Mid Air Collision

Good report, thanks for sharing! Tragic case, and easy mistake on parallels…
Yep, „belly check“ check is a good practice, and I’ll try to remember doing that reliably in the future…

PS
Landed there 10 days ago today. Gives me the 🥶

easy mistake on parallels…

In US, you may need PhD to correctly taxi and line up !

This is Vegas

This is Chicago

Steve6443 wrote:

What surprises me is that in controlled airspace, why the controller didn’t wave off the Malibu, telling it to go around, seeing it was going to either overshoot the curve to final

No idea if these controllers have ADS-B displays or other radar. Also, the fact that someone on the radio gave a shout out to the Malibu during this critical phase of flight is probably going to be considered as a factor.

The correct runway was repeated by the controller – no idea if they saw that the Malibu was off track, or just unsure if they gave the correct runway, or just a “bad feeling” by the controller.

The 172 pilot seemed to have no chance to avoid this – pretty horrible situation. I’ve had a couple of situations where a faster plane was coming up at me or down to me from behind, and it’s scary. Both times I saw them on ADS-B/TIS and honestly didn’t know what action to take. Move left? Move right? Stay put?

One was a P210 climbing while I was in a PA28, the other was a TBM700 messing around with me while I was in my RV-8. Sometimes your number is up, I guess. :(

Tower controllers at Class D and up airports in the US have radar feed and ADS-B if the airport (like North Las Vegas) is in a busy area.

Seems to me the tower saw the situation developing and could I suppose have said something extra like “you appear to be lining up for the right, confirm 30L and traffic in sight on final for the parallel”. However at this point the other plane might already have been in a blind spot.

If this wasn’t simply a case of brain fade by the Malibu driver, landing on the wrong runway despite repeatedly acknowledging ATC instructions, the lesson learned is to never, ever go past the runway centerline when landing on one of two parallel runways. Particularly when flying a fast plane and circling continuously from overhead to final.

Some people have difficulty with visualising left and right.

Personally I’ve no difficulty with left and right. Likewise North/South come totally naturally to me. But East / West I have to force myself to think about to avoid an error.

It’s quite possible that the pilot, hear and understood “Left”, and saw both runways, and just mixed up left and right.

One thing that I’ve found useful is that if you get a ‘somewhat odd’ instruction is not to just question it, but question it pointing out the odd bit. For example in this case, if the pilot had mixed up left and right, it might have been considered odd that the controller wanted them to cross the approach to a runway to land on the further one. So instead of asking “confirm landing on 30L” (to which the controller would have confirmed it, and the pilot continued with their mixing up left/right) they could say “Confirm cross approach to 30R and landing on 30L”. That would prop the controller to realise that something here doesn’t make sense.

I’ve used this approach in the past. Sometimes the controller has helped me identify my own mistake. Sometimes it helped them realise their own mistake, and sometimes everything was fine but they then explained their reasoning.

So if something seems odd, best to confirm the instruction while also pointing out the bit that seems odd or unusual.

dublinpilot wrote:

So if something seems odd, best to confirm the instruction while also pointing out the bit that seems odd or unusual.

Very good tip. “Why is he telling me to do something I think I am already doing? Perhaps I’m not actually doing what he expects or what I think I am doing…”

As someone who gained his US wings at VGT in 1988 and has flown from, or to there almost every year since I find this tragedy perplexing.

The pilot would have expected 30L because of the convenient turn off to the ramp and 30R would have felt ‘wrong’ because it involved crossing the active 30L. ‘Expectation bias’ would have favoured the correct runway and even if he’d fixated on the 30R threshold after rolling out of the tight turn (which is necessary because of the proximity of class ‘B’), he’d surely have realised the error on final because he’d have been thinking “how am I going to get to the ramp”.

VGT has a reputation for incursions and it’s ‘LAHSO’ operations but none of that has any bearing on this awful accident IMHO. Maybe there’s more than we know at present.

There will be some fuss about that unofficial conversation that has a message for all of us. RIP to all of them.

There might be an additional factor at play, or it might not. That is, if maybe the person doing the radio is not the one flying, there is an additional error source. If the radio operator understands and reads back everything perfectly, but somehow the flying pilot gets it wrong, there is little chance to catch such errors unless there is communication in the cockpit to confirm clearances. In professional multi crew operations, there are checks and balances in place which don’t exist in the case of an informal task sharing setup.

Rwy20 wrote:

In professional multi crew operations, there are checks and balances in place which don’t exist in the case of an informal task sharing setup.

That’s one of things I always stress: single pilot aircraft is a single pilot aircraft; task sharing between people who are not trained for multi-crew operations is just source of potential problems. When I fly with a colleague pilot then it’s either me or (s)he flying, there’s no task sharing. If the other person is flying I will step in only if I see that situation is deteriorating endangering the safety of the flight. And then it’s complete taking over rather then helping in some tasks.