Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A Lufthansa A350's frustrating Oakland diversion

onemileatatime.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 413 posts

Re: A Lufthansa A350's frustrating Oakland diversion

#231

Post by lmm »

V-eHGsd_ wrote: post #200
MBCook wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Makes sense. Thanks. That is weird then that SFO wasn’t ready.

they were ready. "fly heading XXX, vectors for visual 28R", is them saying, "i'm ready for you to land". What norcal (not SFO) was not prepared to do was accommodate the extra wide gap that lufthansa's company policy would've required. it was up to lufthansa to tell approach that they're not going to be able to accept the approach in use. It's being advertised on the atis that they would've been able to pick up in th…

> i'm sure it was said in the follow up video, but lufthansa knew what they were offering at SFO and if they needed something different they should've spoken up much sooner.

How are they supposed to know that an ILS approach - a completely routine procedure - is not available? If the problem is them not giving ATC enough warning, what process is there for telling ATC ahead of time? What was SFO going to do if it clouded over, close the airport?

Re: A Lufthansa A350's frustrating Oakland diversion

#232

Post by mixdup »

ralph84 wrote: post #178
perihelions wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- "their pilots aren’t prepared to do the approaches everyone else is doing" Is this is a fair framing? My read of it is that Lufthansa's enforcing a minimal standard of safety—one that's higher than both other airliners' and the ATC's. They're not incapable of doing visual landings at night; rather, they have a policy banning it in non-emergency situations. It (naively) seems reasonable to me not to budge on this ki…

Sure, Lufthansa can make up whatever rules they want for “safety”. Safest would be to not venture 7 miles above the arctic at 500mph at all. But if their rules are obviously in conflict with the standard operations at an airport, it’s on Lufthansa to adjust not everyone else. You can’t barge in and expect to get ATC priority on account of “company policy” or suddenly there’d be a lot of company policies requiring onl…

They didn't "barge in" or expect any priority. They arrived just like everyone else. As a matter of fact, they travelled farther than probably most arrivals that day so ATC had much more warning they were approaching than, say, a flight from Denver or Atlanta

Re: A Lufthansa A350's frustrating Oakland diversion

#233

Post by bombcar »

jcalvinowens wrote: post #210
reso wrote: post #45

> Pilot: If we are not set up for base soon, we will have to declare a fuel emergency and that would really fuck up your sequence. > Controller: What is your divert field? > Pilot: Oakland > Controller: Ok you need vectors to Oakland? > Pilot: No, my company forbids visual separation at night, what is the problem here? > Controller: I can't have this conversation with you. You either divert to Oakland or you can cont…

> This is tough for me to wrap my head around. It's pretty easy to explain: the controller took the pilot at his word, and immediately offered the fastest and safest option to get them on the ground, which was to land at Oakland. The runway thresholds at SFO and OAK are less than ten miles apart.

Exactly. ATC called his bluff and won.

Note the pilot was not willing to even dare to break his company rules and do a visual, so why should ATC break theirs?

Re: A Lufthansa A350's frustrating Oakland diversion

#234

Post by lmm »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #211
redtriumph wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Citation for Reagan comment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_Air_Traffic_Contr... .

The original "Thanks Regan" comment makes no sense to me. To be clear, President Regan fired all striking air traffic controllers in 1981. The same Wiki article says: > So that means, FAA had enough controllers by 1991. What does that incident have to do with today's shortage? Nothing. Deeper: I tried to Google why is there a shortage of air traffic controllers in the United States. The root cause appears unclear to…

> Does anyone know why EU / Japan / Korea does not have the same issues?

Because over there the job comes with a strong union and real job security?

Re: A Lufthansa A350's frustrating Oakland diversion

#235

Post by astrange »

I was just booking a flight through Lufthansa and was amused to see the English in all their emails/website is kind of bad, 2000s Japan-level.

Like "You are pre-ordering of the pretzel to eat on board of the aircraft? Then klick here!".

I get the impression Germans think they're great at English and so don't actually check to see if they are or not.

Re: A Lufthansa A350's frustrating Oakland diversion

#236

Post by blt »

throwup238 wrote: post #154
gumby wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they have a troublesome airport What is troublesome about SFO? I’m not a pilot (or in any way connected to flying except as a passenger) so airports are basically a black box to me.

There's a bunch of reasons but it's primarily the popularity of the airport combined with the runway layout and the noise abatement procedures all made worse by the Bay's weather. SFO has two pairs of parallel runways and the pairs are very close together, with the runways in the 28L/28R pair only 750 feet apart. That's really close for an A350 with a giant 200ft wingspan and the noise abatement prevents the use of a…

For comparison, at LAX the typical parallel landing runways 24R and 25L are around a mile (~5000 feet) apart.

Re: A Lufthansa A350's frustrating Oakland diversion

#237

Post by bombcar »

tomohawk wrote: post #77
perihelions wrote: post #66

There was a major airliner crash at JFK caused (partly) by poor communication between pilots and ATC, resulting in the plane running out of fuel, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avianca_Flight_052 (1990) https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/the-words-not-spoken-the... There was a similar fact pattern to the OP: the pilots relied on time estimates from ATC which turned out to be inaccurate, - "Due to the air traffic cont…

As a pilot, your first job is to fly the airplane, not listen to ATC. A family member was a commercial airline pilot for many decades, and had stories of having to declare an emergency when ATC direction conflicted with facts in the air. ATC would get pissed, but they're safely on the ground. Another family member was ATC, and so holiday dinners could be interesting.

Exactly. If the flight had been in real danger the pilot would have declared an emergency (and then had to answer to why didn’t he divert to Oakland).

But if you declare an emergency the first thing you may do is not insist on flying the ILS separation.

Re: A Lufthansa A350's frustrating Oakland diversion

#238

Post by filleduchaos »

ra7 wrote: post #192
FireBeyond wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why should ATC at a busy airport be so accommodating? Apropos of the other issues already being well debated: 1. ATCs role is to facilitate use of the airport. 2. They/the airport are being paid by Lufthansa to do so: ~$4,000 landing fee based on the OEW + 5% fuel being 340,000lb at $9.11/1000 lb. ~$800 for up to 8 hours at a gate (or a flat rate of $36,000/mo per aircraft for a frequently visiting ship). ~$1,000 f…

This is great information. Are these pricing details publicly available for airports?

Additionally, there's a whole laundry list of charges you can see on most international flight tickets. For example on my last flight ticket from Nigeria (my country of residence) to the US with United, there are Nigeria-specific sales taxes and airport service charge fees listed as well as two separate US Customs and Immigrations fees, a "September 11th Security fee", and a US transportation tax.

Re: A Lufthansa A350's frustrating Oakland diversion

#239

Post by bombcar »

epolanski wrote: post #133
StopHammoTime wrote: post #100

Just a clarifier for everyone - a fuel emergency is not what you think it is. They don’t run until the last drop. While it indicates the aircraft should be handled without delay, it’s also not going to fall out of the sky immediately either. A fuel emergency would never be severe enough that they would be forced to land at SFO in this situation. In fact, if they were truly forced to land the pilots would lose their j…

A fuel malfunction does not lead to a mayday, there's a PAN PAN first.

Depending on the issue and the pilots they can go straight to mayday, but that’s likely to to be “fuel is low because one wing is empty and the other is draining.”

Re: A Lufthansa A350's frustrating Oakland diversion

#240

Post by dilyevsky »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #217
danielschonfeld wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

American Airlines (at JFK) proved you can call emergency just because you feel like it with no repercussion. And really the pilot in command is the one in control. For the attitude that controller had he should have declared an emergency and told him what he was going to do and have him clear all airplanes around them. Bullying attitude don’t belong in a game with 500mph (~300mph in this case) objects. If you’re goin…

You wrote: > Can you provide a flight number and date? I would like to learn more.

AA2 on May 5, 2010
Post reply on HN