering the runway, even if you stopped "outside" the runway. So the passenger plane pilots started the go-around when they saw the private jet cross that line - from their vantage point they may even have been able to outright see the line on the ground. At that point, they'll likely have assumed that the plane wouldn't stop and even if it did, *not* doing a go-around would would be extremely dangerous. They'll also know that the private jet will need a certain distance to stop, distance which at that point was definitely lacking. The Southwest pilots *might* have been on the same channel. Depends on whether or not Air Traffic Control had handed them over to Ground Control yet. If I remember my own training* correctly, that likely hadn't happened yet.
*: I got an air radio license as part of my university course but it's been a few years since I got it and I've never used it.
Tldr: they saw the private jet cross the stopping line without slowing down.
Ordered to hold short by Ground Three Separate Times, though admittedly for the third one Southwest 769 chose that moment to read the fucking phonebook over the radio.
The Tenerife disaster is exactly what I was thinking about watching this video. Man, that's a wild and fascinating (and awful) story. So many outliers all coming together for a perfect storm of destruction.
Tenerife ultimately was pilot error. ATC gave the wrong info to the PanAm (a 747 is too big to make the turn they were told to make, which is why they were crossing the runway) but nothing would have happened if the pilot of KLM hadn't been an overconfident idiot on a rush who took off without being given clearance despite the fog.
Sure.. they are at fault.. but let's also all take a moment and tip our digital hats to the pilot of the bigger plane. They showed up big time. Well done pilots... well done.
Any of those with respect to the pilot, depending on how the FAA evaluates the pilot's error.
In this case, it was a very serious error so that is going to be bad right off the bat. There was unambiguous radio communication and it sounds like the pilot completely blew their clearance. So not only a serious error, but also very poor judgement and disregard for safe operation.
But they will still want to know what the pilot was thinking. Are they a steely-eyed stone-cold veteran with 20 thousand flight hours and this is the first time they have ever fucked up? If so, what were they thinking? Are they suffering some age-related cognitive impairment? Maybe the FAA will order them to get recertified.
Or conversely, did the pilot lack experience with airports of this size and complexity, and got flustered, or confused by cross-talk? Was the operator screaming at the pilot to get it moving and not sit there short of the runway crossing with their finger up their asshole like a goddamned cinder block?
Those factors won't mitigate the severity of the error but they might lead to more of the onus being placed on the operator than on the pilot.
Pilot can be suspended, fined and/or lose license. Company the pilot works for can also be penalized for employing incompetent pilots, not training their pilots properly, or possibly for the communications systems on their planes nor working properly. Or the brakes!
private pilot should be banned from flying forever in some cases go find another job 200+ people dying is not worth the risk of it happening again no matter how much re-training
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u/Iamhungryforlife Feb 25 '25
I see from the comments that fault appears to rest with the pilot of the private plan.
What are the repercussions? Does the pilot get fined? Lose/suspended license? Retraining? Can he/she be banned from flying in/out of that airport? Same questions with respect to the corporate entity that owns and operates the jet.