Aircraft Collide Over S. Germany

[BovineOne]

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp...liner_crash_10

FRANKFURT, Germany (AP) - Two aircraft collided over the southern German state of Baden-Wuerttemberg, a state official said early Tuesday. There was no immediate word on casualties.


A spokesman for the interior ministry of Baden-Wuerttemberg described the planes as a Boeing aircraft and a Tupolev.

[cireliz]

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp..._germany_dc_38

[dbaker]

Quote from cireliz's link:

Swiss air traffic controllers, in charge of Lake Constance airspace because it is close to Switzerland, said the Tupolev reacted too slowly to orders to lower its altitude.

They said the Russian pilot got Swiss orders to decrease altitude a "good minute" before the collision but German Transport Minister Kurt Bodewig said the warning was given 50 to 60 seconds before the crash.

"The way our colleague worked was cutting it close, but absolutely acceptable," Anton Maag -- an official at Skyguide, the Swiss air traffic controllers body monitoring the flights on Monday night -- told a news conference on Tuesday.

Swiss air traffic controllers said earlier it was only on the third instruction that the Russian pilot had begun to reduce altitude to avoid collision.

By the time the Tu-154 began to descend, the 757 was also diving because its on-board collision-avoidance system had instructed its pilot to do so. So the planes hit each other in one of the worst air accidents in German history.

Maag said the air traffic controller in charge at the time was working alone as his partner took a break because of the light air traffic. Five planes were in the sector they were monitoring at the time, including the two crashed planes.

Either a faster response from ATC or the 757's TCAS not performing a descend would have prevented this accident.

[dbaker]

Air Collision Warning System Was Off, Swiss Say

ZURICH (Reuters) - An automatic system alerting air traffic controllers if two planes are on a collision course was switched off when two aircraft crashed into each other over Germany, Swiss air traffic controllers said on Wednesday.

[tycoonjack]

Swiss cut air traffic by 20%

The Swiss Air traffic control body, Skyguide, has announced it is to reduce the number of planes in Swiss air space by 20%.

This comes in the wake of last Monday's mid-air collision between a cargo jet and a Russian passenger plane in which 71 people died.

Skyguide says the change, to take effect immediately, will relieve its air traffic controllers who have been working under extreme stress the crash.

The reduction in traffic will cause delays on one of the busiest weekends of the summer.