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CNN Live Today

Midair Confusion in European Crash

Aired July 02, 2002 - 13:14   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.


THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
KYRA PHILLIPS, CNN ANCHOR: In Germany, aviation officials are searching for the cause of a deadly midair collision. A Russian charter jet and cargo plane slammed into each other last night near the German and Swiss border.

At least 71 people were aboard those planes. Most of them were Russian children heading to Spain on vacation. Air traffic controllers say the Russian pilot descended to avoid that collision, but acted just too late.

How could two planes, both equipped with collision avoidance systems, collide in midair? CNN's Miles O'Brien is here to help us understand how it all went down -- Miles.

MILES O'BRIEN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Kyra, thanks very much.

Let's begin by just giving an overview -- show you the map of Europe and some of the destinations that are involved here.

Four cities that you need to consider here as we consider how these two flights intersected, how they ended up on collision course.

First of all, let's take a look at the map. And it's very straightforward here when you look at it and you see the directions. There's Munich. There's Brussels. Excuse me, I gave you another Munich. Let me try that one more time. There's Munich. Let's go to Brussels. Let's give you Bergamo, Italy.

Oh, my goodness gracious, I'm not doing this very well. Bergamo, Italy, Barcelona, Brussels, and Munich. OK, geography class is over. Now we'll show you the basic directions of the flights. The DHL-757 was en route like that. The Tupolev-154, having started in Moscow, was headed from Munich to Barcelona.

Now you can see right there is the point where the trouble began, right at that X. Now, if I could give you a sense of what might have happened in midair, we put together some 3-D animation, giving you a little indication of it.

In the foreground is the 757, the DHL-757, if we can put this in motion now for us, you will see that it was on a northbound course. The Tupolev-154, not unlike a 727, was flying on a sort of southwesterly course, in this direction. What is likely to have happened is the two aircraft were on their way toward a collision course, the controller, who was a Swiss controller, had just gotten in touch with this Tupolev-154, the Russian-made aircraft, realized that these two aircraft were at the same altitude, at 36,000 feet.

He talked to this pilot, who is obviously not an English speaker. English the international language of aviation -- took him a little while to explain to him that he needed him down 1,000 feet lower, at 35,000 feet.

By the time he did that, this plane was close enough that its collision avoidance system, which emanates a little radio beam out here, identified this as a plane that was on a collision course. So what happened was just as the Russian realized he had to go down 1,000 feet, the collision avoidance system on the 757, the cargo hauler, told those pilots to do precisely the same thing, to descend.

That is where, unfortunately, they met, both of them descending, both of them going -- continuing their collision course by taking what they thought were evasive actions. In other words, two evasive actions canceling each other out.

Let's tell you briefly -- just going to a Web site here will give you a sense of how this collision avoidance system works. TCAS, as they call it -- essentially what it does is, it creates kind of an oval around a plane, the forward portion obviously being important, identifies intruders into that spot, and gives pilots a sense of where they are on a graphical display, as I scroll up to this site.

This is one of the manufacturers of this equipment. I'll try to decipher this for you as best I can. Each of these little blips indicates an aircraft. If you look at it very closely, you'll see there's like a little bar at the end of it. That gives it the direction, and in addition, although it's very hard to make out, it gives the altitude and so forth, and the pilot can see, at any given moment, all these little blips out there.

What happens is, if one of the blips is actually on its way to becoming a collision course, an audible tone actually begins in the cockpit with a voice that will say, climb, climb, climb, or descend, descend, descend, as it did in this case. The pilot is obligated to follow those commands.

These TCAS systems are very effective. Unfortunately, in this case, the TCAS worked just fine. What happened was, because of some lag time getting the information to the Russian pilot in the Tupolev- 154 to get down, the TCAS did its work at the same time the Russian pilot was doing its descent, and the disaster that we saw just happened.

Briefly, let's look back in time to the late '70s. San Diego -- the TCAS system that we see in these commercial airliners these days came as a result of this crash, when a Pacific Southwest Airline 727 crashed on approach to Lindbergh Field in San Diego, flying right into a Cessna 172. The controllers thought the pilot had seen -- the pilot had visual contact with that 172, that small plane, for a little while, then lost it, and literally flew on top of that plane, killing all aboard that aircraft.

So that is why those systems are on there. Unfortunately the systems work well, but in this case -- one in a million chance -- the system worked, and, unfortunately, the other plane just matched what the system told it to do -- Kyra.

PHILLIPS: Miles, got a quick question for you, but I want to let our viewers know that we are standing by. In just a few minutes, possibly seconds, we are going to bring you the news conference -- Ed and Lois Smart, the parents of 14-year-old Elizabeth Smart, are getting ready to step up to the podium for a daily briefing, so we're going to bring that to you live in just a moment.

So Miles, let's continue talking here for a minute while we're waiting for that. This crash, it comes just six months after -- I was reading here that European air traffic controllers have the minimum height between aircraft in European airspace.

Can we talk a little bit about what that means, and why they did that, and could this be a possible part of the investigation to what went wrong?

O'BRIEN: In this case I'm not sure it applies, because what happened in this case, you had a Russian aircraft that was talking to a German controller. He was perfectly safe in that German controller's sector, at 36,000 feet. He changes frequencies into another sector, the Swiss controller. Turns out that altitude and that correct course weren't good in his sector.

As a matter of fact, probably told him right away on that radar screen, This is collision course with that DHL-757, so he immediately tried to get that Russian plane to change altitude.

That situation could have occurred no matter what the separation rules were. Let me back up and just explain to our viewers what we're talking about here.

Up until about a year ago in the U.S. and about six months ago in Europe, the vertical separation rules were 2,000 feet. That has been shrunk now to 1,000 feet for aircraft that are above 29,000 feet. The theory is that these aircraft that fly up there, first of all they have to be certified to fly in this environment, but they are certified, they are calibrated, their instruments are such and they're precise enough that they feel comfortable enough with it.

Nevertheless, it does reduce some of the margin for error. There's no other way to slice it, except to tell you it does reduce the margin for error by half. Having said all that, it really isn't a factor in this particular incident. A factor to really consider in this one is the fact that in Europe you have this hodgepodge of air traffic control systems, that have run by each nationality, and as they hand-off from German to Swiss to French, and so forth, there's a lot of hand-offs over a short period of time, and that is something that is topic of discussion in Europe right now, whether there should be pan-European air traffic control system to make it a smoother transition as airplanes fly across the European continent.

PHILLIPS: All right. Miles O'Brien, thank you so much. We'll check in with you again, with more on the investigation.

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