At least a person who eats in a restaurant has first hand knowledge of what the chef’s food tastes like.
Continuing your analogy, you’re basing your entire opinion of a restaurant on what a critic says of the food, and then saying that anybody that disagrees with that critic, despite having actually tasted the food, is not a reliable source in the discussion.
You are vastly overestimating the role of the Tower Controller, while at the same time underestimating what role the pilots themselves actually play in an airport environment.
No, I’m saying people who, by their own admissions, frequently override safety protocols, without consequences, are in no position to fairly assess whether the overriding of safety protocols by ATC’s are a big deal or not. It seems fairly obvious that their opinion is understandably jaundiced concerning nagging protocols.
I’m not underestimating the role of pilots in the airport environment. I’m saying being a pilot doesn’t give your opinion any extra weight on this issue. It certainly doesn’t trump the FAA and people who actually do the job, simply because they talk on the radio with them a lot.
Point taken, the restaurant analogy was not a good one.
Again, you’re mischaracterizing pilots. Where are you seeing them say that they frequently override safety protocols? Pilots, as a whole, are not like Maverick in Top Gun. Most of them are very professional and take flying very seriously. We’re all aware that complacency can very quickly have disasterous results.
Most of the arguments in this thread, especially by those with no experience in aviation, have been very interseting. It’s true that ATC should have a low tolerance to breaking protocol, especially in busy airspace. The security issue is serious as well, but I disagree with some people in this thread as to the extent that that security needs to extend.
The main discussion in this thread that the pilots are trying to correct is the safety issue. People that have no idea of how ATC actually works think that a moments distraction can have immediate and disasterous consequences. If this was Regional Control - the ATC that controls the airspace between airports - you’d be correct. In fact, if it was one of those controllers who let his kids talk on the radio you’d probably have every pilot in this thread agreeing with you about how unsafe it was.
But this isn’t regional control, this is the tower. When the kid tells the plane he is cleared for takeoff the plane is moving at a whopping 0 MPH. There aren’t many life or death decisions that happen at that speed. Seconds after the plane takes off, the kid tells the plane he is cleared to change frequency from the tower radio frequency to the regional departure frequency. If this was a non peak time, even at Kennedy, it’s very possible that the controller wasn’t responsible for anything for a few moments - at least until another plane was ready for takeoff or regional approach passed a plane to the tower that was landing. From what I read, the Dad did not let the kid talk to those planes as well he shouldn’t.
wasn’t the plot of Die Hard 2 about taking over an ATC tower?
FWIW, Canada and the USA have pretty much harmonized their laws and regulations in the entire industry, simply because of the sheer amount of crossing of airspace and communication/handling of aircraft from both countries. Actually I strongly suspect (though I admit I don’t know) that ATC regulations are similar in the vast majority of ICAO contracting nations; I expect EuroControl has similar procedures to NavCanada and the FAA, again because of the amount of aircraft being handled from several different origins and destinations. The FAA/TC/EASA collaborate on a heck of a lot of stuff.
The Canadian ATC system might as well be the American one, so I don’t think it is valid to dismiss an opinion based upon it coming from a Canadian.
I’m sure you’re right; my point was to illustrate how cavalierly elbows was dismissing the pilot viewpoint.
You are seriously mischaracterising pilots, and I think you should stop. We don’t “frequently override safety protocols” at all, that’s is complete rubbish and seems to be based on the say so of one ATC relative you have. The airline industry is as safe as it is because the vast majority of pilots do exactly what they’re supposed to do, when they’re supposed to do it.
Yes a passenger needs to go through security screening to enter the sterile area, everyone has to, pilots and ATCs included. This is completely unrelated to the process used to permit a visitor to enter a secure area. What do you think happens if an electrician needs to fix a light in the control tower? They will have a process where visitors can be escorted through secure areas as required. Like I said earlier, it is quite legal for me to take my 3 year old daughter on to the tarmac to have a look at an aeroplane. I would be very surprised if it was against security protocol for this ATCer to take his children to work with him.
Having the child there is not the issue, the issue is letting the kid talk on the radio.
By the way, his supervisor has been suspended as well, so it’s quite possible that he got his supervisor’s authorisation for the whole thing in which case the buck stops higher than the controller in question.
I’m just of the opinion that the pilot viewpoint is no more valid than the stewardess viewpoint, or the baggage handler viewpoint. Both also ‘understand an airport environment’ and both are trumped by the FAA and an actual ATC. Just my opinion.
stewardesses and baggage handlers don’t talk to ATC. Your inability to grasp this concept is astounding to me. You’re at the point of willful ignorance and outright lies to support your point of view. You’re wrong and have no credibility anymore to defend your position
Mmm. This was an extremely stupid risk to take. Had a real emergency come up, or had the kid caused confusion via unnecessary chatter, lives could have been lost. Granted that it’s a low-risk situation (referring to the risk of a real emergency caused by the minor lag in father-to-son communication or the kid’s chatter confusing someone), I think it’s valid to give this guy a significant suspension (a month or two) to send a message, without actually firing someone.
It wouldn’t bother me to have the kid in the tower, listening in, but to have him fired and run out of the profession for one mistake seems like overkill.
EDIT:Not a slap on the wrist, but not a fire-and-blacklist either. Don’t ruin a man’s career entirely, but let him know that this bullshit won’t be tolerated again or from anyone else.
Overall, they are very similar, but there are also many differences. The US is notorious for deviating from standard ICAO procedures and phraseology used in the rest of the world. This document (PDF), for example, highlights some of the major differences.
I understand ATC in the same way I understand being a waiter, I regularly interact directly with both and see a small part of what their job entails. I also need to understand enough about controlling aircraft to know when I’m being given a bad instruction, because I am the one responsible for my aircraft, and it is ultimately up to me to make sure we don’t crash, not the controller, the FAA/CASA/CAA or anyone else. I would say that a baggage handler understands ATC in much the same way a horse understands being a waiter, i.e., not at all.
I would certainly place much more value on an ATCer’s opinion of this incident than I would my own or another pilot’s, however I would place more value on my opinion or another pilot’s than I would a baggage handler or anyone else who has no direct involvement in the system. Having said that, I don’t dismiss the opinions of those not in the industry out of hand, but I’d like to make sure they have an understanding of some of the issues. So when someone likens it to a surgeon allowing their son to make an incision, I’ll say that is an invalid comparison because talking on the radio does not have the same relation to being a controller as making a cut does to being a surgeon.
There are other means of relaying information for a controller. Some enroute controllers use datalink which involves electronically sending instructions as text to appropriately equipped aircraft. There could be anyone typing that stuff in really, a trained monkey, a child, the controller’s girlfriend, and as long as the message is correct, I couldn’t care less.
I sometimes fly into a military controlled airport that does a lot of ATC training. When a trainee controller says the wrong thing or gets flustered, the guy supervising just steps in and fixes it. Now the child in this incident isn’t given free rein to say what he likes, he’s just parroting the actual controller. Safety wise, it is safer than having a trainee controller who is allowed to think for themselves and make mistakes and transmit those mistakes to aircraft.
But this isn’t really about safety, in my opinion safety and security are red herrings. This is about breaking rules. Because the controller and his supervisor have broken the rules, they should definitely be punished. I personally, and this has nothing to do with my job or anything, believe that people should be given a second chance, so I don’t think either of them should be fired unless this is part of a documented pattern of behaviour.
Tours of operational control towers are permitted, including tours with children, under current rules and regulations. Of course, the key point here is “rules and regulations” - having children visit a tower for educational reasons is one thing, having them operate the radios and talk to airplanes while in the tower quite another entirely.
So… yes, there are circumstances where a child might, in fact, be allowed in an air traffic control tower. I can’t imagine a circumstance where it would be considered OK to let the kid play ATC.
Not true. Yes, during emergencies and very high traffic periods ATC is very, very structured but outside of that they are, in fact, allowed to act as human beings. In low traffic/low risk times and places there is even room for pleasentries between controllers and pilots without violating the regulations. Also, ATCs, being human, do in fact, make “deviations” or “omissions” which is why pilots are not only permitted but encouraged to ask for clarification on any ATC directive. While it is, indeed, very procedure driven those procedures are not quite as ridgid as you believe.
While some disciplinary action is warrented (in my opinion) I think jail would be excessive under the circumstances.
I’ve seen this notion in several places, the idea that because it was “ground traffic” it was somehow less serous than directing traffic in the air. The fact is, the worst collision between two airplanes in history happened on the ground. Moving airplanes on the ground is just as serious as moving them in the air.
But you are correct that an experienced pilot would not blindly follow a child’s voice on the radio. In fact, pilots should not ever blindly folllow ANY voice on the radio. Although 99.9% of the time pilots do follow ATC without question they are, in fact, allowed to ask questions and have a duty to NOT follow any instruction that would lead to a hazard or cause an emergency.
The Tenerife disaster, which I alluded to earlier, killed 583 people. It arose because of confusion regarding the ground movement of airplanes at an airport. There have been other incidents involving airplanes colliding on the ground. Even at low speeds these accidens can be deadly. Please do not dismiss ground control as the “least important phase of air traffic control”.
Well, here I am, a little late because my modem blew up and I had to get a new one, but I’m here. 
There are circumstances where I would say such an occurace is no big deal. There are other circumstances where such actions could result in tragedy. I am not entirely certain which is the case here, although I am leaning towards the low-risk end of the spectrum based on what infomation I have. More facts could change my opinion.
Rand, pilots on the ground at an airport like JFK cross active runways while moving from point A to point B. Absolutely ATC needs to pay attention at all times (as do the pilots) to make sure no taxiing airplane is on runway pavement while another plane is taking off or landing. (See Tenerife Disaster again).
The reason I’m not getting on the “hang 'em high!” bandwagon is that just how risky an ATC environment is varies enormously by time of day, day of the week, the weather, and other factors. There are times and places that what was done the risk would be miniscule. However, I have a hard time imagining JFK airport is ever that quiet.
Yes. The record was set in 1977 with 583 fatalities: Tenerife Disaster - although to be fair it wasn’t so much controller error as confusion and error in multiple people and some truly horrible weather conditions. The point is that yes, ground control can be deadly serious business. However, I can not emphasize strongly enough that it is not always that serious/risky/dangerous.
elbows should start a pit thread about pilots. Clearly he has an ax to grind.
Broomstick, I was hoping Tenerife wouldn’t come up (I deliberately didn’t mention it earlier), because the only bearing it has here is to demonstrate that controlling planes on the ground is important and potentially deadly if done incorrectly. IMO this goes without saying. Tenerife was a long long time ago, in a different country, in horrible weather, where the pilots were to blame, ATC was to blame, and a critical simulcast on the radio (blanking out the transmission) was to blame. Bringing it up has little if any relevance and only muddies the waters.
I think Tenerife illustrates why the FAA is so strict about following procedures. Aviation can be hazardous.
Of course Tenerife was going to come up - I wasn’t even the first to mention it - but most circumstances are not nearly so hazardous as Tenerife. It’s like comparing a car on a driveway to a car on a crowded freeway in freezing rain with near zero visibility. Yes, they’re both driving. Yes, in both circumstances an accident can occur. However, one situation is much more hazardous than the other.
I would say that they are both the issue - having a child in an ATC is a distraction as well.
Sure, but these kids are 9 years old, they’re old enough to know how to behave and are probably no more of a distraction than any other visitor to the tower, or than me having someone sitting in the cockpit with me. It’s not hard to give someone attention as work load dictates.
I wouldn’t be surprised if restrictions are put on tower visits after this though. That’s the problem when people abuse what privileges they have, it ruins things for everyone else.
After reading through all the comments I’ll start by saying there are no fender-benders in aviation. It is a very unforgiving venture. And as has already been pointed out, most aviation accidents are not the result of one main mistake but rather many small mistakes. The reason standards are upheld is because the risk factor is dominated by the cost of failure.
In this instance we are dealing with communication. All that’s happening is that a controller is telling his child what to say and it’s repeated on the radio. What could go wrong?
- hearing a child’s voice on approach could lead pilots to wonder if a teenager is playing with mommy or daddy’s hand-held transceiver on the approach line. It wouldn’t be the first time someone tried to over-ride ATC as a prank and a 4 watt transceiver could easily be heard as loudly as the tower radio if it is under the plane when it’s 10 miles out.
- A child repeating what was said could incorrectly repeat a heading of 2-1-5 by truncating it and saying 2-15 which would be heard as 2-50 (an incorrect and confusing heading)
- International flights mean pilots are using English as a 2nd language so poorly annunciated instructions would trigger confusion and require clarification (at best).
- A person who is using a child as a repeater is not fully focused on the job and could miss something. Radars are only as good as the sending and receiving equipment and transponders fail ALL THE TIME. A plane could vanish off a screen or intermittently appear without any warning by someone wandering into the wrong airspace.
I could go on all day listing reasons why it’s a bad idea. Obviously, after the fact, there wasn’t any safety related problems. But I’ll give an example of how this could have gone wrong. This is a real event that happened to me on my first private flight with passengers. The transmitter died right as I was handed off from approach to the tower. I was in limbo flying the last known heading which was taking me diagonally across the approach of 2 parallel runways. The confusion factor was high because I had no idea which runway they wanted me on. If I changed headings I could have put myself in the path of someone on short final. If I had heard a child’s voice on the radio it would have ramped up the confusion factor considerably considering I had no way of verifying what was going on. Fortunately ATC tower was on it and after 2 rapid queries with no answer they asked me to flash my lights if I could hear them. Imagine 2 airplanes converging on each other at 250 mph with communication problems. Now throw in a military base nearby sharing the same approach control but different towers.
It’s the little things that happen all at once that kill people. And whether people realize it or not there are a small discrepancies that happen all the time in aviation. Sometimes it’s a confusing airport layout, sometimes it’s a mechanical, sometimes it’s a crew that is so distracted they fly past the airport completely unaware they’re on the wrong frequency. I’ve seen 25,000 hour airline pilots make the most simple of errors that almost killed someone at an airshow. Crap happens.
ATC personnel don’t fall out of trees ready to handle Chicago or Atlanta. It takes years to create a good one. Firing someone should be weighed against the loss of their skills. Better a repentant senior controller than a newbie with good intentions. A week or two without pay should bring a better person back to the tower. Lessons need to be learned.
I have. It’s perfectly legal. In fact, there are programs such as the Young Eagles that are dedicated to that purpose.
Pilots who bend rules risk their life.
That makes no sense at all. If Pilots didn’t understand ATC communication protocols then there would be a serious problem. What pilots would not understand is how to work ATC equipment which is not part of this discussion.