Much Ado About Air Safety

There's much ado about air traffic safety, with most of the problems occurring around the busy “Hub” terminals. In reality it doesn’t take a rocket scientist mentality to solve this problem, just common sense, pure logic and computer regulated aircraft spacing.

As a pilot, I have visited many airport control towers and centers and have yet to find an airline schedule being used to help the busy and overworked controllers informed as to when such and such a carrier would have an aircraft scheduled to land at a particular airport. so they (in their spare time) could regulate spacing between arriving and departing airlines. Please notice that I used the term “airlines” as opposed to airplanes, since mixing scheduled airlines and general aviation airplanes is akin to mixing oil and water. (They don’t in either case mix well).

Landing an airplane at a busy terminal is akin to pouring water through a funnel into a smaller container. You can only pour just so fast or there is an overflow and a resulting spill. You can scheduled just so many airplanes in just so many minutes onto a given runway and then slow each down from over a hundred miles per hour to around fifteen or twenty miles an hour in a linear runway of one and a half miles or so and get it safely off the active and onto the taxi way. Then if the airplane that had been readied for departure is delayed, there is obviously no place for the incoming plane to go to deplane its passengers.

The Berlin air lift was a microcosm of this problem with aircraft landing every three minutes at Templehof, and obviously the same number departing .

Since all approaches and departures were required to be governed by instrument flight rules (IFR) occasionally for whatever reason,there would be the necessity to execute a missed approach, and the drill was as follows.

Any aircraft that missed its approach was to continue back to its station via the outgoing center corridor.  This created a continuous loop of planes to and from Berlin.  If a pilot missed his approach, he would immediately become a departure and head back to his base.  The loaded aircraft would get a fresh crew and be sent back as a regular flight.  In addition, all aircraft were required to fly by instrument rules to maintain the same speed, interval and altitude.  This almost eliminated accidents and became the key to the success of the operation. 

Yes I know that our aircraft and our instruments are better and with the advent of high speed computers there should be no great problem as there is now. This final note will get me lynched by the general aviation population, but we simply have to land all non scheduled aircraft, and air freight operations at an alternate airport and reserve the busy commercial airports reserved for passenger flights only. One final note, “air mail” as we now know it would be removed from airline passenger flights and routed to the general aviation airports as well.

The way it is now we have one airport that serves the passengers, carries freight, and mail, and this parallels to putting a railroad station, a bus station, a trucking company, and. a post office all in the same building and land area. Mass confusion?, I’d like to have the parking lot concession for that milage!