Two more airport near misses: Burbank (KBUR), Boston (KBOS)

Here's a phrase that apparently the airlines simply made up: near miss. They say that if 2 planes almost collide, it's a near miss. ********, my friend. It's a near hit! A collision is a near miss. [WHAM! CRUNCH!] "Look, they nearly missed!" "Yes, but not quite.

- nauga

or George Carlin
 
BOS is an airport that has never made sense to me from a layout/traffic management standpoint. Multiple crossing runways that are used simultaneously, parallels that are ridiculously sized for a major commercial airport and rarely used. I'm sure ORD was similar before their reconfiguration.
 
midwestpa24 said:
BOS is an airport that has never made sense to me from a layout/traffic management standpoint. Multiple crossing runways that are used simultaneously, parallels that are ridiculously sized for a major commercial airport and rarely used. I'm sure ORD was similar before their reconfiguration.
Click to expand...

It might be more understandable when you consider noise abatement constaints on operations. Politics have plagued KBOS for decades.

But please note I said "be more understandable" and NOT "make more sense"
 
NorthEast Ohio said:
Here's a phrase that apparently the airlines simply made up: near miss. They say that if 2 planes almost collide, it's a near miss. ********, my friend. It's a near hit! A collision is a near miss. [WHAM! CRUNCH!] "Look, they nearly missed!" "Yes, but not quite.
Click to expand...
I guess I never quite get this reaction, especially having grown up speaking English rather differently to the average American. Back when I was a kid playing cricket, for instance, we'd use "near miss" and "close miss" interchangeably when talking about bowling, with the obvious meaning of the miss involving close quarters; ditto with "distant miss" or "wide miss".
 
Bob Noel said:
It might be more understandable when you consider noise abatement constaints on operations. Politics have plagued KBOS for decades.

But please note I said "be more understandable" and NOT "make more sense"
Click to expand...

Oh I work in the industry, so I certainly understand the limitations of the situation. Just being landlocked prevents BOS from being able to significantly reconfigure itself into a more user friendly layout. But watching traffic in and out of BOS can be mind blowing. It's amazing there aren't more "near-misses".
 
NorthEast Ohio said:
Here's a phrase that apparently the airlines simply made up: near miss. They say that if 2 planes almost collide, it's a near miss. ********, my friend. It's a near hit! A collision is a near miss. [WHAM! CRUNCH!] "Look, they nearly missed!" "Yes, but not quite.

- nauga

or George Carlin
Click to expand...

If one is to be pedantic about it, wouldn’t that be “nearly a miss”? Nearly negates the noun whereas near does not.

I will admit it’s been a while since I was forced to care about such pedantry in written language (aka English class), so I might be a bit off the mark.
 
NorthEast Ohio said:
Here's a phrase that apparently the airlines simply made up: near miss. They say that if 2 planes almost collide, it's a near miss. ********, my friend. It's a near hit! A collision is a near miss. [WHAM! CRUNCH!] "Look, they nearly missed!" "Yes, but not quite.

- nauga

or George Carlin
Click to expand...
My take on that is that "near miss" is not the same as "nearly missed."
 
midwestpa24 said:
BOS is an airport that has never made sense to me from a layout/traffic management standpoint. Multiple crossing runways that are used simultaneously, parallels that are ridiculously sized for a major commercial airport and rarely used. I'm sure ORD was similar before their reconfiguration.
Click to expand...

I makes more sense if you are familiar with the local area. They drive like that. Really! Wonderful people outside of cars, but driving makes Manhattan seem polite.
 
For the Boston incident, here's Flightradar's blog
https://www.flightradar24.com/blog/faa-investigating-close-call-in-boston/
where they estimate 565 feet between the Hop-a-Jet Learjet (which took off without a clearance after being told to line up and wait) and the JetBlue 206 (which was landing on the intersecting runway).

Looking at the diagram below, it looks like the Learjet must have been taxiing straight toward the traffic on approach to runway 4 until they got onto their runway 9, but after they got onto runway 9 maybe they no longer had a view of the traffic on approach to runway 9.

Boston-Close-Call-Cover.jpg
 
Last edited:
Albany Tom said:
I makes more sense if you are familiar with the local area. They drive like that. Really! Wonderful people outside of cars, but driving makes Manhattan seem polite.
Click to expand...

When I lived in Boston, I eventually figured out that there are the written rules, and then there are the REAL rules. When I figured out what the latter were, then I was fine.
 
Larry in TN said:
In "It was a near miss", "near" is an adjective modifying "miss". "Near" is describing the type of "miss" that occurred.
Click to expand...
Yes I understand but “near” denotes spatial proximity in this context but doesn’t negate it being a miss, same as in the sentence “put the glass on the near table rather than the far table.” “Nearly a miss”, however, negates it being a miss, I.e. a hit or a collision. “Nearly” modifies the noun and implies the subject of the sentence is not in fact the noun, e.g. “he was nearly an adult” implies he was not an adult.
 
Last edited:
I'll adjust it a little bit. I don't think it's specifically human performance. I think it's that the expectation level we have for air carrier accidents, which is now zero, seems to be in conflict with the fact that people sometimes make mistakes. The fact that there are usually at least two people checking things isn't good enough for a zero accident rate.

The math on this should be pretty easy to figure out. How many mistakes per thousand flights does the average controller make? Of the potential mistakes, what percentage could lead to a collision? So if it's 1 in 10 thousand for pilot or ATC, and they both have to miss to have a hit, then that's average of 1 in 100 million flights. Or whatever the real math is.

Based on the math, they can change the procedures, increase the distances, or whatever. Worst case? They have to build more runways, figure out how to get the carriers to user larger planes so there are fewer overall flights, get people to fly less, get the numbers down.

I say all the above because I while I believe training can help with performance, you're talking about 10%-20% increases in things, not double. Especially with something like alertness. If you want to make meaningful differences in things, you need different procedures, not better training, just from my perspective.

Or we can say that things are fine, and that we're catching these almost accidents. I don't think that's a bad argument, really. To me, airline travel is very safe, and we're just used to zero accidents, so the next one is going to hit pretty hard.
 
The problem with thinking that we can achieve zero accidents is that you simply can't eliminate hardware failures. No matter how reliable the hardware is, there is always a non-zero chance of failure. Always. You. Cannot. Achieve. Zero.

The hard choice is deciding what is safe enough.
 
Absolutely true. In the computer world, when they introduced RAID arrays, they promised that there would never be disk failure based data loss. Well, that proved not to be true. There is always a failure mode that will take down a system.
 
AKiss20 said:
I will admit it’s been a while since I was forced to care about such pedantry in written language (aka English class), so I might be a bit off the mark.
Click to expand...

Fortune shines on you in today's world, because caring about precision in written English has all but disappeared. Peruse any major newspaper or internet news source for verification of this fact.
 
AKiss20 said:
If one is to be pedantic about it, wouldn’t that be “nearly a miss”? Nearly negates the noun whereas near does not.

I will admit it’s been a while since I was forced to care about such pedantry in written language (aka English class), so I might be a bit off the mark.
Click to expand...

oh heck. What does it mean when American English and English can't agree on whether or not "responsible" and "accountable" are synonyms.
 
I’ve seen both “near miss” and “near collision” used where no collision occurred. Seems weird that those two terms could mean the same thing, no?
 
Half Fast said:
I’ve seen both “near miss” and “near collision” used where no collision occurred. Seems weird that those two terms could mean the same thing, no?
Click to expand...
Yeah, it bugs me. "It was a miss, and the planes were very near"?
 
Half Fast said:
I’ve seen both “near miss” and “near collision” used where no collision occurred. Seems weird that those two terms could mean the same thing, no?
Click to expand...
Add it to the list of weird English synonyms. like ravel/unravel and flammable/inflammable.
 
Part of me wonders, though, if the cure that will inevitably come of this will limit itself to commercial aviation, or, as is often the case, will it be a broad stroke solution that will have an effect on the GA pilots as well?

And no, I have no clue what the cure will be, but with these being reported in the news, and them linking them together in the articles, I would be very surprised if something isn't enacted by either congress or the new head of the FAA (whether the gentleman we have a thread abut, or someone else) wanting to make their mark.
 
Bob Noel said:
oh heck. What does it mean when American English and English can't agree on whether or not "responsible" and "accountable" are synonyms.
Click to expand...
It means the English speak the wrong English. :D
 
bbchien said:
Hunter, the problem is human performance. We just cannot push it beyond that limit.
Click to expand...
Let's automate everything! Cloud computing and AI sending commands directly to the autopilot.
It's not like the FAA computers would ever go down.:rolleyes:
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top