What to know about collision avoidance systems in plans

Years ago, Mr. Cox said, he was descending at a Boeing 737 International Airport on Orlando when the system alerted him to his co -pilot about the near traffic. The pilots looked for another plane, but they saw nothing. Then, the TCA provided an urgent instruction: “Go up.” Mr. Cox said they did and then saw a smaller plane under them. A collision would have been catastrophic, he said.

After a series of collisions, which culminated in the 1986 accident of a smaller passenger and aircraft plane near Cerritos, California, which killed 82 people, Congress instructed the Federal Aviation Administration to demand the TCA in All large commercial airplanes. However, it is optional in military planes, and it is not clear if the Army helicopter involved in the accident on Wednesday was equipped with him.

However, that accident occurred to a relatively low altitude, where the most critical collision avoidance instructions of TCAS would have been limited by the design, Mr. Cox and other security experts said. As the airplanes approach an airport, they are likely to be closer to each other than to the highest altitudes. As a result, the system limits alerts that problems to avoid causing confusion and hinder security.

Dependent automatic surveillance supervision

In recent years, FAA has required that all passenger airlines and many other aircraft use another system, called dependent automatic surveillance broadcast. technology transmits the location, altitude, speed and other data of the airplanes in which every second is installed. These transmissions can be collected by other airplanes or equipment on the ground.

Air traffic controllers and many passenger aircraft pilots trust the information received from ADS-B systems using devices that can provide detailed aircraft maps in one area. This information is useful for visualizing what is happening in the air, but the system generally does not emit the type of alerts that TCas does. Even so, ADS-B is useful for pilots, especially when they fly in bad climatic conditions or at a time when visibility is low, said Dr. Hassan Shahidi, president of the non-profit flight safety foundation.