Skyguide traffic controller killed

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James Robinson wrote:

That was only part of the overall problem, however, since there were
many procedural and technical problems at the control center, which
tends to turn the focus of the investigation on the controller's
employer. The controller was probably put into the position where he
couldn't adequately handle the traffic being offered, which led to his
mistakes.

It's funny that this came up now. I recently looked at the NTSB report on
the Nov, 2002 mid-air near KCDW. Since I was in that very same traffic
pattern shortly before this accident (and many times since), I was quite
interested.

The URL for this report is:

http://www.ntsb.gov/ntsb/brief.asp?e...20X05496&key=2

As you can see, there were "errors" on the part of the controllers which,
loosely, mimic the errors at Skyguide. I write "loosely" because Skyguide
handles a different type of traffic and has more automation available.

But in both cases, there was a controller working alone which brought about
an overload condition.

Yet in the CDW case, you'll note, the pilots were listed as being at fault
(with the controller being a "factor"). Given that we're supposed to "see
& avoid", this is a reasonable conclusion in my opinion.

Now, "see & avoid" may not have applied in the Skyguide case. But if
pilot's are - by regulation - supposed to follow the RA instead of a
controller's instructions, then I can see a similar conclusion being drawn
there.

- Andrew

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Stefan wrote:

The investigators are required to follow a rigorous investigation
process, no matter how clear cut a case may be. That takes a lot of
time.

Hmmm... Wasn't it you that claimed that reading the preliminary finding
was enough to have a full understanding of the case?

Yes, and what he's saying here is that a process must be followed, even if it's
just a waste of time.

George Patterson
A diplomat is a person who can tell you to go to hell in such a way that
you look forward to the trip.

Nope, never said such a thing. All I said was that it was clear that
the controller had screwed up... do you dispute that?

Stefan wrote in message ...
Dean Wilkinson wrote:

That is very rude of you to call the investigation team idiots,

You obviously missed the question mark and the irony it implied.

The investigators are required to follow a rigorous investigation
process, no matter how clear cut a case may be. That takes a lot of
time.

Hmmm... Wasn't it you that claimed that reading the preliminary finding
was enough to have a full understanding of the case?

Stefan

Dean Wilkinson wrote:

Nope, never said such a thing. All I said was that it was clear that
the controller had screwed up... do you dispute that?

Yes. Nothing is clear before I've read the full report.

Stefan

Dean Wilkinson wrote:

My bet is that one of the fathers of the Russian children did it...

The controller in this case clearly screwed up since he instructed the
Russian jet to descend when the Russian crew told him they had an RA
instructing them to climb.

Did they really?

Controllers are required to instruct
flight crews to follow the RA when an RA occurs,

They are not.

and crews are
required to follow the RA.

Yes, they are.

The Russians don't appear to have given
proper training to their crews regarding the TCAS system because the
crew didn't ignore the controller like they should have and followed
the RA.

Yep.

Dean

Dima

"Stefan" wrote in message
...
Dean Wilkinson wrote:

Nope, never said such a thing. All I said was that it was clear that
the controller had screwed up... do you dispute that?

Yes. Nothing is clear before I've read the full report.


In fact, the controller has not even been killed until the police finish
their report, right Stefan?

"Stefan" wrote in message
...
Dean Wilkinson wrote:

The controller in this case clearly screwed up since he instructed the

Interesting that you already know the culprit while the official report
is not yet published.

It is interesting that you know who the murder victim was while the official
report is not yet published. In fact, it is interesting that you know there
was a murder at all.

The police will be investigating this incident for some time, perhaps years,
but you are willing to make a snap judgment based on a fragmentary report
printed in some newspaper. :-)

In fact, the controller has not even been killed until the police finish
their report, right Stefan?

LOL, very funny C.J.

Now, just so nobody misunderstands me, just because I believe that the
controller made a mistake, I do not believe that the controller
deserved to be stabbed to death. I also believe that the Captain of
the Russian flight made a mistake as well, and he should have listened
to his first officer who kept pointing out that the TCAS system said
climb.

The controller was put in a difficult situation by his employer,
Skyguide. The Russians could benefit from better training in the TCAS
system and better Crew Resource Management.

I think that this case is a good example of why privatizing air
traffic control in the U.S.A. is a bad idea. When safety takes a back
seat to cost controls and profit margins, people die.

Dean Wilkinson

"C J Campbell" wrote in message ...
"Stefan" wrote in message
...
Dean Wilkinson wrote:

Nope, never said such a thing. All I said was that it was clear that
the controller had screwed up... do you dispute that?

Yes. Nothing is clear before I've read the full report.


In fact, the controller has not even been killed until the police finish
their report, right Stefan?

C J Campbell wrote:

In fact, the controller has not even been killed until the police finish
their report, right Stefan?

Actually, yes. That's how the legl system works here, and it does so for
good. There are libraries full of cases of people who innocently spent
years in prison or even have been executed and found to have been
unguilty later. Oh, and how was that with the "obvious" and "very clear"
fact that Iraq had WMDs? (Not to start a discussion about Iraq, please!)

So just let's wait what the final report will find.

Stefan

Murder suspect haunted by family's air deaths

28 February 2004 07:17


Yuri Kaloyev knew his brother was a broken man even before he
disappeared a week ago. Two years after his wife, son and daughter,
victims of a head-on plane collision over the Swiss-German border, had
been laid to rest amid the sombre rows of a cemetery in their home
town of Vladikavkaz, in southern Russia, his family's ghosts still
haunted his nights. "You could find my brother, even at 2am, at the
cemetery crying on their gravestones," Yuri Kaloyev said. "He
suffered. He could not work. He locked himself away."

On Friday, however, the desolate truth about his brother began to
emerge. Descriptions given by the Swiss police of a man they have
arrested for the savage stabbing to death on Tuesday of the air
traffic controller widely blamed for the plane crash closely fit
Kaloyev.

He is 48. He lost his wife Svetlana, 10-year-old son Konstantin and
four-year-old daughter Diana in the disaster in July 2002, when the
Russian charter aircraft in which they were travelling ploughed into a
cargo plane in the night sky above Germany. While the Russian foreign
ministry have requested confirmation of the arrested man's identity,
the only other man who lost his entire family in the crash, Vladimir
Savchuck, has appeared on Russian TV, deploring the killing.

Before arresting their suspect on Wednesday, Swiss police admitted a
relative of one of the victims of the crash might have been
responsible. On Friday, however, as fresh details emerged, it appeared
that they were dealing with an unprecedented case -- of deliberate
slow-burning revenge by a grief-crazed relative who had nothing left
to lose.

According to investigators, on Tuesday last week Vitali Kaloyev phoned
a Swiss travel company and asked the firm to book him a hotel room
close to Zurich airport. On Saturday Kaloyev arrived in Zurich,
entirely legally, and checked into the Welcome-Inn hotel in the suburb
of Kloten.

Kaloyev, however, chose it for another, darker reason: the suburban
hotel is a short taxi ride away from where Peter Nielsen, the
36-year-old Danish air traffic controller widely blamed for the
catastrophic plane crash, lived with his wife and three children.

According to hotel staff, in the two days before the murder Kaloyev
did little to attract attention. "He was very quiet," the hotel's
manager, Simona Huonder, said on Friday. "We hardly saw him during the
time he stayed with us. He was on his own the whole time, mostly up in
his room." She added: "He didn't speak very good English. My colleague
who checked him in had to give him information slowly."

At breakfast Kaloyev ate alone, later flicking through brochures
offering city tours. "He seemed like any other tourist," Hounder said.
On Tuesday afternoon, however, Kaloyev left his hotel room -- No 316
-- and set off for Peter Nielsen's house, a half-hour's walk away. A
female neighbour of Nielsen spotted him. She then asked him what he
wanted. He waved a piece of paper with Nielsen's name on it. The
neighbour pointed to the air traffic controller's front door, but
instead of knocking on it, Kaloyev sat down in the front garden, near
a bench.

Nielsen, who had lived in Switzerland since 1995, had just returned
home from a trip to Geneva. His wife had picked him up from the
airport. He spotted the intruder, went outside, and asked him what he
wanted. Swiss detectives say that the couple's three children went
into the garden as well; the controller's wife then called them back,
and was inside herself when she heard a "kind of scream".

She rushed out to discover her husband lying in a pool of blood. The
victim and the killer who spoke "broken German" had had a brief
conversation; what they said, however, is unknown.

Nielsen's wife watched her husband's assailant run off; by the time
the police arrived at 6.17pm it was too late. The controller, who
suffered multiple injuries, had bled to death.

Clues for detectives were numerous. They had several good descriptions
-- of a burly, unshaven, dark-haired man in his late 40s or early 50s
who appeared to come from eastern Europe or Russia. They had a murder
weapon -- a 22cm jackknife with a 14cm blade that had been thrown away
near the scene. And they had a name: the chief suspect was a man who,
police said, had "behaved strangely" during the first anniversary of
the crash last summer in the German town of Überlingen. The man had
allegedly threatened officials from Skyguide -- the firm for which
Nielsen worked -- and described him as "scum".

So far, however, the suspect has denied involvement in the killing. On
Friday Kaloyev's brother said that in the months before the murder
Vitali had slowly fallen apart, despite support from his sisters, and
the traditional, strong family ties of Caucasus society. "His
condition was terrible. Imagine what you feel when you lose both your
beloved children and wife," he said. "He disappeared a week ago
without telling anyone. And that is all I know."

It is a tragic end to Kaloyev's seemingly endless grief at the loss of
his family. A native of Vladikavkaz, near the border with Chechnya, he
got a two-year contract to work as a builder and architect on a
project in Barcelona. Just as his contract ended, in June 2002, he
decided to prolong his stay in Spain, and asked his family to fly out
and join him for a month's holiday. He was waiting for them at
Barcelona airport when he learned of the crash.

Kaloyev was one of the first relatives to arrive at the scene, and
discovered the body of his daughter, still intact, almost two miles
from where the accident happened. "Diana dreamed of coming with her
mother and brother to see me," he wrote on a website commemorating the
crash's 71 victims, most of whom were Russian schoolchildren.

Remorse

Nielsen was the only person on duty when the disaster took place. He
had wrongly instructed the Bashkirian airlines plane to descend, even
though its onboard warning equipment told it to climb. The pilot
followed the controller's instructions and ploughed into a DHL cargo
plane that was descending in accordance with its own
collision-avoiding equipment. Nielsen expressed remorse at what had
happened, but in a statement issued after the tragedy pointed out that
he was not the only person responsible.

The apparent revenge killing, meanwhile, has shocked all those
involved in the still-unresolved fight to gain justice for the crash
victims. Yulia Fedotova, a lawyer representing the families, who lost
her own daughter Sofia (15) in the crash said she was "shocked" by the
controller's murder. She added: "We still do not have any official
confirmation that the murderer was Kaloyev. Mr Kaloyev's personal
trauma, however, was clear to those around him."

Margarita, wife to his brother Yuri, told the Izvestiya newspaper:
"Vitali suffered everything alone. And after two years, he was in such
a state that I would not be surprised if he would behave irrationally.
Anyone can put himself in his place: in a minute to lose all your
family."

Kaloyev's days in Vladikavkaz after the funeral appear to have slipped
by, marked by little more than visits to the cemetery. According to
Izvestiya, at the memorial service last year he took the head of
Skyguide, Alan Rossier, aside afterwards and asked him "uncomfortable
questions about who was to be blamed". Kaloyev agreed to come to the
Skyguide office the following day, the newspaper reported. According
to the paper's sources, "Kaloyev asked several times: do you think the
air controller is to blame? He also asked to meet him."

Yet his brother disputes the accounts. Yuri Kaloyev, who travelled
with him to Switzerland and Germany to collect his family's bodies
from the scene of the crash, reserves his own fury for the air traffic
control company Skyguide.

"All this talk and speculation in the newspapers about his abnormal
behaviour last year at the ceremony in Switzerland is rubbish. He was
fine. What is abnormal is the behaviour of Skyguide who did not sack
such an air controller and director as Alan Rossier."

The intensity of Kaloyev's grief remains clear in the internet eulogy
he wrote for his son.

Of Konstantin, who learned to speak at 18 months, read fairytales aged
three, loved dinosaurs and at aged five played computer games, he
wrote: "He would have become a good, well-educated person, useful to
society, were it not for this tragedy, which I cannot get over. I have
no strength."

- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004