Quote:
Originally Posted by DaFace
I don't think any of us here have anywhere near the expertise to definitively conclude anything about what they could or couldn't see. I just know that other incidents that outsiders would conclude should have been easily avoided are less so once they really look at the factors at play. It's obviously not the same situation, but an A350 collided with a coast guard plane on the runway in Japan a year ago. People have asked how it's possible that the A350 wouldn't have seen the coast guard plane sitting on the runway, which seems logical until they actually mocked up what it would look like to the pilots...
(Note the slight break in the centerline about halfway down the runway. That's what they estimate the coast guard plane looked like to the A350 pilots.)
This is why investigations are important. We can guess all we want, but until they carefully study everything that happened, we don't really know where the fault lies. |
Yah, that's pretty much what airfields look like at night. people like to think that everything's lit up, and the aircraft look like X-Mas trees or something, but that's just not what it looks like in reality. When you approach an airport at night, you typically are looking for the long-ish black/unlit rectangle amid a sea of lights. As you get within a few miles you can start to see the actual runway environment lighting, but from a dozen miles away it's just a black rectangle. Other aircraft, unless they're pointed at you, are fairly dark, because recog/nav/logo lighting just isn't very bright.
Also, at B-class airports, most commercial jets are flying the ILS, so the pilots aren't even looking out the windscreen; they're focused on the glideslope indicator until they're just a few hundred feet off the ground, while they're traveling 3-4 miles/minute.l