Thankful no one got hurt. The Cessna pilot reacted quickly to incorrect instructions from the tower.
I’m curious to hear reactions from the pilots on the SDMB.
Do you routinely think about the instructions from the tower? Mentally checking that they make sense?
I use a Garmin and probably put too much trust in it. Assuming the instructions will guide me off the interstate and down the right local roads. I’d be in trouble if it incorrectly sent me down a one-way street.
Back when I was actively flying out of towered airports yes, because I’m the one whose going to die if ATC tells me to do the wrong thing. You look before you actually turn. You keep an eye out for airplanes on long final. You look for birds because they don’t listen to ATC or follow the rules, and having a bird slam into your windshield can ruin your whole day.
Note that “look out the window” only applies to visual flight rules. If you’re in instrument conditions it’s a different matter entirely.
It’s rare that ATC screws up but it can and does happen. Sounds like in this case both pilots acted correctly to prevent and accident.
Not me, but this was an interesting case:
Short version: a plane accidentally taxied onto an active runway in the dark. They figured it out and said so, but controllers somehow kept insisting that that plane was somewhere else, and gave permission to a different plane to begin takeoff roll on that runway. The pilot in that second plane had been listening to the back-and-forth between the tower and the first plane, and refused instructions to take off until the first plane reported arriving at the gate.
Perhaps I should note that it is entirely legal and proper for a pilot to refuse to comply with an ATC command that is dangerous or would result in a dangerous situation.
Of course, afterward a pilot may be called upon to explain him or herself, but I’d rather that than a fiery crash.
Wouldn’t you notice the one-way signs?
That’s the problem with using GPS. Once you start relying on it, you’re not paying as much attention to your surroundings as you probably would without it. I’ve often missed seeing certain landmarks on a route that GPS had previously taken me, but that popped out when I wasn’t using it the next time.
74Gear has a number of videos called “ATC vs Pilots” about exactly this.
I try to pay attention to my route and the street signs.
It’s difficult in a strange city with heavy traffic. Just keeping up with the Garmin instructions and driving takes a lot of attention.
At something like a Manhattan intersection, the one-way marking is not prominent. A small black-and-white arrow sign on the lamppost at the corner. See the second photo here, for example:
NYC designs the future of safer intersections for cyclists - Curbed NY
I would bet that everyone who drives regularly in Manhattan has at least begun a turn the wrong way into a one-way street on occasion.
See, this is why flying cars will never be a thing.
I briefly considered flying lessons. Thank goodness I reconsidered. I do better with wheels on solid ground. 
I’ve made a wrong turn on a one-way before and I can’t even blame the visual busyness of an urban setting. I was looking for parking in a residential area and … just made the turn. I got a bit down the block before I realized I only was seeing headlights.
Back to aviation …
Yes, we listen to everything everybody says and try to build a mental picture of who is where doing what. And we compare what we’re asked to do with what makes sense for our own state & goals, but also for compatibility with the larger context of everybody and everything else. That’s what we call “situational awareness”. You must know your own state, but it’s far better to know, at least approximately, everyone’s state. It’s more or less the aerial equivalent of defensive driving. Be mentally modeling the other drivers’ thought processes and inputs, not just your own.
If we do hear something that doesn’t make sense either there’s a mistake in the instructions themselves, or in our understanding of them, or in who they’ve been given to, or in who thinks the instructions were given to them.
Every pro pilot and every controller has made all of those errors. And heard others make them countless times. And it’s never 100% true that everyone is aggressively monitoring everyone else’s state. Sometimes attention to that level of abstraction doesn’t happen.
As to this specific incident in the OP.
It’s not at all uncommon at airliner airports to fly light aircraft over the middle of the airport on a track more or less 90 degrees to the runways in use. Directly over a runway, the airliners are either on the ground or close to it. Usually.
The runways at Orlando are very long. The 757 is a very high-performance airliner. If they were only going a short distance, e.g. to Atlanta, they’d have very little fuel onboard and even with a full load of people would climb much more steeply than, say, a 777 going to Europe.
If the Cessna’s track was a little farther towards the far end of the runways / airport than the controller quite realized AND the 757 climbed more steeply than the controller quite expected, it’s entirely possible the 757 would be up near the Cessna’s altitude before they crossed paths, rather than well afterwards. Oops.
Or perhaps the controller had expected the Cessna to progress eastward more quickly than he did due to unexpectedly high winds even at that fairly low altitude. So the controller’s mental pacing of how far past the runways the Cessna would be by the time the 757 got there was too optimistic. Oops again.
Ideally the controller should have mentioned the Cessna to the 757 as part of the takeoff clearance. Which would have clued the 757 pilots to look for the Cessna on the TCAS and out the window and perhaps detect the impending conflict before they even started the takeoff.
One of the challenges with building that situational awareness in general is that when you first join a new frequency you have zero information about any of the players other than yourself. Only over time does more and more puzzle pieces fall into place as you hear people talking on the radio. Then just about the time you’ve got it mostly sussed out, it’s time to move on to the next freq & start over.
Applied specifically to takeoffs, at airline airports it’s pretty common to only switch from the taxi controller to the runway controller very close to the end of the runway, when you’re just about ready to go. So you may only be able to listen to the global state of play for 20 seconds before it’s your turn to go. During which time nothing may be said to anyone about anything and you’re still totally in the dark.
During this specific incident, the Cessna may well have been set on his course by the tower controller then handed off to the radar controller before the 757 was even able to monitor any of that. They were cleared for takeoff into a silent sky that should have also been an empty sky but wasn’t. Oops.
I hate it when that happens.
Thanks, LSL, for that clear explanation.
Empty sky makes sense, but what’s silent sky?
Thank you @LSLGuy
Your comments were very helpful. It cleared up several questions for me.
It’s fortunate that only the Cessna caught the error and climbed. Although the 757 would have climbed even higher and faster. The planes may have still avoided a collision.
They can do this, but I’m wondering why they would. Isn’t a gentler climb more fuel efficient? Or does the better fuel efficiency from reaching high altitude quicker offset any loss of efficiency in the climb itself? I can’t imagine it’s a safety thing - I would think the safety margin from a more rapid gain in altitude is likely offset by a greater risk of engine failure at high power.
I think @LSLGuy is talking about the radio. The 757 pilot switched to Tower frequency just before takeoff. Tower did not inform 757 about the Cessna, and because the Cessna was not actively talking to the tower at the time the 757 was taking off (that’s the “silent sky” imagery) there was also no opportunity for the 757 pilot to passively pick up on its presence.
Here is a discussion I wrote a few years ago about big jet takeoff performance. It and a few posts in either direction gives a decent primer on the topic. Actually, the whole thread has some stuff that may be of interest to those who missed it 8 (!?) years ago.
As applied to this incident …
If they were indeed going just to Atlanta and hence very light on fuel, they may well have been using the minimum legal takeoff power. It’s just that the 757 is built a lot more like a Corvette than it is like a UPS van.
There are some circumstances where full takeoff power is called for procedurally. Which varies by carrier, weather, etc., such that we don’t have the data here to speculate. But if they were in one of those situations, there’d be no particular reason for the controller to have anticipated it, nor any reason for the 757 pilots to mention their intent.
Aside: in fighters, we were required to notify the tower if we intended a serious near-max performance takeoff and climb-out versus simply doing our ordinary 50% faster and 100% stronger maneuver than airliner-typical. Precisely because of the vast gulf between climbing out at 5 degrees net upslope vs 10 degrees upslope versus 80 degrees upslope.
'Zactly.