"Smitty Two" wrote in message
news
In article ,
"Robert Green" wrote:

As a kid I remember bicycling over to see the wreckage of a mid-air
collision over Brooklyn, NYC. With today's huge planes and fuel loads,
a
similar disaster (I believe it was a Connie and a 707 back then) would
likely cause 10 times the casualties on the ground. When we cut back on
regulation and inspection, the death rate from accidents will climb.

As far as mid-airs, we have a decent automated TCAS (traffic collision
avoidance system) these days that doesn't rely on air traffic
controllers. The standard "see and avoid" responsibility of pilots is
commendable, but when you're flying 600 mph, other planes go from barely
perceptible specks in the sky to filling your windscreen in seconds.

We've had an awful lot of close calls lately. The huge airbus spinning the
small jet on the JFK runway and the 1st lady's near miss with a 200 ton
military cargo jet occurred in the last week or two. The FAA chief has
ordered a top-down safety review.


http://www.dallasnews.com/business/a...rol-system.ece

""Incidents of near misses and close calls, and serious mishaps that have
been reported - I am just a little concerned that our luck may be running
out," Mica, the chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure
Committee, said in an interview Thursday."

With bigger and bigger jets carrying more passengers all flying to major
urban centers, the law of averages is at work and sooner or later, you'll
have another Tenerife where two jumbos collide and lots of people die.

March 27, 1977- KLM Flight 4805 and Pan Am Flight 1736, both Boeing 747s,
collide on the runway in the Tenerife disaster (Los Rodeos Airport) Tenerife
Canary Islands; 583 of 644 people on board both aircraft are killed in the
worst accident in the history of commercial aviation.

At Tenerife, collateral damage was limited because the two planes were still
at the airport.

There's a good list at Wiki:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...i al_aircraft

including the details of the mid-air collision I remember as a kid:

December 16 - The 1960 New York air disaster: United Airlines Flight 826, a
Douglas DC-8, and TWA Flight 266, a Lockheed Super Constellation, collide in
mid-air over Staten Island in New York; all 128 aboard the two planes and
six people on the ground are killed.

While I agree that collision avoidance avionics have improved tremendously
since the 1960 crash, planes just keep getting bigger and bigger and the
airspace more and more crowded. The articles about the JFK crash mentioned
that the Airbus that was involved was so large that special precautions had
to be taken for every take-off and landing. To me, that's just asking for
trouble.

--
Bobby G.