It Operator Error News Today

Rules. the asella train has something called positive train control, or automatic train stop. so that speed is monitored, and if the engineer for whatever reason, is exceeding the speed, the train will automatically stop. youve got an amtrak train in this accident that apparently did not have that feature. so it is possible through technology to monitor speed. we will know more once we get the read out of the black box. but from my perspective, that technology ought to be on every train in the n...

Applying the brakes very late in the game, that seems to be a recipe for danger. >> no question about it. trains dont stop very quickly. you put the brakes on now and you stop quite a distance down the track. so putting the brakes on that late brake application coming six seconds or five seconds prior to the locomotive coming to a stop, thats way too late. so now the focus is going to be on what the operator was doing, was he on his cell phone, which we find often to be a factor in these types o...

In jeopardy of breaking a limb. >> because this was a foreign crew investigators did not have the legal authority to issue drug or alcohol tests on them. so that did not occur. one point of clarification here, when we talked about the auto throttles not holding the minimum speed, there is some discussion now about whether that was because of operator error. did the crew understand how the auto throttles system worked on this plane. it differs from plane to plane, boeing to boeing plane. was it o...