plain stupid at JFK. Kids supervised by parent to issue take off commands.
Some people out there actually are saying its not a big deal as long as the kids are supervised.
Do what now?
One more reason people should stay on the ground :rollin:
By MELANIE TROTTMAN And ANDY PASZTOR
The Federal Aviation Administration suspended an air-traffic controller and his supervisor at New York's John F. Kennedy Airport, after the controller allegedly allowed his 10-year-old son to radio instructions to pilots.
The FAA is investigating the matter, which occurred on the evening of Feb. 16 at one of the nation's busiest airports. It was reported by Boston television station WFXT-TV on Tuesday.
The day after his son was there, according to people familiar with the details, the same controller brought another youngster, his daughter, into the controller tower, and she also allegedly transmitted some radio messages to aircraft.
"This lapse in judgment not only violated FAA's own policies, but common sense standards for professional conduct," FAA Administrator Randy Babbitt said in a statement Wednesday.
Doug Church, a spokesman for the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, an air traffic controllers union, said, "We do not condone this type of behavior in any way. It is not indicative of the highest professional standards that controllers set for themselves and exceed each and every day in the advancement of aviation safety."
According to FAA and air-traffic-controller personnel, the boy apparently amused and impressed tower staffers with his knowledge of air-traffic-control language. One person familiar with the incident said the controller was proud of how much he had taught his son and may have been showing him off.
In the recording, the boy's squeaky voice can be heard relaying instructions to the aircraft, apparently after hearing them from his father; at times, a controller jumped in with additional instruction. "That's what you get, guys, when the kids are out of school," a male voice in the tower said.
In one exchange, the child can be heard saying, "JetBlue 171 contact departure." The pilot responded: "Over to departure JetBlue 171, awesome job."
The comments indicate the JetBlue plane had just taken off, as controllers typically instruct pilots to switch to another radio frequency, referred to as departure control, shortly after liftoff.
In another exchange, the child referred to an AeroMexico flight as "Airmex" and signed off by saying, "Adios."
The recording can be heard here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-G5xV_N8N1U&feature=sub
LOL, I bet he gets some time off work for that! :rollin:
Is there a web award for dumbassedness of the year? lmao
I think it's cute and according to the articles the pilots thought the same thing! Nobody was ever in any danger whatsoever.
Besides it's clear on the tape that the father still issued commands in between. The more important commands were still issued by the father, even that youtube recording is biased, they sped up the father's regular issued commands.
Besides, the kid was told Exactly what to say. It's pretty much about the same as the father speaking in a high pitched voice.
Exactlty.
Its one of those things like yeah it was wrong in a way but noone would have gotten hurt.
The father should have said an ex girlfriend kicked him in the nads and thats was his voice just high pitched :lol:
I think it's great that the dad is involved in his child's life ,
did he use great judgment , well that can be debated.
Personally i think NBD
It wasn't like the father walked off and left his kid at his terminal. He was there the entire time, telling his kid what to say.
This will get blown out of proportion, as most things do. Especially when the media gets their hands on it.
There was obviously never an issue of safety of those flights. If someone had thought so, there would have been protests at the time or it wouldn't of happened to begin with.
You know this sort of thing has happened in the past. The difference now is that the media got ahold of it and the FAA is going to be forced to do something to appease them. I hope the man does not lose his career for trying to share his job with his son.
That being said, rules are rules. And what he did was technically against regulations, no matter how harmless it may have been.
They get paid big bucks too but they job i guess is wicked stressful (you can only work like 3 days a week or something).
I agree with that. The hammer will come down on somebody. What if others done it, are the controllers side tracked?
Been there, done that. Never had any problems (dad worked 25 years in aviation) i have helped him many times. It´s pure fun to see a big plane follow accurate instructions from you.
I'm not sure an airport's control tower is a very good place for this "Bring your Kids to Work" BS!
honestly i pity that kid, what a sad world he will eventually have to live in :rolleyes:
yep, only a matter of time before the rest of the world comes around to my way of thinking.
here is the deal,
The ATC is in command and distractions have never ever yeilded positive results from any tragedy. Most all emergencies were created out of human error to include the biggest winner,,,,,,,,,,Distractions.
while your heads have been burried in the sand,, perhaps recently you may recall a pilot overshooting his destination due to Texting (ATC's did not notice for 9 minutes). Another overshooting his destination due to sleeping which ATC caught.
ATC's should not offer any ingredient into the processes which have the capacity to harm hundereds of lives.
Why do i say this,, because if you let the little things go into the wind,, the larger things will become now small and therefore more people will cause larger problems.
Its called disipline incase you all dont get it.
However, its a pitty i had to say this,, figured it was common sense.
Some jobs offer the atmosphere to bring your kids to work and so should the world of the ATC's, however, the kids should never ever be directly involved supervised or not in taking part with launching people into the air.
there you have it, butter up the fact rules were broken in order to increase the backing of breaking rules in place in order to pick and choose who should follow them and who should not.
if that were the case,, then there goes the meaing as defined of the word "RULE".
Rule could be changed to "opinions" perhaps.
I just totally disagree,, now you wonder what kind of kids im raising eh?
This is a total lack of responsibility but many parents bring thier kids to work. I have, but in this case, there are probably processes in place to allow it to happen however, the processes are not there to have kids launch craft. Its one of those judgment calls made by the supv on site and i both resepct and disrespect that. The highest amount of duty is required out of the ATC's and this shows that at for a moment, they were relaxed and distracted while on the job.
Next we should allow this..........
"well, it might be breaking the rules but he only had one beer"
or in the case of Cali- he only smokes a little bit.
We must gather our foundation before we tear ourselves apart. I nip every fugging thing in the bud before it becomes a problem. Thats called being a responsible adult.
according to you. < period.
you find that cute eh,, one day cute will bit your ass and its gonna be handed to you from the the very exact comparrison perhaps not on a flight but im just sayin.
"it was cute your honor that my son of 13 years was driving. We didnt cause any harm other than some minor little ding to another car. We could have never known the other driver was an elderly who we accidentally ran off the road , we didnt know about her bad eyeysight. Do you think we should sue the other driver because of her eyesight? She should have saw us coming even if it was raining"
however any ATC distracted has less attention span on the tarmac.
How would you feel if a doctor were on his cell phone while doing surgury? yep that happened and again many people in our laid back country said,, "there was no danger to the patient".
oh well, the old saying says that if you cant beat em then join em. I refuse to join people with that "it aint no big deal" attitued.
I think it was just so cute the way that neurosurgeon had his little son doing the surgery!
I think it was just so cute the way that officer had his little girl arresting that gang member!
I think it was just so cute the way that nurse had her son calling in a prescription!
I think it was just so cute the way that pharmacist had her daughter filling the prescriptions!
I think it was just so cute the way that hostage negotiator had his son talking to the terrorists!
Wasn't it just so cute how that little boy was talking to the planes when his daddy should have been watching those two other planes that got just little too close! Not to worry, it was only 350 people who died!
Then again, some people have no problem with people texting while driving.
Shiny Side Up!
Bill
And I thought I hated it when people let thier kids leave the outgoing answering machine message!
Man, Scott. That horse you're up on has got to be at least 10 feet tall! What with the convenience store clerk incident and now this? Just make sure you hold tight to that saddle, buddy. Wouldn't want you to fall off.
:bowdown:
I see what you are saying jim, you have a point.
The one thing that you will conclude is that I am not popular perse because of my "altitude". I am consistant, thats important enough to understand someone. I dont swag or sway depending on the weather or the mood of the day. I do get lazy sometimes though hense my favorite quote..........
"the early bird gets the worm , but the second mouse gets the cheese":hick:
This pretty much is a free ticket to slack ,, and not feel bad:D
Hey though,, atleast you probably know where i stand without asking about a subject. WHich would you rather have .
one thing we're missing here is the human element though. its sad but it it is what it is.
so no im not better than you,, i always consider myself the opposite so as to always keep striving for high standards which apparently are not accepted.
as for the kids,, I hope in reality that the airlines have a get together and remind everyone about the "rules" and I hope no one gets fired but if it happened, thats the message that must be sent and evidently it came from someone who thinks like me.
I ain't sayin it's right, and I'm not sayin' it's wrong...but the kid was just merely repeating what he was told. Yes, it IS against regulations, but you aren't gonna sit there and tell me you let your kids break a rule or regulation sometime, somewhere, in a responsible setting. Ever let your kid sit on your lap and "steer" while you were driving?
Truth is, it's human nature. I can't fault the guy...i'd do the same perhaps, if I were in his shoes....AND I had a responsible kid that I knew wouldn't blurt out "United Air, please turn zero-one-nine" into another jetliner...
Point is, his dad was right there where he could've yanked his headset off if it got out of hand, but he didn't have to, nobody got hurt, and the sad thing is, the guy will probably never work in ATC again.
I see some issues, people being overly judgmental, and critical of others. WTF?
Bah! People will be people...there's no control over free will. Accept it. Deal with it. Or ignore it. But nobody is going to raise their kids exactly like you. Or me.
I dare say that kids have cleared takeoffs a lot of times before..and I haven't heard of any jets crashing because some 17 year-old was repeating his/her father's instructions to a pilot...and I have a curiously morbid fascination with reading up on plane crashes. Nope, never heard of a jet crashing because a kid cleared it for takeoff....
Against the rules? highly likely.
Unsafe? Probably only slightly less safe than sitting on my couch...
jkirchman made an buttstuffogy to being on a high horse....
here's my reply to THAT lighthearted comment ;)
"Beware the fall off of the high horse, it's a longer drop than the climb that got you there."
Dunno where I heard that....but take it with a grain of salt :rollin:
A child in the control center is a major distraction in exactly a place where a major distraction cannot be tolerated. If you recall, on August 8, 2009 there was a little incident of an ATC talking on the phone, a relatively minor little distraction. Unfortunately, this minor little distraction caused him to not notice that there were several planes and a helicopter all in potential conflict. This turned out to be not much of a big deal either as nearly all of the aircraft missed each other. All that is except for one plane and the helicopter. Nine people died in that little mix up.
Overly judgmental and critical? I don't see anyone calling the guys intelligence into question. He simply did something dumb, and people do dumb things all the time. People text while driving, and certainly they can throw their phone on the floor and take control of the wheel if anything gets out of hand. But that's dumb on their part because when things go wrong in a car going 60mph they happen too fast for an uninformed mind, that is, one that has been too distracted by attempting to text to assess the situation and make a life or death decision. Yes, the ATC in question here could have taken control quite quickly, but his mind too would have been uninformed and things happen even more quickly when you are dealing with aircraft that are moving at hundreds of miles per hour and where nearly 100% of collisions are fatal.
So am I being judgmental and critical, or am I showing discernment and recognizing that what this ATC did potentially jeopardized the lives of hundreds of air passengers? Remove the emotional argument and the answer is obvious, he did a dumb thing that had potentially disastrous consequences.
And that's the thing about the odds, or consequences, they don't care if the person who did the "silly little thing" meant to put their own life or someone else's life in jeopardy. Consequences are blind to reason and intent and instead are the product of whatever happens, and if two planes had collided or if an emergency had occurred for which this ATC was not adequately prepared because he was distracted by his child being in the tower, consequences wouldn't have cared. No benevolent "god of the odds" would have looked and said "oh , he didn't mean to be distracted, here let me keep that plane from crashing!" No, the plane or planes would have crashed and people would have died.
Now, do I wish the ATC to be fired? Only if he has a track record of doing dumb things. Otherwise, reprimand him, and let's get back on with it. The supervisor on the other hand, he might need to be demoted.
Shiny Side Up!
Bill
I'm just going to stay out of this one further. My horse isn't tall enough for this race.
I don't even have a horse.
Had a horse when I was a kid, but after it almost killed me, folks got rid of it lol.
This is kinda becoming one of those "why did I even bother posting" kinds of threads lmao.
Oh, one last jab at it: Yes, I agree on the texting while driving, very dumb, very dangerous. But let's compare apples to asparagus here:
The kid cleared a jet for 'takeoff'....wasn't like he stood a lot of chance in steering it into another jet on the ramp ;)
But you and I, we weren't there to see how it exactly unfolded, so with that said, i'm done in this thread :D
You know how those 767s can just pull right out in front of you sometimes!
And my comments toward Scott and his giant Palomino were meant to be taken lightheartedly. So no offense meant by that.
I'm Jim Kirchman. And that's the way it is.
Nah, these sorts of things are a bit of fun! If we all agreed on how things should be handled, it wouldn't matter who was in charge of what as everyone would make the same decisions. In other words, don't for a moment think I think any of this is personal...
As for the difference between texting while driving and a kid on the radio, the difficulty isn't with the kid being on the radio but rather the kid being in such close proximity to the ATC as that's where the distraction comes in. As you'll note in my other example, the person on the other end of the phone didn't call out to any of the aircraft involved in the accident that occurred, instead the phone was the distraction. In the case of the kid, it's not the kid making a radio call that's the problem, to argue so is to argue an emotional argument about how cute it was, but rather it is the fact that a kid in the tower is a large, and potentially massive distraction.
Anyway, I've enjoyed the conversation on this... beer's on me! :drink:
Shiny Side Up!
Bill
for once,, im speachless..........
if i had the capcity for words like you do,, that one sentence would sum up the entire thing. That is one amazing sentence so applicable to everything ethical.
that could very well end up being the "be all and end all" to many debates.
kudos!
shesh,, how much trouble i could have stayed out of if i had just thought of those words.:bowdown:
:rollin:
thats funny as hell,,
Rest in pease walter kronkite (sp?),, loved his news