Comment by snailmailstare
2 months ago
There's obviously some number of mistakes one party can make in a single incident such that the other has a limited probability of preventing an accident. If flight control is the robustness, it would take flight control with a lot of free time to be reducing those mistakes in pilots by following up on all sorts of errors unrelated to an incident until a pilot rarely makes multiple overlapping mistakes.
You're still going to try to reduce the errors by each party as much as you can. The point is that if they each do the right thing 99.9% of the time, the overlap allows you to prevent a problem 99.9999% of the time. Whereas if you compromise one of them so that it's 80% instead of 99.9%, the chance that something makes it through the net increases by a factor of 200.
It's not entirely fair to choose this flight as a random sample, but assuming for a moment that it is.. The pilot has a 85% or lower, how many 9s on the controller fix that?
If controllers were like traffic cops they would take time to raise or remove that 85% when they caught it and pay limited attention to current traffic to take actions to reduce future traffic risk. But they are not that as you just explained again.
It's not about a particular pilot, it's about the system as a whole. As long as 99.9% of aircraft don't require any remediation, the air traffic controllers have the bandwidth to catch the few that do. Until you don't have enough air traffic controllers.
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