terrible mistakes that people make

I was watching a docmentary on channel 7 last night; Air Crash Investigation- Deadly Crossroads. It was shocking to me that with such advanced (yeh I know not flawless)technologies we have that people could still make terrible mistakes that results in deaths.

The show featured the terrible accident in Ueberlingen, Germany - At least 95 people were feared dead after a Russian-made plane travelling from Moscow to Barcelona collided with a cargo plane bound for Brussels over southern Germany late on 01 July 2004. As a result of the crash, 49 children, 8 adults and 12 crew members on board the Russian air craft and 2 pilots on the DHL cargo plane were killed. 71 lives gone in the spilt of a second.

The question is in an event of an emergency like this, who should the pilot obey? There was not any rules on wether to obey the airtraffic controller or the computer as mentioned towards the end of the program. I mean the airtraffic controller was an experienced one, he is after all a human human do not work strictly with the rules like a computer does. On the other hand even the system had a flaw in it, because of the 100 ft error margin, they had neither one of the computers told the pilots to change direction.

The next question is, there were supposingly 2 airtraffic controllers, but since the traffic is lower at night one of then actually took a lengthy break - common practice in that particular air traffic control tower. Maintainence to shut down the main computer and phonelines, back-up computer which runs slower were used. International Aviation rules also prevented another air traffic controller in a near by tower who realised that the 2 aircrafts were going to crash from communicating with the pilots directly. All these events led to the murder of the poor air traffic controller on duty. So if the person wanted revenge, why only target the poor airtraffic controller he was living his life in guilt already, how abt the people responsible in making the rules aren't they just as guilty?

The most shocking part was there was a near crash in Japan, which results with 80 injured when one of the aircrafts had to make an emergency decending, 18 months before this tragic accident. When the Japanese asked the International Aviation Organisation to set some rules, it was not being dealt with immediately.

I sincerely hope that people who make the decisions abt the rules will take accidents like this seriously to make air travel more enjoyable and safe.

More indepth abt the crash can be found here


Human error or system error