Planes in near-miss over France

Swiss and Dutch planes came as close as 15 seconds to colliding over France on Wednesday, airline officials say.
The two flights were reportedly within 300m of the other when pilots and onboard warning systems averted a crash over the northern city of Rheims.

Rheims air traffic controllers were in charge of the planes, which were flying at a reported 9,500m.

France has launched an inquiry to find out if human error or technical failure was to blame.

A French aviation spokeswoman said the near-miss was not related to the three-day strike by Paris air traffic controllers - which has just ended.

More at BBC NEWS Online

Scary! Thanks for posting that. I'm just wondering something...how can the planes be 300m apart, and still be 15 seconds from colliding? I just can't picture it at the moment  

Sebastian

@ LHSebi:

Imagine two a/c flying parallel to each other, separated 300 meters. Than turn one of the a/c slightly so that they will meet in 15 seconds...

GOT

I think that the Danish press reported more accurately on this incident:

French ATC made a poor job. The TCAS systems on both planes alerted, both flight crews acted in accordance with the TCAS recommendations. Game over.

The expensive systems worked as intended.

Both crews finished their paperwork on overtime, and an investigation will be launched.

Happy landing, Preben Norholm

An airliner cruises with a speed close to 300m per second (500 mph = 223.5m/s).

TCAS systems normally will instruct one plane to descend an the other plane to climb. The alert comes on at a distance of several miles.

It's a good guess that due to the TCAS alert the planes passed each other with a 300m altitude separation.

Normally having a TCAS alert you would climb or descend half a flight level = 500 feet = 150m. So the system seems to have worked perfectly well.

But such details are way too complicated to report by our press.

Why is it people use the term "Near-Miss"??? A near miss, means the two aircraft almost didn't crash, but still did. A near-crash or near-collision are the sensible (and proper) terms to use.

Just my .02 for the day.

YOW, it depends how you look at it. I've always taken it to mean that it was a "Miss" but that it was "Near." It does seem that "near-collision" would be more descriptive, but "near-miss" sounds better.

French ATC failed big time. When finally working they made a complete mess of it. Striking during holiday season and doing a bad job all year round.

Luckily two great pilots made sure nothing horrific happened. Much respect to those two pilots.

Hopefully no coverup by the French authorities as they did with the Concorde crash investigations.

"Hopefully no coverup by the French authorities as they did with the Concorde crash investigations."

Won't happen. The French will investigate throughly and then put the names of all French controllers in a hat. They will pull out ten names at random and shoot them.

Then they'll declare the problem solved.