Investigators found multiple human errors to be the primary cause of the fatal collision between a Japan Airlines jet and a Japan Coast Guard (JCG) aircraft at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport earlier this year.
Were they having tea on the veranda? How do you miss an collision alarm going off for over a minute?
One possibility – with all the noisy, flashy alarms we have in cockpits and ATC facilities today, one more alarm can get lost on the cacophony.
From what I can tell from the report, the ground radar system did not have any collision alert features so I’m not sure where that assertion is coming from.
Not to be overly pedantic, but preliminary reports are just that, and do not determine causes. There are certainly a bunch of factual observations about what transpired that will collectively be used to formally identify cause(s) and put forth safety recommendations, but it’s not over until it’s over…and it’s not over yet. Despite what is said here, I don’t see any evidence of anti-collision safety features in the ground radar system, and the report comments that such features would be useful - reinforcing that the system does not provide such warnings. However, that does seem a bit odd for a technically advanced ATC service as found in Japan, so it’ll be interesting to see the details in the final report.
People were involved in this accident. That’s no accident (no pun intended}. Removing any person from this situation would not have improved the outcome. Proper training, supervision and relaxed watchfulness would have. Once again communication and being “in the moment” may well have saved the day.
After a little more digging - the ground radar system apparently turns targets yellow when there is a potential runway occupancy conflict, but there is no aural alarm. That’s a problem in a tower, because the tower controller’s job is mainly to look out the window, not stare at the radar. We had the same issue in the US about 25 years ago, and the NTSB recommended the FAA add aural alarms to tower displays to attract attention to the display when necessary. Sounds like something the Japanese will be doing soon, too…although I’m a little surprised they didn’t have it already.
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