[SystemSafety] Aerial Collision Avoidance

[Peter Bernard Ladkin]

Neale Fulton just put me on to a 2008 paper in the journal Safety Science (published by Elsevier and 
therefore expensive to buy, whether you are a library or an individual) by Peter Brooker, quondam 
Chief Scientist at NATS and a Professor at Cranfield when he wrote the article.

Brooker's article concerns the 2002 Überlingen midair collision. He has read and makes some comments 
about my 2004 paper (published in 2005), amongst other things that my recommendations, to verify the 
TCAS algorithms, are not "wise". He apparently reaches this conclusion through considering an 
analogy with Ancient Rome.

I know some more about the technical background now than I did when I wrote the paper. For example, 
that the Reversal-RA anomaly was actually known about, and a Change Proposal filed, by Eurocontrol 
in 2000, and it took until 2008 to get this changed in the TCAS specification (Version 7.1). And in 
between some 70-odd people died. Some people may feel as I do that this story of inertia is scandalous.

The blog article is at http://www.abnormaldistribution.org/2012/12/09/aerial-collision-avoidance/

PBL

-- 
Prof. Peter Bernard Ladkin, Faculty of Technology, University of Bielefeld, 33594 Bielefeld, Germany
Tel+msg +49 (0)521 880 7319  www.rvs.uni-bielefeld.de