Saturday was a very bad day for a group of five Italian tourists, their Kiwi pilot and three Pennsylvania men when the latter’s Piper Cherokee collided with a tour helicopter over the Hudson River. It also is turning out to be a bad day for two air traffic controllers from New York’s Teterboro Airport:
The air traffic controller at Teterboro Airport was on the phone with his girlfriend during the mid-air collision over the Hudson River.
His supervisor had wandered off and wasn’t even in the tower.
Horrified officials called their actions “unacceptable,” even though they were not blamed for Saturday’s crash.
Both controllers – who were not immediately identified – have been suspended and will likely be fired.
Crash probes by the National Transportation Safety Board and the Federal Aviation Administration revealed the two controllers seriously deviated from their assignments at the time of the collision.
Nine people died when a single-engine Piper plane with three aboard clipped a Liberty Helicopters sightseeing chopper carrying a pilot and five Italian tourists. Both aircraft plummeted into the river.
The article – which has an embedded video link of the mishap from a tourist boat – goes on to say that the NTSB found the controllers’ actions “unacceptable,” but that there was no reason to believe that they led to the mishap. The video appears to show the Cherokee overtaking the helo, which burdens him with collision avoidance.
The article goes on to say that the Cherokee crew, having departed from Teterboro, was handed off to Newark for their further flight south to Ocean City, NJ.
TSB chairwoman Debbie Hersman has said the controller told Altman to switch his radio over to the Newark tower – and gave the correct frequency – but Newark never made contact.
The controller was also on a separate line with his girlfriend.”The handoff was never made,” an aviation source said.
Well, operating under VFR flight following, it’s the pilot’s responsibility to check in with the controller, not the other way around. Not excusing the Teterboro controllers’ actions, but from their perspective the hand-off was made when they switched the Cherokee off frequency. In any, case the controller has the responsibility to provide traffic advisories only as workload permits. If you really want traffic separation, you file an IFR flight plan (and then cancel, if appropriate, once clear of the Class B).
Saturday afternoon is a very busy time around the Hudson, with tour helos lifting off from the West 30th Street heliport and weekend travelers navigating up and down river. Teterboro is a relatively busy airport, with an average of 548 aircraft taking off or landing every day. (My home ‘drome, also embedded within Class B airspace, has nearly 700 daily operations.)
VFR means “see and avoid,” even with flight following.
Fate is the hunter, and that.
See and avoid is right. Flight following can be dropped by the controller without warning if traffic he must control builds to teh point of taking all his time, or the VFR guys are too much of a distraction.
Some meathead screwed up, and I’ll wait until the final report comes out which will require a reconstruction of events including the relevant radio traffic.
That was such a gently converging course it is baffling the Cherokee didn’t see the helo long before.
Having flown the Hudson corridor several times it is understandable yet inexcusable this happened. Frankly part of the problem may have been the Cherokee being handed off to Newark Tower. If he had been on the corridor CTAF he may have become aware of the situation in time to do something about it. But we will never know.
When I’ve flown it there are always a lot of airplanes but everyone plays by the rules, self-announces (“Red and White RV, Southbound Intrepid…”, etc),and stays to the right of the river.
Coming out of Teterboro and transitioning into the environment he lacked the earlier radio calls that would have helped situation awareness. But, of course, you can’t depend on that as someone just might, you know, forget to make one. And I’ve known at least one person to fly a Piper Cub up the Hudson that didn’t have a radio.
So its back to the basics – head on a swivel and all that.
I just hope they don’t close the corridor down. It is a nice transition down the Hudson and the first time I did I enjoyed looking UP at the World Trade Center going by. Second time I looked down into a still smoldering hole….
Scapegoats found.
Check.
Hard to tell from the video, but was the helo climbing into a blind spot? Difficult to see anything down through the wing on a low wing airplane.
Change the names and titles to medical specialties and a bad medical outcome. Now you know how a centralized, top down remote decision process will “benefit” you if this country is dumb and lazy enough to allow the panderers in D.C. to have their way.