N. Las Vegas Mid-air

100% pilot error on the Piper's part.
That being said I don't see any reason why the controller didn't issue a traffic advisory to both of them "advise traffic in sight on parallel runway" or similar.
Also in the age of ADSB this is even more sad, it's so easy now to look at the iPad/gps and see where everyone is.
 
Hang 4 said:
Not sure what a controller could have done. Only thing I could see is the Malibu lining up for the wrong runway. "Hey, you're assigned 30L, looks like you're lining up for 30R" and maybe "go around". Still all on pilot IMHO.
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Based on that approach, not sure one could ever say “lined up” for any runway, seems like that would have had to very tight turn to get to 30L
 
nrm2430 said:
https://archive.liveatc.net/kvgt/KVGT2-Jul-17-2022-1830Z.mp3

N160RA was doing several turns around the pattern. N97CX checks in around 22:38
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I found it about 24:00. Then going back and listening again was in the 23:'s. Went back one more time and it was 24:17. Anyway, she checks in with the over the field and downwind for 30L thing. So she must of gotten that from Approach. Visual Approach or just on Flight Following with a B Clearance, who knows. Not pertinent anyway. She says 30L I think four times. Never an indication of any kind of confusion with 30R.
 
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Hang 4 said:
Not sure what a controller could have done. Only thing I could see is the Malibu lining up for the wrong runway. "Hey, you're assigned 30L, looks like you're lining up for 30R" and maybe "go around". Still all on pilot IMHO.
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Not sure a controller could tell that visually, given the location of the tower. He would really have to be watching closely.
 
luvflyin said:
….She says 30L I think four times. Never an indication of any kind of confusion with 30R.
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I would mostly agree except the controller felt it necessary to clarify 30L, to which she acknowledged 30L right before they lined up with 30R.
 
Tarheelpilot said:
I’m not a lawyer and I’m not commenting on legal liability. So I will not respond to your statement.

I’m speaking from my professional experience. This is 100% a pilot f up. It doesn’t matter who looses in court or has to pay. That’s just bs after the fact for people wanting money.
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As I pilot, I agree 100% that is a pilot screw up. I was just commenting on the liability standpoint which was the word you used.
 
eman1200 said:
listen to the first 2 minutes of this link
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Got it. It sounded like he was verifying that he had said it correctly the first time. Maybe he did see something that looked like she was overshooting. Only he will know that. We'll probably have to wait a couple years to know.
 
eman1200 said:
I would mostly agree except the controller felt it necessary to clarify 30L, to which she acknowledged 30L right before they lined up with 30R.
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And I still don’t understand given the controllers “concern” for clarifying 30L why he couldn’t simply have said “we have a 172 doing patter work on 30R, let me know when you have traffic in sight” or some similar situational alert. Maybe it wouldn’t have mattered but it seems a reasonable way to manage that airspace with GA aircraft.
 
Fearless Tower said:
As I pilot, I agree 100% that is a pilot screw up. I was just commenting on the liability standpoint which was the word you used.
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No doubt the FAA is going to be named. Maybe some of the other Usual Suspects also. Deep Pocket gonna apply. It's going to be a guessing game on what they think a Jury may end up looking like. I'm just giving it 50/50 right now on Trial vs Settlement.
 
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Ed Haywood said:
Is Bob Hepp still running the flight school there?
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Yep. Aviation Adventures is still running strong and, as far as I know, he's running it. They bought out what was Westside Aviation's maintenance facility over on the west ramp, too.
 
It would be interesting to hear if he was on an instrument plan flying a visual.
 
PaulS said:
It would be interesting to hear if he was on an instrument plan flying a visual.
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It wouldn't surprise me. They were IFR at one time according to this I read "...This started out as an IFR flight. Most of the trip down from Coeur d'Alene was at 23,000 ft. Perhaps they cancelled at some point. Someone needs to listen to the ATC Center tapes..." Maybe they Cancelled, maybe they didn't. But I don't see at all how that would factor into what happened.
 
I'm just curious if that pattern was his idea or a controller. It would also be interesting to know if they told him to fly fast.
 
3393RP said:
A few years ago I was on final to KTKI RWY 12 and a single that had just landed stopped on the runway and stayed there for 30 seconds or so. The tower controller asked me to do some "slow S turns" to provide separation, to which I said "Unable, 24W is going around."

There was no way I was going to waddle around out there at approach speed with flaps out and stabilized to land.
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EXCELLENT call.

A friend of mine did not do so, and crashed on final to Oshkosh due to someone not flying the NOTAM.
 
PaulS said:
I'm just curious if that pattern was his idea or a controller. It would also be interesting to know if they told him to fly fast.
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Wouldn’t surprise me either way. Wouldn’t surprise me if that over the airport into downwind for the left isn’t a routine thing for arrivals from the North. Had they been told to keep speed up, maybe, but I don’t see that as contributing in that it caused a wide turn. Everything I see about this is the Malibu was going for 30R regardless of what who ever was talking was saying. It happened on a very short final.
 
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Pinecone said:
EXCELLENT call.

A friend of mine did not do so, and crashed on final to Oshkosh due to someone not flying the NOTAM.
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Not a bad call but I’m curious, what’s difficult about doing S turns on final? Home field put me behind a stearman on final so I did s turns the whole way down to give us more spacing. Absolute nothingburger.
 
What a horrible accident to have happened.

Even if the Malibu was told by approach control to keep speed up or fly overhead they still need to reduce speed when necessary, fly pattern appropriately, and line up with the correct runway. I’m with the crowd thinking she was handling the radios and he was flying and just had 30R plugged in his head, expectation bias or not.

At VGT has the parallel taxiways or close-in landscape ever fooled someone into misidentifying the runways like it happens at other airports?
 
eman1200 said:
Not a bad call but I’m curious, what’s difficult about doing S turns on final? Home field put me behind a stearman on final so I did s turns the whole way down to give us more spacing. Absolute nothingburger.
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Nothing difficult; possibly problematic with parallel runways in use, due to encroachment.
 
TrueCourse said:
Could age have played a contributing factor in this crash? Supposedly, pilot was 82 years old. Don’t shoot the messenger.
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Age in itself, no. But we all age differently. My in-laws are well into their eighties, very sharp, still drive on cross-country vacations. My 60-year-old neighbor, not so much.
 
Well said. The number is not important, it’s typically what comes with that age for many people. So, only those close to them know if the pilot wasn’t as sharp as he should have been to safely fly the airplane.
 
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schmookeeg said:
...
I wish there was some ipad-sized visual 2-way comm replacement to limit the amount of chatter on the radio. You flick a button and I get a "FLY DOWNWIND TO 30L" picture, with euro-style idiot-resistant pictures, arrows, and maybe some smiley-faced hoops in the sky to fly through. We're like 80% of the way there already.

Maybe I get a green "OK" button. If I press the red button, I am given vectors to F off out of the class D and try again. :D
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The FAA's reliance on voice-grade communication channels is dismaying in these days of high-speed data networking. We all carry around portable comm terminals with 4 UHF and microwave transceivers, and high-resolution graphics displays. Call them tablets, smartphones, whatever; they are ubiquitous, reliable, effective, and cheap.

Scenario: upon startup, have the app locate the nearest ATC facility, and select "W"; hit SEND. No need for 25 seconds of chatter: "Ground, this is Skyhawk 567 Mike Alpha at Area 5 with Quebec, West departure". Instead, in 50 milliseconds, the app sends airplane N number and GPS coordinates to the local controller, whose own app responds with taxi instructions, bitmap of the taxiway path, and overlays it with text of the ATIS. Pilot hits the ACK key, starts rolling. No talking, no "readback of all runway crossings", just progressive permissives issued to the pilot as he navigates to the runway for his West departure, and awaits the takeoff clearance message.

Analogously, pilots of arriving aircraft just hit the "L" key on the app, and get their unambiguous landing instructions displayed in milliseconds. Without chatter, channel saturation, or tragic misunderstandings.
 
t3chiman said:
The FAA's reliance on voice-grade communication channels is dismaying in these days of high-speed data networking. We all carry around portable comm terminals with 4 UHF and microwave transceivers, and high-resolution graphics displays. Call them tablets, smartphones, whatever; they are ubiquitous, reliable, effective, and cheap.

Scenario: upon startup, have the app locate the nearest ATC facility, and select "W"; hit SEND. No need for 25 seconds of chatter: "Ground, this is Skyhawk 567 Mike Alpha at Area 5 with Quebec, West departure". Instead, in 50 milliseconds, the app sends airplane N number and GPS coordinates to the local controller, whose own app responds with taxi instructions, bitmap of the taxiway path, and overlays it with text of the ATIS. Pilot hits the ACK key, starts rolling. No talking, no "readback of all runway crossings", just progressive permissives issued to the pilot as he navigates to the runway for his West departure, and awaits the takeoff clearance message.

Analogously, pilots of arriving aircraft just hit the "L" key on the app, and get their unambiguous landing instructions displayed in milliseconds. Without chatter, channel saturation, or tragic misunderstandings.
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You really don’t see that having just as many potential issues? I’d wager more. Not that I’m against electronic clearances, but I think adsb did plenty to put pilots heads down in the cockpit when they should be looking outside. No need to add more of that sort of th8ng.
 
I'm just trying to figure out why this guy, who was apparently based at this airport, would cross over midfield, at 140 knots and basically turn into a short approach 0.6 nm from the centerline of the runway he was going to land on. This is 100% on the pilot, but I'm curious as to whether he was just hot dogging, or he was trying to please/help out someone. He basically attempted a 0.6 nm diameter 270 degree turn to final starting at about 140 knots. With a standard rate turn you can expect your turn diameter to be about 1% of your ground speed, 1.4 nm in this case. So this guy must've been yanking and banking to get the turn this tight, turns out it wasn't tight enough. That would have been slightly disorienting and his view of the intended runway would have been obscured for much of the turn.

We, as a collective, really need to be better.
 
Salty said:
...having just as many potential issues? ...
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There are always issues. This is real life. My professional opinion: the voice grade comm channel is surpassed by techno-economic progress. Long winded phonetic readouts of waypoint identifiers--not necessary, error-inducing, channel-clogging. Send me a text. Those off-by-a-digit frequency and altimeter settings--not necessary, error-inducing, at times tragic in their consequences. Send me a text. And the Morse code identifiers--please.
 
t3chiman said:
There are always issues. This is real life. My professional opinion: the voice grade comm channel is surpassed by techno-economic progress. Long winded phonetic readouts of waypoint identifiers--not necessary, error-inducing, channel-clogging. Send me a text. Those off-by-a-digit frequency and altimeter settings--not necessary, error-inducing, at times tragic in their consequences. Send me a text. And the Morse code identifiers--please.
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Your eyes already have plenty of work to do in the pattern.
 
Salty said:
You really don’t see that having just as many potential issues? I’d wager more. Not that I’m against electronic clearances, but I think adsb did plenty to put pilots heads down in the cockpit when they should be looking outside. No need to add more of that sort of th8ng.
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Things have improved enormously once airline pilots started listening/monitoring TCAS rather than just looking outside …
 
Is a human sending the text? Would you rather your tower controller be looking out the window or looking at a text? It wouldn’t solve much in my opinion. Departure frequency at Tucson is 125.1. Guess how many times pilots check in on guard per day. There will still be a lot of human error
 
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t3chiman said:
There are always issues. This is real life. My professional opinion: the voice grade comm channel is surpassed by techno-economic progress. Long winded phonetic readouts of waypoint identifiers--not necessary, error-inducing, channel-clogging. Send me a text. Those off-by-a-digit frequency and altimeter settings--not necessary, error-inducing, at times tragic in their consequences. Send me a text. And the Morse code identifiers--please.
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Did it take longer for you to type this post out or for me to read it?

I use CPDLC on a regular basis at work. It's great for what we use it for. Departure clearances, amended clearances, enroute altitude clearances, route amendments, frequency changes ... all that stuff is great.

For taxi, takeoff and landing instructions, I think that's too dynamic of an environment for text based clearances. It's much easier/quicker/safer for the local controller to press the transmit button on the mic and say "Airline 123, go around, aircraft on runway" than it is to see the problem, type out a text message, send it, have Delta read it, then react.
 
Sluggo63 said:
... easier/quicker/safer for the local controller to press the transmit button on the mic and say "Airline 123, go around, aircraft on runway" ...
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Agree that voice commands have an immediacy that text messages can't match.
 
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