Runway Change

On Friday, August 3, 2012, the USA TODAY ran a story about a "loss of separation" between three regional jets at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, in Washington, DC.  The "miscue" occurred July 31st, when thunderstorms south of the airfield shut off the northbound arrivals---forcing a runway change. . . 

This story was old news to the Brethren.  It had been making the rounds on the "Reply to All" email posts for at least 24 hours by the time I saw it in the newspaper.  Eddie Price, the Airport Manager at Pond Branch Airfield, started the thread with a link to a TV news video about Tuesday's "dire incident."  Brother Price is a member of several discussion groups.  He sent the link to the Citadel Roundtable, his group of Citadel buddies from back in the day.  One of the members of the Roundtable is Robert Kahle, who happens to be a retired Air Traffic Controller.  The runways and airlines used are just examples, but this is what Robert had to say about the story:

The video says it was during a runway change due to a thunderstorm. Well, a Tstorm is a major pain when it is busy because airline pilots will not fly into them..at all. They are scared of them, for good reason. Lightning, micro bursts, etc. ugly stuff. So the normal flow of traffic goes out the window and it becomes a coordination nightmare. You are in a controller's ear waiting for him to stop talking so you can ask if he can take US Air at 4000, which will put him a little bit more down the tubes but he knows you have nowhere to put him because of a line of thunder boomers and he's coordinating with someone else to put a plane where he should not be and the Tower is calling down to switch runways because of a wind shift and everybody is yelling and the tension is at a maximum. All the planes want to land before the storm hits but now they can't land with a tailwind and controllers are changing the maps on their scopes for an opposite direction runway operation and planes are in a state of chaos and everyone is thinking, "Don't let em hit.". So, the last plane landing on runway 27 has been cleared for approach. The runway gets switched. The Tower has lined everyone up for runway 9 and they launch 2. Someone in the radar room forgets to switch the Delta that was cleared to 27 and they think Tower is separating them and the Tower thinks radar is taking him to runway 9 and they swish and the Tower is calling down to see who is talking to Delta and Delta is saying,"We were cleared at the river."

Now, it is called a near miss and it looks scary as hell, but they were still 1.7 miles from the first departure and 2.8 from number two. No paint scraped. Just a little lack of coordination.

They will sit down for days listening to tapes to figure out who exactly dropped the ball and they will decertify him for a few days and give him remedial training, like that is going to make any difference in the world because you could never re create that screwed up scenario in a training session. It all happens very fast even with all the jets slowed down to 170. With all the chaos and coordination and yelling and weird vectors and pilots refusing vectors and a runway change, which can be very complicated even when you are not busy, they were lucky they just whiffed two of them.

Been there. Probably done that.