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MOSCOW, July 9: Up or down? Heed the man or the machine? Alexander Gross, the 52-year-old flight commander of the doomed Tupolev-154 that collided in mid-air with a cargo plane over southern Germany, faced the cruellest of dilemmas on the night of July 1, Russian experts said on Tuesday.
Facing conflicting commands from Swiss ground control and an onboard warning system, and with a payload of youngsters on board, he chose the former — tragically putting his plane into a dive that led to fiery disaster.
A Russian aviation specialist said Gross, an experienced pilot with more than 12,000 flying hours under his belt, and his crew faced “a crazy combination of circumstances” over the Swiss-German border.
But Yuri Averyanov, deputy head of the air traffic control department of Russia’s Civil Aviation Authority, said Gross should in the end have followed the instruction from his TCAS collision warning system.
Averyanov said Swiss controllers ought to have averted the disaster long before. But once the TCAS issued its instruction to climb, Gross and his crew should have followed the command.
“The collision avoidance system is the pilot’s last chance of survival,” Averyanov told Reuters.
Swiss ground control has faced serious questions since the disaster in which the Russian passenger plane collided with a DHL cargo plane, killing all 71 people on the two aircraft — 52 of them Russian children on their way to a holiday in Spain.
German investigators say the air traffic control company Skyguide ordered the Tupolev to descend just one second after the plane’s onboard warning system told the pilot to pull up. The control tower repeated its instruction 14 seconds later.
Both aircraft were diving when they flew into each other.
OTHER EXPERTS NON-COMMITTAL: Other Russian experts were non-committal.
“The commander of the plane has the last word. He has to make the final decision. This is the law of aviation,” said Rudolf Teimurazov, deputy head of the Intergovernmental Aviation Commission.
“He is the commander and has to choose the right decision on the basis of all the information he has.”
Skyguide, tracking the two planes at the time of the crash, at first said the Russian pilot had reacted too slowly to its warnings, a charge bitterly resented by ordinary Russians in the light of German investigators’ disclosures since.
President Vladimir Putin, in a visit on Monday to Ufa, capital of Russia’s Bashkortostan region where most of the victims came from, exonerated Gross and his co-pilots.
“The Russian pilots were professionals of the highest class,” he was quoted by Itar-Tass news agency as saying.
The TCAS — Traffic Control Advisory System — was only introduced on Russian aircraft in 1998 to make them compliant with aircraft flying regulations in western Europe.
Only one Swiss air traffic controller was on duty at the time of the disaster and Swiss aviation authorities on Tuesday ordered Skyguide to have at least two controllers on duty at radar stations at any given time.
German air traffic controllers also said they had tried to warn their Swiss colleagues about the impending collision but could not reach them by telephone.
“What we had was a crazy combination of circumstances,” Averyanov said.
But he said it was clear from international regulations that the collision avoidance system should be strictly obeyed.
“The device is straight in front of the pilot’s eyes and at that moment he must follow its orders unquestionably, ignoring everything else,” he said.
Averyanov said it was the pilot’s duty to tell the controller that he was under the system’s command, clearing ground control of any responsibility for consequences.
But he said Gross and his crew probably had no time to tell the controller that the TCAS had issued a contrary command. “Everything happened in the blink of an eye,” he said. “The pilot was simply confused. He probably started to wonder if the system was operating correctly. Computers also fail sometimes.”—Reuters
