As a railway safety expert I find the system which allows two aircraft to be on the same runway to be abhorrent. The railways found this to their cost in the 1800’s. Why is the airline industry so backward ? I guess the blame is fairly and squarely down to the bean counters.

If the tower had been fully staffed instead of saving on personal, the incident would never have happened.

Easter sunday: It is obvious that this airport's flow-thru capacity should be sharply reduced when control tower is short of staff. So few are on the job that simply taking a rest-room break could lead to a crash! Expecting automation to pick up the slack to provide a safety margin is playing with fire. Retired in Sacto.

If air traffic control had told the airport management that on ly four of nine of them had turned up for work and they would have to close the airport I bet that would have got more controllers working in double quick time. Instead they took a chance.

Absolutely no excuse! The 777 crew should not have started the roll until they saw wheels up on the 190.

This is why self driving cars are not the fool proof thing for safety people think they are. It all works fine until just one thing is omitted from the whole equation either because the programmer didn't account for something or some outside force prevented some sort of information. People want this sort of automation because they think it will do it all for them and they don't want to babysit the technology. The tech world tries to convince us that their tech is smarter than we are. If the controller didn't put so much trust in the tech and not assume everything will go as planned, it might not have become a situation any further than the aborted take off do to the bird strike.

We don't want another Teneriffe but that situation appears to be just around the corner

not enough flight traffic controllers

It’s Ridiculous in this day and age for a VHF signals not to be heard, due to another radio signal with greater power. With marine VHF sets most sets have a output wattage which differs from fixed VHF set to a handheld set, if wile aircraft on the ground used a lower wattage than no signal would be readable and the aircraft would have to respond again allowing a greater margin of safety, if one aircraft is transmitting on 25 watts and the other is transmitting at 5 watts, but the acknowledgement from ATC should make it clear who he was talking, that’s if correct protocol was followed.

flying has gotten too dangerous.

Just goes to show man is still greater than technology when it fails, yet for the sake of whatever, manpower is continually degraded. Using an Americanism, BOOTS ON THE GROUND. l'm glad the controller was absolved of blame, that would have been so unfair. Perhaps better standardisation of technology would also benefit the service.

What type of ATC gives an unqualified takeoff clearance while there is still traffic on the runway? “B777, with the departing Embraer on the runway ahead of you, you are cleared for takeoff.” Kudos to the B777 crew.

Only by the Grace of God.....................