A pilot flying a Delta Air Lines regional jet on Friday apologized to his passengers after making a hard turn to avoid colliding with a US Air Force B-52 bomber, audio from the incident shows.
The incident occurred on SkyWest Flight 3788, which was operating as a Delta Connection flight, from Minneapolis, Minnesota, to Minot, North Dakota, SkyWest said in a statement.
The flight landed safely in Minot “after being cleared for approach by the tower but performed a go-around when another aircraft became visible in their flight path,” the statement read.
Pardon? Who is operating a tower in North Dakota apart from the FAA? What is going on here? Why is there a tower in our United States that the FAA does not control?
“Long story short, it was not fun, I do apologize for it and thank you for understanding,”
lol, understatement
If I had to venture a guess I’d say it was probably the tower at nearby Minot AFB. Perhaps the commercial flight’s approach took them over the bases’ airspace or something.
I’m having trouble coming to grips with us having multiple air controllers. I thought everything was FAA and the military had to coordinate with them.
Good thing I don’t fly an airplane, I suppose.
They use the same ATC systems and protocols, so handoffs between airspace should be the same whether it’s a military or FAA tower.
So there’s a whole other ATC controlled by the military? I honestly have no knowledge of this and am surprised.
Im just hearing about this too, but that doesnt surprise me at all. Government black ops in mind, you can’t have civilian ATC personnel having classified information on the location of military aircraft nor their capabilities. Of course the military is going to have their own branch responsible for handling sesnitive info.
Nah, I always thought that military shit flew through FAA ATC and they just handed it off to the next. I don’t know what to think now.
Kind of. It is more the same system, just some towers are operated by the military and some by the FAA. Each has their own airspace they are responsible for, but civilian aircraft can fly through airspace managed by military ATC and vice versa.
I’m not sure why it is like that nowadays. I guess in the beginning of ATC in the US it made sense for air bases to control the nearby airspace, and it probably just went from there, with maybe consolidation of towers as a cost-cutting measure along the way.
Caveat: it’s been years since I’ve had to know any of this, so this might be outdated or misremembered.
So why didn’t the military tower catch the helicopter in that DC crash? The FAA failed but the Army also failed? Two failures?
I’ve not read the report, but there’d only be one tower responsible for the airspace. Iirc, it was an FAA tower. What I heard happened was that the helicopter didn’t follow the tower’s instructions. But, again, I’m months out of date on that incident.
Imagine airspace like a tray of cookies baked too-close together. Some are bigger than others, some are weird shapes, some are sugar cookies, some are chocolate. But it’s a tray full of cookie. There’s only one cookie at each spot.
To stretch the metaphor further, imagine an ant walking across the tray. It’s still only on one cookie at a time and it doesn’t care if it’s chocolate or sugar. At the edge of a cookie there’s a handoff between cookies, where cookie A says “hey, cookie B, an Ant X is about to walk on you. Don’t let them crash into any other ants, k? They’re your responsibility now.”
Anyways, I’m going to go let my caffeine kick in.
lolwut? Cookies with ants on them. I just don’t understand how there’s a military ATC and a civilian ATC and they aren’t sitting in the same room. They should be sitting in the same room.
My guess is the Air Force. Iirc, the Army and Navy also operate their own ATC. I didn’t know they did approach control for civilian aircraft, but that seems to be the case.
WTF? I thought all air traffic was FAA, guess I was wrong.