Quote:
Originally Posted by timun
Hmm, listening to the instructions I can kind of see how the American Airlines flight crew may have misunderstood instructions. It was also helpful for me to see the aerodrome chart to understand the context. In reality, they needed to turn right at a five-way intersection between taxiways A, B, J and K:
I'm an aviation n00b, but not knowing exactly what the signage looks like at that taxiway fustercluck I can imagine if it wasn't signed very, very well it could seem very confusing to the flight crews. They were cleared to cross a runway, and instead of hanging a right at K they hung a right at J. If JFK ground control had said "American one-zero-six heavy turn right at Kilo and cross runway three-one-left" instead of the actually spoken "American one-zero-six heavy cross runway three-one-left at Kilo," it would have been more immediately obvious to me. Arguably they shouldn't have had to, because signage should have had a right arrow at taxiway K anyway, but just that extra little bit of context and I doubt this ever would have happened.
I find the ATC chatter interesting, insofar as about half the time I can't understand what the hell anyone is saying. I understand the need for expediency, as the air traffic controllers—or rather, ground control in particular—are super-busy. But everybody is so motormouthed that communications gets garbled super-easily. Maybe I'm just slow...
All of this said, wouldn't there be a runway entrance light lit up to tell the American Airlines flight crew to stop...? |
In general it's pretty hard to mess that one up especially given the size of the plane and the dogleg they would have had to do to get onto Juliet from Bravo.
I tried to find better footage but this is the best I could find. This video shows the intersection and turn they should have taken.
https://youtu.be/h9Tzxcw5eRI?t=1698
There are stop bars and I imagine wig-wag lights, but if they honestly thought they were cleared they would go through them. But as Ryan Coke mentions, regardless of clearance, they should be visually checking, and would have been hard to miss Delta starting it's roll.