In short, ATC instructed an airliner to turn left on to a heading of 180 (south). The expected instruction would have been a right turn to 180 as the aircraft was already heading 090 (east). Once the ATCer realised the mistake, chaos reigned for some time as she tried to get the aircraft going the right way.
No, the ATCer did not direct the aircraft toward Mt Wilson.
The ATCer instructed the aircraft to turn LEFT on to a heading of 180. That heading is almost directly away from Mt Wilson and if the aircraft had done exactly as instructed they wouldn’t have got anywhere near the hills. A left turn from 090 to 180 is taking the long way around and would normally prompt a crew to confirm that she didn’t mean a right turn. This crew didn’t do this though, they read back the instruction and started a left turn. From then on the ATCer is doing her best to keep the aircraft separated from other traffic and to get it established on a southern heading (180).
So at no time was the EVA B777 ever directed to fly toward Mt Wilson other than momentarily as a consequence of the left turn. The fact that they flew northerly for some time is a mystery and is presumably down to the crew getting confused about what was being asked of them.
I would expect that the crew not being native english speakers and the ATCer using non-standard phraseology will have played a part in this mess.
Finally, it is normal for pilots and controllers to get “stood down” pending an investigation and the fact that this controller has been assigned different tasks is of no consequence.
Richard Pearse. I’m interested in your statement, “The fact that they flew northerly for some time is a mystery and is presumably down to the crew getting confused about what was being asked of them.”
I’ll let Richard Pearse answer that question more fully if he’d like to, but I will mention this: Several decades ago, pilots on a Varig flight in Brazil confused “027 degrees” (northeast-ish) with “270 degrees” (west), with fatal results: the plane crashed in the remote jungle in darkness hours later, thousands of miles from its intended destination.
Quite different circumstances than this recent incident (and indeed the Varig situation would be almost impossible nowadays, thanks to GPS), but perhaps this same sort of momentary confusion occurred this time, as the pilots tried to figure out why you would turn left to go south (“maybe she said 018, not 180”).
I’ve been given similar instructions before. It was deliberate and designed to slow my transition to the intended heading and to avoid avoid traffic by turning left instead of right.
Yes, the crew should have questioned it (which I did in my case). If time permits the controller should explain the longer route to avoid confusion and the inevitable call for clarification.
In the Varig case, it was a misinterpretation of a written instruction, not a spoken one. From Wikipedia:
“While First Officer Zille was making an external inspection of the aircraft, Captain Garcez consulted the flight plan for the magnetic heading to Belém; the flight plan read 0270. Garcez interpreted this as 270 degrees, but the intended meaning was 027.0 degrees. Varig’s heading notation for the flight plan was changed to four digits from three while Garcez was on vacation,[10] and it did not explicitly specify the position for the decimal point, which was implicitly located to the left of the rightmost digit.”
“zero-two-seven” and “two-seven-zero”.
Speaking to the general outline of the EVA scenario, not the specifics of this individual event. …
I too have been given turn to a heading with the wrong direction of turn. As a controller mistake, not a deliberate turn the long way around as **Magiver **relates he once got.
The good news is we had good clear radios, it wasn’t crazy busy, and we both clearly heard all of what the controller said. And we all spoke native English. So we went straight which we knew was OK in the interim, and asked for a confirmation. Which we promptly got. Budding crisis averted.
Stuff happens. The challenge in this industry is there are times when things are going normally and then a minor issue snowballs into a looming disaster in just a few seconds. Once the error chain starts confusion begins to set in and it gets harder and harder to make sense of the rapidly-developing situation.
And often the confused airplane and the confused controller will end up talking on top of each other, with neither one hearing the other. And as such what you next hear from the other side is not at all responsive to your last question they never heard. Which engenders further confusion and tends to make you more convinced they’re confused and you’re the one with the correct understanding. It snowballs very, very quickly.
Which though undesirable is no big deal when you’re 5 minutes from running into something. It’s much bigger deal when you’re 30 seconds from it.
And naturally in busy airspace the other 25 airplanes coming and going have no idea there’s a looming situation. So their routine correct radio use can contribute to comm jamming.
Last of all, the various recordings you may get of radio comm is only about 1/3rd of the story. Down on the ground the controller must contend with other comm going on in the background, and various computer beeps & boops. Meantime in the cockpit the pilots will be talking to understand what they think is happening and the airplane may be sounding carious alarms, be they spoken or noisemakers.
A true instant replay would have all of that going on at once. There is no assurance that a clear radio transmission is heard properly over the rest of what’s happening at either end.
Bottom line: There is no assurance that a crisp clear radio transmission as recorded by a third party receiver was actually heard properly over the rest of what’s also happening simultaneously at either end.
Late in the incident, the controller notes that the aircraft is northbound and seemingly confused. She then tells the pilot to turn southbound repeatedly but never suggests a direction for the turn, even after non-compliance. What are the protocols for specifying a turn like this? If you have heading 090 and are asked to turn to 100, then a right turn is “obvious”, but from ~0 to 180 it isn’t. What about from 0 to 150? I’d think a right or left pattern would be specified in general for any major change of direction. Comments from the experts? (And in this case, it seems like it might have been prudent anyway given the apparent confusion.)
Protocol is to give a direction and the bearing, e.g., “turn right heading one eight zero”, but I think by then the controller didn’t care which way they turned she just wanted them heading south.
Many’s the time we hear foreign pilots on the radio and say to ourselves “If that guy hears and understands English as weakly as he speaks it, I sure hope nothing complicated happens while we’re nearby.” It may well be that “south” simply wasn’t a word they understood. Perhaps what the controller thought was a simplifying statement meant to clarify and shortcut through the confusion instead was meaningless to them and contributed to their further confusion.
A US airliner crashed in South America a few years ago when the crew got their nav confused and aimed themselves at a mountain. The controller knew a critical problem was developing, but didn’t speak English; he just knew the canned English phrases of the official pilot/controller phrasebook. So he had no way to explain what the problem was and how to correct it. He tried doing so in his native Spanish which is routinely used between ATC and local flights throughout Latin America. Which sadly neither US pilot had any skill with; it was just gibberish to them. About 180 people were killed 30 seconds later.
I suspect this case will turn out to have a large element of that same issue.
I realize this entails complications of its own, but at airports known to have a high degree of foreign flights from one particular region - for instance, SFO and LAX get flights from Taiwan, China and Singapore on a highly regular basis - might it be OK to have some ATCs who are bilingual in English and Chinese, and have them handle those flights on their arrival and departure? i.e., “You handle those EVA Air, Air China, Cathay Pacific, China Airlines, China Southern flights?”
The bilingual ATCs, of course, would still have to have English as good as anyone else’s.
That would only encourage the further lack of English comprehension, and make the matter worse. Those pilots still need to have the ability to speak and communicate with other aircraft. They can’t do that if they don’t speak English.
It’s not just foreigners who don’t speak english well that find it difficult understanding RT in the US. Native english speaking pilots can have trouble as well. And it goes both ways, I’ve heard Americans having trouble with Australian controllers. The best weapon against this kind of stuff is to use standard ICAO phraseology as much as possible, and to take a little extra care with foreign pilots. A long haul pilot may only do one trip to the US every few months so it’s not like they have a lot of exposure to it.
Last night going down the US east coast I listened to two British Airways, a Lufthansa, a Quebecker working for Air Transat and an Iberian. Some dealt just fine with rapid fire NYC accents and a couple hours later drawling southerners from Jacksonville, Florida. Others struggled.
One British guy had impeccable enunciation and procedure. The other was mushy, informal, and hard to understand. The guy from Iberian sounded more Russian than Spanish and had a very thick tongue. The previous day going into NYC I heard an Air China guy who was obviously Asian, but his English was so crisp and excellent I commented on it to my partner.
ICAO puts out the official phrasebook. Each country deviates from it a bit in forming their own national phrasebook. The US deviates more than most, mostly for reasons of backwards compatibility and sheer “USA! USA!”.
Unfortunately, the busier the environment, the more local shortcuts start getting used. The limit case being IMO O’Hare ground (=taxi) control. They are so far off ICAO or FAA standards it amazing. But that’s what it seems to take to stuff that many airplanes through that much concrete in that much time. It works well enough if you’re a regular there. I pity the newbies who start their airline career there. Welcome to the Bigs! :eek:
And yes, you do hear most controllers in most locations at most times being extra slow and careful to folks with thick accents. And trying hard not to surprise them with late changes in the plan. KISS applies even if that means having them take up 2 airplanes’ worth of time/space.