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Air Traffic Controller and poet Damian Campbell is back on the job.
[REVOLVER] Two private planes collided on the runway of a Houston airport early last week. Luckily, no one was seriously injured, and the ultimate nightmare scenario of a midair collision did not transpire. Investigators are still looking into the incident, though early reports suggest the air traffic controllers were responsible.New York Times (archive): "We just had a midair," the pilot of the Hawker is heard saying in an audio recording posted on LiveATC.net, which shares live and archived recordings of air traffic control radio transmissions. The recent accident in Houston is just the latest noteworthy instance in what a major New York Times investigation this summer determined to be "an alarming pattern of safety lapses and near misses in the skies and on the runways in the USA." According to internal records of the Federal Aviation Agency, the Times reported that these safety lapses and near misses occurred as a "result of human error." The Times report further revealed that "runway incursions" of the sort described above have nearly doubled, from 987 to 1732, despite the widespread proliferation of advanced technologies. A follow-up report by the Times revealed that Austin’s airport alone has experienced so many close calls as a result of air traffic controller error that a pilot proclaimed, "They’re trying to kill us in Austin." One such incident involved an air traffic controller clearing a FedEx cargo plane to land on a runway just as a Southwest Airlines jet was set to take off on the same runway. The air traffic controller in question said the Southwest jet would take off before the FedEx plane got too close, though the two planes ended up just seconds from colliding, with the FedEx plane skimming less than 100 feet over the Southwest jet, whose 128 passengers had no clue how narrowly they just escaped death. Below is an audio recording of the exchange between the pilots and air traffic controllers. Despite the remarkable lack of transparency with respect to such near misses and the air traffic controllers behind them, the Times was able to identify the controller behind this incident as one Damian Campbell, a "Navy veteran and self-published poet." According to the report, even fellow air traffic controllers were "baffled" by Campbell’s actions. Still more baffling is the fact that Campbell is apparently back on the job. FAA’s policy is not to take disciplinary action against a controller unless he or she is guilty of "gross negligence" or illegal activity. The Times report does not provide a picture of Mr. Campbell. Such is the extreme reluctance to show an image of Mr. Campbell that the only reference we could find is from a Twitter user who posted a screenshot of the LinkedIn profile of one Damian Campbell who works as an air traffic controller in Austin, Texas. The LinkedIn link has since been scrubbed: Emphasis added. Posted by: Besoeker 2023-11-12 |
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