Originally Posted by
rickair7777
People,
I just heard (from a guy who was there) about a recent very near midair between an 121 pax airliner and a large 121 cargo plane (one of the big two). The story was very disturbing...
Center made an error assigning cargo an altitude, and both aircraft ended up head-to-head at cruise speed in the flight levels.
Center's computer alerter went off at the same time as the RA's...not much time here, about 1000 knots closure, like top gun. Center starts screaming (very agitated since the seperation violation has already occured) that he told cargo a different altitude and to climb immediately....
Pax gets a climb RA, cargo gets a descend RA...good so far, but the controller's insistent screaming somehow convinces cargo to ignore the RA and climb instead
The aircraft came with a couple hundred feet and pax saved the day by executing a hard banked turn (in the 300 flight levels).
It was determined that the controller assigned cargo the wrong altitude, but cargo still should have followed the RA. I find this pretty distrurbing because a professional flight crew at one of the worlds top aviation employers disregarded an RA in extremis.
This is almost the exact same scenario that brought down that Russian airliner (and a DHL heavy) over germany a few years back. Please remember these two events next time you get an RA...I sure will.
Ok, so I'm about 99.99% sure that this was me. If it's true, it happened about two months ago and if it's not me, than that makes this even scarier since this exact scenario happened with me two months ago.
The cargo a/c had an emergency of some sort and was going over us on the arrival as we were headed west. There was weather in the area that we needed to deviate for. The controller kept telling us we couldnt' get higher because of the emergency going over top of us which was fine with us, we couldnt' climb much more anyway. We finally were able to convince center we needed to go right for the weather which they gave us.
About 10 seconds later we got the TA (Traffic Advisory), the preliminary status letting us know a conflict could occur if nothing changes. We noticed he was at the same altitude and I was able to pick him out between two buildups, as soon as we got the visual on him we got the RA (Resolution Advisory) telling us to climb. We started to climb and as we were climbing I informed ATC what we were doing but they blocked us telling the other a/c to get back on altitude. His RA was telling him to descend (heard on the tapes) but that's when I noticed that he was climbing too. We started a left turn to avoid him. It was close, but none of the pax or the fa noticed a thing. Once the other guy realized what was going on he did descend per his RA.
The only thing I would say is that, I had some close calls when I was flight instructing, like a T-6 coming over the top and dropping in front of you, but this was different. We are all professional pilots who NEED to do what we're trained to do. I won't ever say I can't understand why the other guy climbed, with ATC yelling at him, I understand the temptation. But please please chalk this up as a learning experience for everyone. You must follow the RA, MUST.
If the other a/c had followed the RA there would have been no issues, other than a loss of seperation, but by ignoring it, there were 55-60 people's lives put in jeopardy. Like I said, I will never fault the other guy for this, I'm just happy that we acted in a manner that kept us all safe.