A USAir A320 and a Beech 99 almost collided in the clouds over Minneapolis-St. Paul. They came close enough that the captain of the A320 heard the Beech 99's engines.
They were using parallel runways; the Beech was on the left-hand runway (30L) and the Airbus on the right-hand runway (30R). I don't know the departure procedures at KMSP and I'm not instrument rated, but it would seem to me that instructing the airplane on the right-side runway to turn left immediately after departure is not a sound idea.
Smarter than
1 day ago
Noise abatement procedure?
ReplyDeleteAn A320 hitting the ground is not going to be very quiet.
ReplyDeleteBoth were to turn left. The pilot of the Beach failed to make the turn. Cloud base was at 900’ and both aircraft were in the clouds fly on instruments. Oddly the Beach was still on tower radio and the US Air was on Departure radio, so they didn’t hear each other’s conversations.
ReplyDeleteIf anyone still cares about this, there is an excellent writeup here.
ReplyDeleteThe Beech radio is mostly unintelligible on the audio, but the sequence is interesting. It's not odd they were on diff. freqs. The Beech would stay with tower until the initial turn is made, and then handed to departure. This didn't happen, so no hand-off.