ATC Near-Miss Debate

You're implying this is ATC rather than human-error related.

It's quite common, at least in the US (where I have most of my experience). It's generally not scary, pilots coordinate with each other on the radio, announcing their intentions. There are, however, some pilots who seem to not make more than the bare minimum number of calls or don't seem interested in listening to the other pilots near the airport.Additionally, there are guidelines for how to enter the airspace of an uncontrolled airport to reduce congestion and the chance of a

Why didn't the ATC talk to the airline pilots? Isn't that an egregious error?

Wrong.https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/atpubs/atc_html...

Don't the pilots have the option of engaging alternate flight rules in this case? Or is that not how it works?

ATC wasn’t been an asshole. The airspace was extremely busy and there wasn’t space between arriving flights for anyone to make an instrument landing.In order to make instrument landing, dozens of other planes would have to be moved out of the way.

Mythbusters tried this (in a simulator) and both succeeded as long as the ATC was there to give instructions

There are alerts, both visual and aural, in modern ATC setups when aircraft are within a certain distance of an intersecting trajectory in time and space, and additionally when they are within a certain proximity.However, the intended instruction was safe. The problem was that the ATCer read it out incorrectly. I am not aware of a system that does voice recognition on what is said by the controller to check that it matches the programmed instruction!

That’s not how ATC works - atc ALREADY went beyond what you normally see w their suggestions for a go around. ATC is focused on traffic (keeping it separated), pilots are in charge of flying their planes. In fact communicating with ATC is low on list of things to do when their are problems. Priority is aviate, navigate then communicate. And these controllers went above and beyond w their warnings already

The NOTAMs for a commercial flight from JFK to LAX, for example, would be several pages long. Warnings about construction work at either airport, closed taxiways, cranes in the vicinity of the airport, enroute navigational aids which are unusable, etc. ATC can't relay that for every departing flight. Additionally, the NOTAM system is where they'd retrieve these from, so if that's down they have nothing to relay.