251–260 of 413 posts
I find it fascinating that pilots and ATC from around the world can understand each other on such a poor resolution channel.
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Pilot was bluffing. If they call an emergency, they can do whatever they want. But they can't just call a fuel emergency if they have enough fuel to divert to a viable alternate - that's not how the system is supposed to work. They're supposed to divert if they get close to minimum fuel and can't land at their primary airport. Of course, if it's a real emergency they can call any emergency (weather at alternate preve…
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…
I don't think it's that simple. In the AA case you refer to, the pilot was concerned about the high crosswind on the runway ATC wanted him to land on, so he declared an emergency so he could land on a safer runway. Crosswind landings are dicey at the best of times, and I suspect that if the AA pilot didn't get any repercussions it was because in that situation his action was considered a reasonable judgment call. Yes, technically it wasn't an "emergency" since nothing was wrong with the plane, but it was in the sense that the pilot did not think he could safely land on the runway ATC wanted him to land on, so it was a safety issue.
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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 clou…
it's not that the ILS wasn't available, it's that the atis would've said
"VISUAL APPROACH, RUNWAY 28L 28R IN USE"
and the lufthansa crew would say, "huh, we need something different than that". in aviation if you want something non standard, you need to let air traffic know so they can put you in their plan. If you don't tell them different, they're going to plan for you to do what's being advertised.
> What was SFO going to do if it clouded over, close the airport?
then SFO would've advertised the ILS (checks atis) like they're doing right now ...
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No, Lufthansa should not be dispatching flights to arrive at SFO at the busiest time of night if their pilots aren’t prepared to do the approaches everyone else is doing. This isn’t a foreign vs. domestic carrier thing. British Airways, Air India, EVA, etc. etc. all have pilots prepared to execute night visual approaches and do so every night at SFO.
"The flight was initially supposed to leave Munich at 4:20PM, but only departed at 6:30PM The flight was supposed to arrive in San Francisco at 7PM, but ended up landing in Oakland at 9:43PM, after a 12hr13min flight" Don't think they intended to arrive at the busiest time
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- "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…
It's also not like SFO doesn't have other LH flights arriving who all have the exact same rules, so it could've hardly come as a surprise.
Finally, the pilot was in some ways quite considerate. He could have just waited and declared a fuel emergency that would have really screwed things up for ATC.
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My framing here is literally based on the transcript of the conversation between the pilot and ATC. Its pilots were following a mandatory company safety policy. This is not true, because if it was true the pilot would already have diverted to Oakland per "mandatory" company "safety" policy when he was first told that they would not be able to accommodate his non-standard request to disrupt the twenty plus planes that…
> first told that they would not be able to accommodate his non-standard request Now you are just making things up. Please go take a chill pill and stop spreading misinformation. Edit: You may not be aware of the international differences in views on visual approaches. Requesting ILS is far from the "silly request" you seem to be trying to mock. This doesn't mean that ATC was wrong to make the decisions that they did…
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> 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 clou…
> How are they supposed to know that an ILS approach - a completely routine procedure - is not available? it's not that the ILS wasn't available, it's that the atis would've said "VISUAL APPROACH, RUNWAY 28L 28R IN USE" and the lufthansa crew would say, "huh, we need something different than that". in aviation if you want something non standard, you need to let air traffic know so they can put you in their plan. If y…
So they should have, what, called them when they were back over the east coast? Genuine question. They filed the flight plan, they requested the approach they needed when they got there (which again, is a completely routine one that SFO uses every week), it sounds like they were sending all the communication that's expected?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 clou…
> What was SFO going to do if it clouded over, close the airport? No, land planes at a slower rate (about half) because they can no longer land two planes side by side on the parallel runways. On a day when the weather is known to be cloudy and that is factored in up front, that's not a huge problem. On a day when the weather is clear and planes are landing at the higher rate, it is a huge problem.
> On a day when the weather is clear and planes are landing at the higher rate, it is a huge problem.
But it can get cloudy any time in SF. So suddenly needing to switch over to ILS operations should be something they're set up to handle pretty routinely.
Maybe the reason why Lufthansa does not allow visual approach at SFO at night, could be after the Air Canada near miss. > The NTSB determined the probable cause was the Air Canada flight crew's confusion of the runway with the parallel taxiway, with contributing causes including the crew's failure to use the instrument landing system (ILS), as well as pilot fatigue. FAA changed the rules for SFO and made visual appro…
There's also this crash that happened while ILS was broken: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asiana_Airlines_Flight_214 This was ultimately pilot error but also due to the fact that the pilots were not as accustomed to doing visual landings.
Not because landing at SFO is particularly dangerous.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asiana_Airlines_Flight_214#Cra...