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.