00:00Now, I do want to address one thing, which is reports of distraction.
00:04I have seen a number of reports from press about distraction,
00:08whether there was distraction among controllers.
00:11Look, this is, I would caution pointing fingers at controllers and saying distraction was involved.
00:20This is a heavy workload environment.
00:24You had a United Airlines flight.
00:26We still have to determine what happened at shift change, which was around 1030.
00:32We have to determine who else was in the tower and the facility and available at the time.
00:38We know that that controller was still on duty for several minutes afterwards.
00:45Normally, they would be relieved.
00:46We have questions about that.
00:48Was anybody available to relieve that controller?
00:51We don't know that yet.
00:52We also have questions about what else was occurring, what other traffic they were dealing with at the time.
01:02So one thing I will close with before I take questions is we rarely, if ever, investigate a major accident
01:11where it was one failure.
01:13Our aviation system is incredibly safe because there are multiple, multiple layers of defense built in to prevent an accident.
01:24So when something goes wrong, that means many, many things went wrong.
01:29And so here, that's why we're here.
01:31We're here to prevent this from reoccurring, prevent this from happening again.
01:37And that's going to take some time.
01:39So with that, I will take questions.
01:40I ask that you raise your hand, state your name, and your affiliation.
01:45Chair Homity, it's Pete Muntean with CNN.
01:47Given the fact that combining controller positions has been a factor in previous incidents that you've investigated, including the DCA
01:57midair collision,
01:57what would you say now that you know positions were combined in the control tower cap on Sunday night?
02:05Is that a safe practice?
02:06And does it make you upset that the positions were combined?
02:09So there's a little bit of a difference.
02:12The question is on combining positions because we saw the combining of positions in the midair collision that occurred near
02:21Ronald Reagan, Washington National Airport, about a year ago.
02:24So our understanding right now, and again, this is preliminary and subject to change.
02:30Our understanding is that in the DCA midair, there were procedures followed, a list like traffic volume, staffing available, training,
02:43workload,
02:45that was considered in order to combine positions like the helicopter position and the local control position in DCA.
02:52In this situation for the midnight shift, it is standard operating procedure that they only have two on duty and
03:01those two perform the duties of other controllers.
03:04That is our understanding right now.
03:06However, we're going to further dig into that as part of our investigation.
03:10Certainly, I can tell you that our air traffic control team has stated this is a problem, that this is
03:19a concern for them for years,
03:21that they have had this concern for quite a long time.
03:24I can understand it's a concern, especially if there's a heavy workload.
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