"kilopascal" wrote on 2002-07-02 22:33 UTC: > What was interesting, that even though the planes collided over Germany, > the planes were in Swiss airspace.
The planes collided over a lake that is on the border between Switzerland and Germany. The Boing came out of Swiss airspace and the Tupulev was about to enter it, therefore control over the Tupolev had already been handed over to Swiss ATC. > If the un-unified > nature of the European air traffic control system helped cause this crash, > then this should be a perfect example of why a unified system is needed. At the moment everything reported hints at that the primary cause was most likely a mistake made by Swiss ATC, a controller who separates the flight altitudes too late and a collision warning system being offline at the time. There might also be some questions on why the collision avoidance system installed on the Boeing initiated a descent as an evasive manouver (I don't know anything about the algorithms these systems are supposed to use). There are currently no suggestions that this has anything to do with either non-metric communication problems or with the way European ATC is organized. http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/europe/newsid_2087000/2087253.stm Markus -- Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK Email: mkuhn at acm.org, WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>
