Originally Posted by
LarryJ
The risk of a mechanical problem does not increase after a go-around. The same failure is just as likely before the first approach.
If a crew member is incapacitated, an emergency will be declared and ATC will make a big hole for the landing. If they don't, you'd land anyway. We can see the other airplane out the window and avoid it.
All fuel tanks have two fuel pumps. By the time you're landing, the center tanks are dry. Each pump in a tank is powered by a different electrical bus. The engines can suction-feed tank-to-engine if both pumps were to fail on the same tank.
It would be nice if ATC were perfect. They are not, and they will never be. The system is designed to have multiple levels of safety with backups for every identified threat and failure. That is why airplanes are sent around when they don't have 6,000' and airborne, on the preceding departure, or clear of the runway, on the preceding arrival. Neither situation puts the airplanes in dangerous proximity to each other and both provide a robust safety margin, as has been demonstrated by the rather significant errors that have led to runway incursions, which this incident was not, in the first half of this year.
I understand the redundancies in place. my concerns is that approach and landing phases remain the most critical and risky parts of flights: statistically where the majority of accidents occur. While these redundancies are in place, the data suggest they still have have higher risk in this stage of flight. Ergo the controller placed the flight not 1 but 2X into higher risk phases of flight. That is the concern I have.
And as we can see from AUS (and other incursion incidents over the past year or so) the runway is a very risky place. These were serious enough that the FAA recently had a
safety summit, and formed a new safety review team to address the concerns that came from the summit
including:
Commercial Operations
- Pursue more efficient methods of sharing safety information in near real-time at all levels of the aviation industry, including frontline workers.
- The FAA will urge the Commercial Aviation Safety Team (CAST) team to set a new goal of eliminating serious incidents such as runway incursions and close calls.
- Continue to refine the data being collected by the Aviation Information Analysis and Sharing (ASIAS) system to include a broader range of factors that will help identify precursors to incidents.
- Pilots and flight attendants expressed concerns that they continue to feel stress in the workplace, including long work hours under adverse conditions. The group acknowledged that risk models should also incorporate human factors.
Air Traffic System
- Re-examine runway incursion data to identify underlying factors that led to these incidents and identify remedies.
- The FAA issued a call to industry to help identify technologies that could augment existing capabilities of surface surveillance equipment and deploy this technology to all airports with air traffic control services.
if it was a safe and redundant as you say, why all the fuss from the FAA and airline industry including pilots and FA's?