Latest / Aviation Survival Stories / The 0.05 MHz readback that silenced the Piper - did they make it?

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The 0.05 MHz readback that silenced the Piper - did they make it? · Aviation Survival Stories

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: 11.53 in the morning, August 8th, 2009. Above the Hudson River,
• 0:09
  Speaker 1: under a sky with unlimited visibility, two aircraft are about
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: to occupy the same patch of air. Neither pilot has
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: seen the other. Four minutes earlier, on the ground at
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: Teterboro Airport, a controller picked up a phone call that
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: had nothing to do with either aircraft. What was said
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: on that call never made it into any transcript. What
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: it cost is the reason this story exists at all.
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: Nine people are about to go into the river below.
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: A helicopter and a small plane. Two flights that started
• 0:39
  Speaker 1: the morning with nothing in common except the same narrow
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: strip of sky over Manhattan. Word would reach the surface
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: afterward that someone had survived. That word would turn out
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: to be wrong. This is not a story about a storm,
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: or a mechanical failure, or anything dramatic enough to explain
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: itself on its own. It is a story about one
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: misread digit on a radio dial, a phone call nobody
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: can reconstruct, and a rule of flying so old that
• 1:05
  Speaker 1: nobody had gotten around to replacing it. Hold on to
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: that number for a moment. Five hundredths of a point
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: on a radio dial. By the end of this, you
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: will understand exactly how something that small killed nine people
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: on a clear morning over one of the most watched
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: stretches of airspace in the United States. Stephen Altman had
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: been flying for years. On the morning of August 8th,
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: he arrived at Teterboro Airport in northern New Jersey with
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: two passengers and an easy plan. Take off, pick up
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: the Hudson River Corridor and follow it south toward Ocean City,
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: on the Jersey Shore. His airplane was a Piper PA-32R-300
• 1:40
  Speaker 1: Cherokee Lance, single engine, built in 1976. The kind of
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: machine a pilot flies on a clear Saturday morning, without
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: thinking twice about it. Teterboro sits just west of Manhattan,
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: on the far side of the Hackensack Meadowlands. It handles
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: private planes, charter flights, business jets, busy on an August Saturday,
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: but nothing Altman hadn't managed before. Running alongside the airport
• 2:04
  Speaker 1: is the Hudson River Corridor, a narrow band of low-altitude
• 2:07
  Speaker 1: airspace threaded between Manhattan's west side and the New Jersey shoreline.
• 2:12
  Speaker 1: Pilots fly it under visual flight rules. There is no
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: radar separation inside it. There is no controller sequencing the traffic.
• 2:19
  Speaker 1: The rule governing every aircraft in that corridor is the
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: oldest one in aviation. See and avoid. Look out the window.
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: Spot the other airplane. Move. It is also... The National
• 2:31
  Speaker 1: Transportation Safety Board would later write, a rule with hard
• 2:35
  Speaker 1: physical limits. On a summer Saturday, that corridor is never empty.
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: Sightseeing helicopters lift off from Manhattan all morning, one after another.
• 2:44
  Speaker 1: Small planes like Altman's cross through it, heading north and south.
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: None of them share a radio frequency with each other.
• 2:50
  Speaker 1: None of them are told by anyone on the ground
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: where the others are. The only thing keeping them apart
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: is human eyes, doing their best in good light. Across
• 2:58
  Speaker 1: the river, a second aircraft was already in the air
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: A Eurocopter AS350, built in 1997, had lifted off from
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: the West 30th Street heliport in Manhattan, carrying a pilot
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: and five tourists from Italy. It was a sightseeing run,
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: the kind that leaves that heliport dozens of times on
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: a clear summer day. A loop south along the river,
• 3:19
  Speaker 1: the skyline on one side, the water on the other.
• 3:21
  Speaker 1: Five tourists from Italy, on vacation, had chosen this specific
• 3:26
  Speaker 1: way to see New York. From above, low and slow,
• 3:29
  Speaker 1: the whole island laid out at once. It is the
• 3:31
  Speaker 1: kind of flight people plan for months and remember for years.
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: On this particular Saturday, it would be remembered for a
• 3:37
  Speaker 1: different reason. One of the five had a camera out
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: and was filming. Manhattan sliding past a helicopter window, the bridges,
• 3:44
  Speaker 1: the boats below. An ordinary tourist's video, the kind that
• 3:48
  Speaker 1: usually ends up forgotten on a memory card in a drawer.
• 3:51
  Speaker 1: Except this one would not be forgotten. That camera would
• 3:54
  Speaker 1: become one of the only pieces of hard evidence anyone
• 3:57
  Speaker 1: had for what happened next. If you have ever taken
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: one of those flights... Lean toward the window with a
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: phone or a camera up. Watching a city you don't
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: live in fold out beneath you, you already know what
• 4:07
  Speaker 1: that morning felt like for five people who had no
• 4:09
  Speaker 1: reason to think about radio frequencies or air traffic control.
• 4:13
  Speaker 1: They were passengers. Somebody else was flying the airplane. That
• 4:17
  Speaker 1: was the whole arrangement. Altman's two passengers were in the
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: same position, in a smaller airplane headed the same direction.
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: They had trusted a pilot with years of experience, an
• 4:26
  Speaker 1: airplane built decades earlier but still airworthy, and a route
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: flown routinely without incident. On any other Saturday, that trust
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: would have been completely reasonable. At 11.48, the Teterboro Tower
• 4:38
  Speaker 1: cleared Altman for departure and asked him a routine question.
• 4:41
  Speaker 1: Hudson Corridor or Southwest? Altman answered, either. Then, a moment later,
• 4:48
  Speaker 1: I will take down the river. It took him about
• 4:51
  Speaker 1: four seconds to decide. Pilots make that call every day.
• 4:54
  Speaker 1: The controller read him a handoff frequency for Newark Liberty
• 4:58
  Speaker 1: Approach Control. 127.85 megahertz. Altman read it back. He said 127.80.
• 5:07
  Speaker 1: Five one hundredths of a point. One digit off near
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: the end. On paper, that looks like nothing. In the air,
• 5:15
  Speaker 1: it put Altman on a channel nobody was listening to.
• 5:18
  Speaker 1: From that second, Newark could not hear him. Teterboro could
• 5:21
  Speaker 1: not raise him. His transponder kept blinking on both radar screens.
• 5:25
  Speaker 1: The airplane was there, moving, real. But the voice line
• 5:28
  Speaker 1: was dead. The controller who had read him that frequency
• 5:32
  Speaker 1: did not catch the error in the readback. The NTSB's
• 5:36
  Speaker 1: final report would later note that he was on a
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: personal phone call at that exact moment, a call the
• 5:40
  Speaker 1: record documents but never explains. Nobody would ever know what
• 5:44
  Speaker 1: was said. What matters is what wasn't heard. One digit,
• 5:49
  Speaker 1: spoken back wrong, with no one on the other end
• 5:51
  Speaker 1: to correct it. South along the river, the Eurocopter kept
• 5:55
  Speaker 1: flying the loop it flew every day. From inside that cabin,
• 5:59
  Speaker 1: none of this existed yet. There was no radio call
• 6:02
  Speaker 1: to miss, no frequency to mishear. There was a city
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: going by outside the window, and a camera pointed at it.
• 6:08
  Speaker 1: For those four minutes, that was the whole story. Five
• 6:11
  Speaker 1: tourists looking at Manhattan from an angle most people never get,
• 6:14
  Speaker 1: and a pilot flying a route he could probably have
• 6:16
  Speaker 1: managed with his eyes shut. Neuer kept waiting for Altman
• 6:20
  Speaker 1: to check in. He never came up on the frequency.
• 6:23
  Speaker 1: Controllers there watched his transponder crawl east, toward the corridors.
• 6:27
  Speaker 1: and called Teterboro, asking them to raise him. Teterboro tried.
• 6:32
  Speaker 1: Nothing came back. The radar kept tracking a silent airplane,
• 6:35
  Speaker 1: heading straight for a river full of other silent airplanes.
• 6:39
  Speaker 1: Then a warning did fire. A conflict alert, an automated
• 6:42
  Speaker 1: flag built for exactly this kind of situation, lit up
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: on screens at both Newark and Teterboro. It is a
• 6:48
  Speaker 1: system designed to catch precisely what a controller might miss.
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: Neither controller working that sequence remembers seeing it, or hearing it.
• 6:56
  Speaker 1: Somebody else did notice. A pilot on the ground at
• 6:59
  Speaker 1: a nearby heliport, refueling, looked up and watched two aircraft
• 7:03
  Speaker 1: converging above the river in a clear, empty sky. He
• 7:07
  Speaker 1: grabbed his radio and called out to both of them.
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: Neither answered. He was on the ground, at a fuel pump,
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: with a clear line of sight to two aircraft that
• 7:16
  Speaker 1: could not hear him and could not see each other.
• 7:18
  Speaker 1: Every tool available to him, his eyes, his voice, his radio,
• 7:22
  Speaker 1: worked exactly as it was supposed to. None of it
• 7:25
  Speaker 1: reached the sky in time, He kept watching, because there
• 7:29
  Speaker 1: was nothing else left for him to do. At 11.53
• 7:32
  Speaker 1: and 14 seconds, the left wing of the Piper struck
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: the Eurocopter at roughly 1,100 feet over the river near
• 7:38
  Speaker 1: West 14th Street, off Frank Sinatra Park in Hoboken. The
• 7:42
  Speaker 1: wing sheared away and took the helicopter's rotor blades with it.
• 7:47
  Speaker 1: The Piper spun toward the water. The helicopter fell. Both
• 7:50
  Speaker 1: aircraft hit the surface within seconds of each other. The
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: first word out was that someone had survived. That word
• 7:58
  Speaker 1: was wrong. All nine people aboard both aircraft were dead.
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: Stephen Altman and his two passengers in the Piper, the
• 8:05
  Speaker 1: helicopter's pilot, and all five Italian tourists, including the one
• 8:09
  Speaker 1: who had been filming. The river did not give them
• 8:12
  Speaker 1: back easily. The helicopter came to rest at about 30 feet.
• 8:16
  Speaker 1: The Piper came down somewhere else entirely, at about 60 feet,
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  Speaker 1: far enough away that rescue crews spent three days working
• 8:22
  Speaker 1: different stretches of the Hudson before sonar finally located it
• 8:26
  Speaker 1: on August 10th. For two days, one aircraft had a
• 8:29
  Speaker 1: known location and the other did not. Divers worked the
• 8:32
  Speaker 1: shallower wreck while a second search team combed a separate
• 8:35
  Speaker 1: patch of river, looking for a plane that had effectively
• 8:37
  Speaker 1: vanished the moment it hit the water. It was raised
• 8:40
  Speaker 1: from the water the next day, on August 11th. The
• 8:43
  Speaker 1: last of the victims were still inside it. Two aircraft
• 8:47
  Speaker 1: that had shared the same square yard of sky for
• 8:49
  Speaker 1: less than a second came to rest in two different
• 8:51
  Speaker 1: worlds on the river floor. That separation is itself a
• 8:55
  Speaker 1: kind of evidence. Whatever force passed between the Piper and
• 8:58
  Speaker 1: the Eurocopter at 1,100 feet did not simply damage them.
• 9:02
  Speaker 1: It tore both machines apart so completely that divers working
• 9:05
  Speaker 1: the same river, days apart, treated them as two unrelated wrecks.
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: The medical examiner's office in New York listed the cause
• 9:12
  Speaker 1: of death for all nine as blunt force trauma to
• 9:15
  Speaker 1: the head, torso, and extremities. Neither aircraft carried a flight
• 9:19
  Speaker 1: data recorder or a cockpit voice recorder. Neither was required to.
• 9:24
  Speaker 1: What the investigation had instead was the air traffic control audio,
• 9:28
  Speaker 1: the radar tapes, and one tourist's video shot from inside
• 9:31
  Speaker 1: the aircraft that did not survive it. The NTSB's final
• 9:34
  Speaker 1: report came 13 months later, on September 14th, 2010. It
• 9:40
  Speaker 1: did not settle on one person or one mistake. It
• 9:43
  Speaker 1: named two causes running in parallel. The first was structural.
• 9:48
  Speaker 1: See and avoid, the rule that puts the whole burden
• 9:50
  Speaker 1: of separation on a pilot's eyes, has hard physical limits.
• 9:54
  Speaker 1: Two aircraft closing on each other at combined speed in
• 9:57
  Speaker 1: a corridor with nobody sequencing the traffic can reach the
• 9:59
  Speaker 1: collision point before either pilot gets a real chance to
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: spot the other. By the time a small airplane and
• 10:04
  Speaker 1: a helicopter are close enough for a human eye to
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  Speaker 1: register both of them as a threat, the seconds left
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: to react are already running out. The second was the
• 10:11
  Speaker 1: phone call. The controller's personal conversation at exactly the wrong
• 10:15
  Speaker 1: moment was the documented reason nobody caught Altman's misread frequency.
• 10:19
  Speaker 1: One digit, unchallenged. And every safeguard downstream of it failed
• 10:24
  Speaker 1: in sequence. Newark couldn't reach a pilot listening to the
• 10:27
  Speaker 1: wrong channel. Teterboro couldn't correct an error nobody had flagged.
• 10:31
  Speaker 1: The automated alert fired into a room where no one
• 10:33
  Speaker 1: happened to be watching for it. A pilot on the
• 10:35
  Speaker 1: ground shouted a warning that landed nowhere. It would be
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: simple to end the story there. One distracted man, one
• 10:42
  Speaker 1: bad habit at the wrong second. Fix the discipline, and
• 10:45
  Speaker 1: nine deaths become preventable by a single rule enforced a
• 10:48
  Speaker 1: little harder. That version isn't false, but it falls apart
• 10:52
  Speaker 1: the moment you ask what would have happened if the
• 10:54
  Speaker 1: controller had been paying full attention the entire time. The
• 10:57
  Speaker 1: conflict alert still fired on two screens that nobody was
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: watching for it. A pilot on the ground still saw
• 11:02
  Speaker 1: the danger with his own eyes and still couldn't stop it.
• 11:05
  Speaker 1: The corridor still had no shared frequency, no sequencing, nothing
• 11:09
  Speaker 1: standing between two aircraft but a rule about looking out
• 11:11
  Speaker 1: the window. Take the phone call away completely. Give the
• 11:15
  Speaker 1: controller a perfect morning, full attention, no distractions of any kind.
• 11:19
  Speaker 1: The automated warning would still have needed a human being
• 11:21
  Speaker 1: to be looking at the right screen at the right second.
• 11:24
  Speaker 1: The pilot on the ground would still have had no
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: way to put his warning directly into either cockpit. Two
• 11:28
  Speaker 1: aircraft would still have been flying toward the same coordinates
• 11:31
  Speaker 1: with no requirement that either one know the other existed.
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: The phone call explains why nobody caught the mistake. It
• 11:36
  Speaker 1: does not explain why the corridor had no way to
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: catch it either. Three years earlier, in 2006, a plane
• 11:43
  Speaker 1: carrying Corey Lytle had gone down in the East River
• 11:45
  Speaker 1: Corridor under the same kind of airspace. and the same
• 11:48
  Speaker 1: questions had come up about how that corridor was run.
• 11:51
  Speaker 1: The conversation happened. Then it closed, without anything structural changing.
• 11:57
  Speaker 1: August 8th, 2009, was not the first time the question
• 12:00
  Speaker 1: had been asked. It was the first time nine people died,
• 12:04
  Speaker 1: still waiting for an answer. The FAA moved fast. The
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: Teterboro controller and his supervisor were placed on administrative leave
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: before the NTSB had even finished its investigations. before the
• 12:15
  Speaker 1: board had determined how much of the accident actually belonged
• 12:17
  Speaker 1: to him. The NTSB formally rebuked the agency for getting
• 12:22
  Speaker 1: ahead of its own process. The board's job was to
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: decide what had actually happened before anyone was punished for it,
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: and the FAA had not waited. The National Air Traffic
• 12:31
  Speaker 1: Controllers Association was sanctioned too, not for hiding anything, but
• 12:35
  Speaker 1: for breaking the rules on how parties to an open
• 12:37
  Speaker 1: NTSB investigation are allowed to communicate about it. Even the
• 12:40
  Speaker 1: process of figuring out what went wrong became something the
• 12:43
  Speaker 1: investigators had to referee. No criminal charge was ever filed
• 12:46
  Speaker 1: against anyone involved. No one stood trial. What exists instead
• 12:50
  Speaker 1: is a federal report, 13 months in the making, that
• 12:53
  Speaker 1: traces nine deaths back to a corridor built on a
• 12:56
  Speaker 1: rule from the earliest days of flight and a call
• 12:58
  Speaker 1: made at the one moment it could not be afforded.
• 13:01
  Speaker 1: New rules took effect that November, less than four months
• 13:04
  Speaker 1: after the crash, the Hudson Corridor was split into three
• 13:07
  Speaker 1: altitude zones with sightseeing traffic and transit flights required to
• 13:10
  Speaker 1: fly separate layers of the same airspace. It was a
• 13:14
  Speaker 1: real fix. The corridor it produced is measurably safer than
• 13:17
  Speaker 1: the one those nine people flew into. Regulators looked directly
• 13:20
  Speaker 1: at what killed nine people and changed the structure of
• 13:22
  Speaker 1: the airspace in response in under four months. That is
• 13:25
  Speaker 1: not nothing. The corridor itself never closed. It is still there.
• 13:32
  Speaker 1: Helicopters still lift off from the West 30th Street heliport
• 13:34
  Speaker 1: on clear mornings and fly the same loop south along
• 13:37
  Speaker 1: the river that carried five tourists past that skyline. If
• 13:41
  Speaker 1: you book one of those flights this summer, you will
• 13:43
  Speaker 1: pass through the same corridor, under a stricter version of
• 13:46
  Speaker 1: the same rule, look out the window and don't hit anything.
• 13:50
  Speaker 1: The rule is better managed now. At its foundation, it
• 13:53
  Speaker 1: is still the same rule. Every person who buckles into
• 13:55
  Speaker 1: that helicopter or climbs into a small plane on a
• 13:57
  Speaker 1: clear Saturday is still trusting a version of the same
• 14:00
  Speaker 1: arrangement Stephen Altman trusted and the same one five Italian
• 14:03
  Speaker 1: tourists trusted without ever thinking about it at all. What
• 14:07
  Speaker 1: the report really asked the aviation world to sit with
• 14:10
  Speaker 1: wasn't who to blame for one morning. It was whether
• 14:13
  Speaker 1: a system that puts a human eye between two aircraft,
• 14:16
  Speaker 1: with no shared radio and nobody on the ground watching
• 14:18
  Speaker 1: the whole board, was ever going to hold up across
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: enough ordinary mornings. Not just that one. Enough of them,
• 14:25
  Speaker 1: for as long as the corridor stays open, with pilots
• 14:27
  Speaker 1: who are experienced, distracted, tired, or simply human, in a
• 14:31
  Speaker 1: machine that gives them seconds to notice what should never
• 14:34
  Speaker 1: have been left entirely to their own eyes. Somewhere, on
• 14:37
  Speaker 1: the floor of a storage facility, that tourist's footage still exists.
• 14:42
  Speaker 1: Manhattan on one side, the Hudson below. A camera pointed
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: at an ordinary summer sky. Four minutes of nothing happening.
• 14:51
  Speaker 1: And then it stops. This show is made by Oboe Media.