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A comment on Near-miss between FedEx and Southwest flights in Austin. Parent comment

Re:Near-miss between FedEx and Southwest flights in Austin by x3n0ph3n3 on Sunday February 05, 2023 @03:42AM (#34663096)
To be clear, he's referring to _ground_ radar which tracks positions of aircraft on the ground. They all have radar monitoring nearby airspace.
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Re:Near-miss between FedEx and Southwest flights in Austin by TrickyRick on Sunday February 05, 2023 @05:52AM (#34663780)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenerife_airport_disaster

We've learned the lesson once already that not having ground radar is a bad idea.

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Re:Near-miss between FedEx and Southwest flights in Austin by Retric on Sunday February 05, 2023 @07:23AM (#34664345)
I think one major accident 45 tears ago suggests you can safely operate without ground radar.

aka We can’t tell if the risk is 1 in a million flights or 1 in a billion flights, but we know it’s not 1 in 100,000 or there would be more major incidents.

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Re:Near-miss between FedEx and Southwest flights in Austin by Sakos on Sunday February 05, 2023 @04:57PM (#34669977)
It would interest me to know what the reasons are for ground radar not being more widespread and how many accidents are preventable by ground radar yearly. My first guess is that incidents where ground radar would've prevented them are so rare that it isn't worth the expense or the additional complexity or additional point of failure, and it's more productive/effective to solve the issue at different points in the system instead.
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Re:Near-miss between FedEx and Southwest flights in Austin by TrickyRick on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @06:19AM (#34706670)
This is like saying "I don't wear my seatbelt because I've never been in an accident". Safety systems isn't about one or the other, it's about having multiple systems and procedures in place to prevent a disaster. Proper procedures are good, and it's a first line of defense, but humans make mistakes and are imperfect in other ways (Such as not being able to see through fog). Proper procedure in the case of near 0 visibility would be to greatly increase separation between planes, something which wasn't done in this case, and something which would slow down traffic a lot more than passengers and companies like.
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Re:Near-miss between FedEx and Southwest flights in Austin by Retric on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @03:30PM (#34714527)
It’s more like saying school busses don’t need seatbelts because based on a great deal of evidence, they don’t significantly improve school bus safety.

In this case the accident was avoided because aircraft could see each other long before there was a meaningful risk. It wasn’t a mismanaged zero visibility situation but rather proper procedures working.

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Re:Near-miss between FedEx and Southwest flights in Austin by trelane on Sunday February 05, 2023 @08:35AM (#34664770)
Once? There was also a recent Cloudberg article about a place radar would've been real handy to have. (Plane and ground thought they were S of Kathmandu when they were N, until they suddenly went silent, due to hitting a mountain.)

Edit: Bah, wrong comment on the chain.

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Re:Near-miss between FedEx and Southwest flights in Austin by Retric on Sunday February 05, 2023 @09:31AM (#34665173)
That’s a different problem. Regular radar is setup to detect flying aircraft and is very useful to avoid flying into mountains, avoid mid air collisions, etc and it’s not what we’re talking about. That type of Radar has proven necessary on many occasions.

Spending a great deal of money to track aircraft on the ground however is only helpful when one of the aircraft is on the ground. It’s only partially useful when visibility is low, at which point air traffic control can be especially paranoid.

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