if your not American 433 im not talking to you----Dallas/Ft.Worth (KDFW)

[Coral503heavy]

AAL334 and AAL443  oops          8:30AM KDFW...this happend this morning Aug 17th.thought it was funny so i uploaded it enjoy

[craig007]

Funny? That's rude!

Jesus. He could be more polite about it.

[fholbert]

Funny? That's rude!

Jesus. He could be more polite about it.

He was taxing aircraft across a very busy active runway and two aircraft were answering the same call. Polite might get people killed, 100's of them.

[atcman23]

Funny? That's rude!

Jesus. He could be more polite about it.

There's a point where politeness ends and reality sets in.  I don't know how polite you can be when you have two aircraft that could be in conflict and you put lives on the line. 

"Move out of the way or face certain death" I guess...

[w0x0f]

Voice inflection and positive control were completely appropriate to draw the attention to similar sounding call signs.  A busy controller doesn't have much time to fix a potentially deadly situation.  You noticed how well it worked.  The controller should be given credit for catching the bad readback.  Missed readbacks are the number one reason for errors in ATC.  Sometimes you hear what you want to hear.  Your attention is on your next few tasks and it is difficult to multi-task under busy conditions.  The controller is ultimately responsible for catching incorrect readbacks.  It is his error if that pilot would have crossed a runway.

Way to go DFW!

w0x0f

[kea001]

That is just being rude. The controller could have easily pointed out there were two similar callsigns on the frequency. It's as simple as saying:

"American 344, please be aware that there is company 433 on the frequency." which is a simple way to deliver information that one or both of the pilots obviously is not party to.

In fact the controller could have gone a step further by recognizing there could be a conflict beforehand and making both parties aware of it before it occurred. I heard a guy at CYYZ do this sometime earlier this week as they were lining up to hold. The fact of the matter is, there are many functional people out there who are also dyslexic.

That is what controllers 'do' - they deliver information to pilots that they are not party to and direct traffic to avoid conflict.

The argument that 'lives are being put at risk' so I'll take the initiative and be rude doesn't hold water. He should have taken the initiative prior to a conflict occurring.

[fholbert]

"American 344, please be aware that there is company 433 on the frequency." which is a simple way to deliver information that one or both of the pilots obviously is not party to.

On what day and time is there NOT similar sounding call signs at DFW. American has about 120 gates and they are often full (I have 3.3+ million miles on American).

The other aircraft was on the wrong frequency. I'm assuming the other aircraft may have been on the other side of DFW which for those of you who don't know operates like a 2nd airport. ATC had to arrest the error ASAP having no idea where the aircraft is or what danger is being caused.

[sonnycol]

As with the general requirement to read back instructions to ATC, the matter of similar call signs is a major safety issue and it needs to be emphasized to crews and controllers alike. There should be a clear and simple procedure to alert system users to the presence of this situation.

Heck, many crews cannot seem to say their own flight number correctly. There's a lot more going on in the front office than the radio comm.

I live in DFW and I assure you that, as with any major congested hub, our controllers can't help but get cranky sometimes. It gets nuts, and they are humans, not saints...

These unusually good YouTube vids of an Air Wisconsin CRJ-200 ferry flight are an example of misstatement of flight number by both crew and ATC, plus the presence of company with a confusing similar ID on landing. This is everyday stuff, and it works itself out until crews lose situational awareness, when it can bite you.

(That's not to fault this Air Wisconsin crew, who are pros who fly the CRJ well.)

[sykocus]

I can easily relate to the controller. Some times certain pilots just aren't paying attention and figure "hey, I heard a two he must be talking to NWA72". The first time is forgivable, but repeated errors get frustrating quickly. You have to start repeating your clearances to both a/c, then you start stepping other planes, or they start stepping one each other, and an easily avoidable mistake can get dangerous real fast. At the very least it escalates your workload just because one guy barely paying attention. AAL334  and AAL443 are barely similar sounding call signs. Numbers like 16 and 62 I can understand (sixteen vs sixty-two) sounding the same once you add in normal radio static, but four forty-three and three thirty-four?

[evilcuban]

Ha, if that's rude what would think of some of our friends at JFK?

I think you have to do what you have to do to get the job done.  You've often got a fraction of a second to to figure things out and playing semantics games just doesn't fit in there.  Admittedly, I don't know enough about DFW to come to the conclusions others have on which aircraft was where on what frequency and why or how the conflict could have/should have been avoided.  In any case, it's not personal, and I don't think any of the pilots nor the controller were waiting in the parking lot for a fight.

[kea001]

AAL334  and AAL443 are barely similar sounding call signs. Numbers like 16 and 62 I can understand (sixteen vs sixty-two) sounding the same once you add in normal radio static, but four forty-three and three thirty-four?

Understanding Dyslexia

I'm glad you asked that question. I expect that there are quite a few dyslexic commercial pilots out there. You can see it in the posts on pilot forums and the way they stumble up on their callsigns.

I found a good summary regarding dyslexia on another board:


"Hi, I'm not a pilot (I would if my eyesight was better and I could afford it though...have to stay as an enthusiast for now!), but a higher education dyslexia specialist, so I may be able to help with the definitions etc.....
Gorgophone...that's called scotopic sensitivity. There are tests to work out exactly which colour overlay should be recommended when reading books. The tints require a test by an optometrist with a special machine and may be a different colour from the overlay.

Dyslexia is a frankly crap term which covers a multitude of issues....generally "specific learning difficulty" is preferable. The test for dyslexia (often the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS) 3) is administered by a suitably qualified chartered psychologist and consists of a range of cognitive performance tests. Someone without dyslexia will normally produce reasonably consistent results, but someone with the condition will produce a "saw tooth" profile. The thing to remember is that everything is comparative to the rest of an individual's performance: someone's lowest score may be higher than your highest, but because of the variations in their results, they will still have dyslexia despite being able to have you for breakfast! Generally, people with dyslexia will often have a comparitively poor short term memory (e.g. problems remembering long lists of numbers, "loose" words they are thinking of before they can be used in a sentence). Many people also have issues taking in the context of written text quickly and then of course there is the old left/right and spelling problems: e.g. muddle up "b"/"d"s and "p"/"q"s, miss syllables out of words, have trouble with double letters and spell phonetically....if you have trouble spelling words like necessary (two similar "ssss" sounds spelt differently!) you may be one of the dyslexic club.

Benenfits of dyslexia can include enhanced visual logic, unnaturally strong long term focus on a specific task, strong 3D spatial awareness and long term/photographic store of information (is this a job description for ATC??!!). Business vision can also be enhanced (hey, My Branson!)

I would guess that these would also be highly beneficial for a pilot: the only downsides (which an aware indiviual could easily deal with) would be being seen as a "different" thinker as regards CRM, sky glare from scotopic sensitivety, the left/right issue and remembering number chains. The only one that might bother me would be if a n individual with poor visual processing had to read and understand a rarely used SOP in a pressing emergency situation (but that's what the sim is for?!). Otherwise, I think that the failsafe nature of flying (e.g. most activities called out and confirmed verbally) will pick up dyslexic (and non dyslexic errors).

Funny old world, isn't it? You often hear people dispairing of their spelling, but you never hear anyone moaning about their 3d spatial awareness being crap!!

Hope this is useful and I'd be interested to hear what others think.

Daniel"

http://www.pprune.org/archive/index.php/t-170755.html


Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Airways has dyslexia.

http://www.beingdyslexic.co.uk/pages/information/dyslexia-inspiration/famous-dyslexics/richard-branson.php