The 2002 Überlingen midair collision
Posts like this painfully push me to finish setting up my blog where I'm going to mostly opine on and outline aviation incidents like this..But I can disseminate at least two flying maxims you can take away from this tragedy:1: Do what TCAS is telling you to do.2: Air Traffic Control does NOT have the final responsibility for your plane, you do.- The TCAS system had already resolved the safe and correct conflict avoidance maneuvers for both of the transceivers involved (on both aircraft).- As amazing and professional as our air traffic controllers are (and they are), they to, just like you the pilot are prone to error, and they in fact are not inside your aircraft, nor are they the pilot in command.I've seen especially in new pilots and people that want to learn to fly this urge to defer to ATC (I even asked a friend who's a huge Flight Simulator enthusiast, of which I was too when young, what he'd do in a purely technical flight situation, and he responded he'd "ask ATC what to do"...).While yes, Air Traffic Control 'controls' certain air space, they don't control your aircraft or its occupants. FAR 91.3 says it all, I'll let you look it up, it's 2 very brief (thank you FAA/congress) sentences that spell out the end of this discussion. You might get a fine, you might lose your license, etc etc, if you're reasoning for having to deviate from ATC rules aren't sufficient..But hey in this case would those pilots on those 2 planes in this incident have rather lost their licenses (potentially) or have what happened happen.Of course this incident is nuanced, as they all are. Flying safely involves mitigating and accepting certain levels of risk. TCAS was a system specifically designed and implemented to resolve collision situations. You test your equipment at regular intervals and pre-flight so that you can be confident they are working properly so that when you get into a situation where TCAS is telling you to do something, you do it.But the reality is stress, human behavior isms' like maybe say flying in from an eastern european country and wanting to not 'piss off' the Swiss controllers, so deferring to their every direction instead of following your own instruments. << That's a real thing .. when you fly into busy airspace in the US, you quickly realize you just 'don't want to piss anyone off' .. All of these factors influence what should have been a cut and dry collision avoidance dictated by the TCAS system. And this is the cost of human flight.