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About Medford mail tribune. (Medford, Or.) 1909-1989 | View Entire Issue (July 2, 1962)
.... MEDFORD MAIL TRIBUNE. KIEDFORD. OREGON MONDAY. JULY 2. 1962 J Grand Canyon Crash Brought Stay Air Traffic Control Improvements Editor'i noit: It was on merce Dcpartnient. reliable air safely source.--, an i require spending another S51HI . improvements. In devoting '"' Wo 'ven have psychia- inslea.l of liie present ohso- incidents involved actual dan- Saturday Six VCars man Uct 1 Trnmon... Bvn3ncinn nr1 3i-flri f nr! iv nr. ,villir h.r a mnlolv l,n r.f r.. l.i a tril illWrvi,'u-ipi m.,. i-h.i l., I. ..j .t i J . n.. . I hav Saturday lix years ago last week, that two airlineri col lided over the Grand Canyon and lent 128 persons to their dealhi. The following diipatch umt up the accomplishments and the failures in solving the air collision problem since that disaster. By ROBERT J. SERLING UPI Aviation Editor Washington - lUPli - What happened on June 30, 1956, at 21.000 feet over the Grand Canyon, led to major reforms and improvements in the na tion's air traffic control sys tf ni. Unfortunately, however, the traffic has grown faster than all the necessary reforms and improvements could be applied. In the six years since a Uni ted DC7 and a TWA Constel lation collided over Arizona, the achievements are many and impressive. They include: Establishment of the in dependent, well-heeled Feder al Aviation Agency in place of the old financially starved, politically harrassed Civil Aeronautics Administration which was part of the Com Tremendous expansion of the Federal government's Air Traffic Control System partic ularly In use of long-range, en route radar to separate traffic safel) and in the ac tual number of controllers from 8.036 in 1956 to 17,625 as of today. Better coordination be tween military and civil traf fic, especially at the higher, en route altitudes used by jets. Improved cockpit visibil ity in every plane, particu larly airliners built since the 1956 crash. Enormous increases in the use of instrument flight rules which put planes under control from the ground (about 90 per cent of commer cial airline flights now are under IFR compared to about 30 per cent at the time of the crash over Grand Canyonl. Menace Worsens in Spots These accomplishments, however, do not hide the un pleasant fact that the collision menace not only exists but in some ways is even worse as traffic continues to expand. There still are. according to Price of Coffee in America Critical To Latin Americans By A. ROBERT SMITH Mail Tribune Washington 9 Correspondent Washington (Special) The price of a cup of American coffee is more critical to a J. x rtl tin American f countries than Mil trhether they i receive Ameri ca aid uraear the n AMI ai for fYos mm Sewn. Vaygw ) Vfcviea, chair man of the La tin American subcommittee on Foreign Relations, made that clev in a recent speech in ehich he summarized some of the obatecles to econ omic prop's south of the border. Generally, Morse thinXs the- Allience for Progress has registered some isains but that it hes a ton's way to aw in rcaliownn vesfcr afe e smie oMtiwa2r asril pas. rarity c tfce giiwwge peauesja of Latin America. He seid the failure thus far to tori out price stabilisa tion agreement for such cri tictl Latin exirorts as coffee htm ceiiacl iietreas in some countries. That price c Colom bia, coffee., for eyantase, he dropped from M to 41 cents i pound in tlje past five years - and every cent per pound mean g lnjs of $7.5 million In Colombia, for coffee pro vides about 77 ir cent of that country's export income. Other Latin countries are dependent upon eother single commodities for a hevy share r)f thair ineojrft Venezu ela, 92 per cent from oil; Bo livia, 62 per cent from tin; Ecuador, 57 per cent from bananas; and Chile, 66 per pent from copper. Penny Per Cup If the price of coffee could through stabilization be re stored to BO cents, Morse said the cost to American coffee drinkers would amount to about a penny per cup. But it would mean an additional $400 million a year in earn ings for Brazil and $50 mil lion annually for Colombia. The success of the program, said Morse, is dependent upon "the willingness of recipient nations to undertake funda mental reforms of their insti tutions and social patterns and to mobilize to the fullest extent possible their own do mestic resources." "Many of those who con trol the major resources of some Latin countries fall into a state of shock whenever thee 1 mention" f 'social re form," which tl.ey falsely confuse witri violent upheav al. The usuae result of each such 'shock wave' is that an other 1Q0 million or so wings off to Switzerland. Thus it occurs that a privileged min ority who fear revolution above all things so act, in their fesr, as to make revolu tion more likely," said Morse. He said estimates of the flight of capital abroad range from 9S to 10 Hllion, which is one-third to one-half the total M0 biHion contemplated in aid urstear the Alliance for At Wk SOmk thMe, United Staa6 awMl European invest ment in Lajin America has dropped sharply below expec tations. In contrast to S300 million a year in the fifties, U. S. investment was down to 91 million in 180 and S190 million in 1M1. M lastearffjiakj "It is up tf the Latin Ameri can governments to make their countries more attract ive to private capital aid it ct baj said that the efforts thus far made are encourag ing for the future," the sen ator said. "Recent expropria tions and nationalistic finan cial regulations adopted in a number of countries have tended to frighten off new in vestors." On the positive side, Morse said in the first year of the Alliance, as the U.S. commit ted $1 billion in aid. "meas ures of progress and reform have been begun throughout the continent, ranging from the mobilization of domestic resources fo new education and housing programs . . . (and) new programs of lax and land reform, housing, educa tion, agriculture, power and luiblic sanitation ?te being launched in most of the Amer ican republics." 6 PROOF ECHO SPAING OlSt CO.. LOUISVILLE. KY. BOURBON Ji yar oU iiiiiiMiW Th succest of tft"A" mm mm ASM 683' fifth 6 . 8 .sio( Jlnim, J 1 1 BOURBON !l$sM average of nearlv six near collisions daily. Most involve private aircraft operating un der visual flight rules with no positive control from the ATC system. But the FAA itself admits too many also involve aircraft operating IFR with controller errors responsible for some of them. The most obvious and fre quent question asked is why should there be a collision menace after six years and millions of dollars in federal spending supposed to solve the problem? The FAA since it came into existence in 1958 has spent $51.5 million in research to perfect an automatic or semi automatic system of control ling air traffic. FAA Admin istrator Najeeb E. Halabv re cently warned that such a system still is about five years away and probably will million before a completely modern system is actually working. The chief blame, according to impartial experts, is the lack of any orderlv plan for automated ATC. "Wandering research" one critic called it the failure to settle on a single system and then ham mer awav until it is perfect ed. Part of this is due to the very human tendency lo de lay equipment decisions be cause "there might be a bet ter device jusl around the cor ner." Only in the past few months has FAA's massive re search program stopped wan dering and started concentrating. Research Thwarts Svstum I ATC research itself has generated not only delays in long-range modernization but in badly needed immediate the maioritv of funds lo svstem of the future, some of the needs of the present tiol incidents We're trying to have been ignored. The chief establish any correlation be sufferer is the controller, who itween working conditions and commits errors that are as errors lor example we have much the fault of inadequate some evidence that most nils- tools as a human mistake. And most of them are committed in the crowded, busy termi- controller nal areas where en route traf fic begins to pile up. There has been widespread publicity recently about con troller errors, such as the one that put two airliners into a holding pattern at the same interviewing men who lete method of hand-written been involved in con- slips of paper This achieve- ment, however, appears to lie several years away. Even with obsolete tools, the controller's record since the ballooning traffic of the past six years has been re markable. In llitil, there were 278 "1 n c i dents" involving some kind of controller error. The projected figure for Iil(i2 is '258. The ATC system han dles about 200.000 flights dal ly. And not all the so-called takes are made in tlje first hour of a work shift, when a cold,' rather than in the seventh hour when he may be fatigued." Thomas. Bain and Carmody all agree thai the most press ing equipment need is for more accurate altitude re porting. Present radar can incidents involved actual dan ger. A controller must report any instance when two planes are brought within less than their required 10-minute sep aration and a nine minute separation is investigated us closely as a nine-second one. Thomas figures the average center controller makes one mistake every 14 years; the average tower controller one error every 45 years. ) "I wish all professions I were lhat good," says the i head of ATC's 17,000 men. ! SHIP IT LASME to or Irom Oakland, San Fran c'ico, Lot Angeles and orhtr California points. Call Jack Fitzgerald TWIN GOES HOME Patricia Lowe, the larger of a set of former Siamese twins, is shown as she left the hospital with her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Franklin Lowe, in San Francisco. The other child, Prudence, will be able lo go home in a week or so as she must still receive cortisone injections to help her gain weight. Dr. Pieter de Vries. who headed the team of physicians which separated the girls, said the ll week old twins are "doing fine." (UPI) altitude for more than 40 min-jtell only speed and direction. It cannot distinguish altitudes. The first major breakthrough in solving the collision men ace will come with the de velopment of a device that automatically sends an alti tude signal from aircraft to utes. And the FAA. for the first lime, is taking a really close look at controller prob lems. It has one group of trouble-shooters, headed by for mer airline executive Gordon Bain, looking at the present system itsell lo see wnal im- Vround radar, and records mediate improvements can bej,hat altitude visually on the made. It has another group, rad.,r Sl.0pc It presently is directed by veteran ATC ex- ,he highest - priority project perl Charles Carmody, gath-!in FFA . mdl,slrv research. ering suggestions from con- . , . , ,, ,1 . Need Handoff Personnel (rollers themselves. I 1 he second most immediate need is more manpower for i radar handolls - literally ; keeping aircraft under cen- Alreariy their work is jell ing into some concrete ideas on what can be done to reduce controller mistakes in the in terim period between today's ATC system and what will come in the future. For ex ample: - Controllers need more specialization. They literally have too much to remember. A controller in a major cen ter must know virtually every word in 10 procedure man uals stacked a fool high. Controllers need more re fresher training and in a for malized classroom, rather than the present "on-the-job" briefings they get to inform them of new procedures, me thods and equipment. Receive Close Examination Dave Thomas, head of FAA's Bureau of Air Traf fic Management, says no field of human endeavor is being examined more closely than ATC and the men who operate it. "In the personnel explosion that followed Grand Canyon," he explains, "we concentrated on getting more controllers into the system as quickly as possible. Now we must con centrate on keeping them pro ficient. "When one makes mis take, we're trying to find out ter to another. It was the lack of such handoff continuity that played a role in the col lision of two airliners over New York in 1060. FFA's next budget calls fy 1.100 new controllers and 800 of them would be earmarked for hand off duty. The third major require ment is an electronic system for keeping track of flights, m New savings from Stale Farm! See our ad on the snorts pages, then contact me! "C" it'''" 417 B. 77-7?lf STATE FARM Fin nd Cuay Co. Home Office : Bloimnon, Illinois United flights from Medford Morning and evening flights connect in Portland with United jets to mors citiw in tl Emt tWi ny oflvr airlir. Akfl) convenient . cmntetiwS wills Unip4 WCalife.C8ll Uufwil .iirLiMs, -SP 3-S233, yir Jrm'd F" 7 I I T "" iT. 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