Seems like Lufthansa has decided it's not able to land planes at SFO at night.
They decided that they don't want to be part of preventable accident.
A Lufthansa A350's frustrating Oakland diversion
311–320 of 413 posts
Re: A Lufthansa A350's frustrating Oakland diversion
#312Earlier quoted context omitted.
The FAA (and specifically Transport Secretary Buttigieg) hold all the cards here. That they're not doing more to address the issues speaks volumes about the FAA's mission and abrogation of it.
Do they? Congress holds the purse strings, and that seems to be a BIG part of the issue. There aren’t enough controllers (possibly budget). The ones who are are horribly overworked and it’s an ultra-high stress job. Between that and pay they can’t recruit more to ease the burden. But the existing ones are burning out, making things worse. Maybe better equipment could lessen the load, but that’s big money too. Is ther…
This is just another instance of the long set of Shittification and Shrinkflation happening everywhere, brought about by us holding our collective heads in the sand over the real rate of inflation. I'd bet it's a lot more than the official numbers.
Re: A Lufthansa A350's frustrating Oakland diversion
#313Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Asiana 214 crashed (in broad daylight and perfect visibility) because Asiana pilots were overused to landing on the autopilot, which was off on this landing; also because they ignored the "sink rate" warning going off for a minute. Not because landing at SFO is particularly dangerous. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asiana_Airlines_Flight_214#Cra...
This is a bit simplified. See https://youtu.be/Toy92_qriZU?feature=shared
Re: A Lufthansa A350's frustrating Oakland diversion
#314Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Let's keep in mind that SFOs "standard operations" is purely economical, it's about making more landings so the airport earns more money. Now you might be happy to compromise your safety so others can earn more money, I think many others are not. 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 way…
He would be in the wrong to wait and then declare a fuel emergency. He’s supposed to divert once he reaches a certain level. Only if he then had some problem diverting would declaring a fuel emergency become a real option.
Re: A Lufthansa A350's frustrating Oakland diversion
#315Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They arrived just like everyone else. As I understand the sequence of events, the flight crew informed ATC that they couldn't execute a visual approach...when ATC cleared them for a visual approach. If they really couldn't do a visual approach due to company policy, one would think they would inform ATC of this earlier, to at least give some time to try to accommodate them. (Other commenters have said that this inf…
Does ATC know your flight plan? My recollection from the Channel 9 days was that pilots requested whatever landing clearance they wanted when they pinged the appropriate ATC, but I’m neither a pilot nor ATC, so don’t know if there were processes I wasn’t seeing.
ATC knows the flight plan, but in the US (as opposed to Europe) the last few steps to the ground are generally not filed as part of the flight plan, but are negotiated when closer to landing. There are pros and cons of this, of course.
Re: A Lufthansa A350's frustrating Oakland diversion
#316There's a follow up video to the one linked in the story that provides a lot more context missing in this piece. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zHxdn8oz20 Basically, SFO normally does VFR parallel approaches at night. Approach sequences these approaches miles beforehand, so there can be a chain of 10-20 aircraft all sequenced to land before responsibility is even transferred to SFO's tower. The incident happened du…
A small nitpick: the other aircraft were doing _visual_ approaches, not VFR approaches. A visual approach is a type of instrument approach operated under IFR regulations. Practically, this has no affect on your comment. Just pointing this out in case its interesting to you or others (if you didn't know this already).
Does this mean controllers still have a responsibility of separating aircraft under a visual approach? (A comment in a sibling thread mentioned that Lufthansa pilots are allowed visual approaches, but are not allowed to be responsible for visual separation at night.)
Edit: sounds like visual approach means ATC do not have responsibility for separation. I thought the entire point of IFR (which – according to you – visual approach falls under) was that ATC is responsible for separation!
Re: A Lufthansa A350's frustrating Oakland diversion
#317Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the FAA leadership is ultimately in the wrong for allowing their area of responsibility to deteriorate to the point where a controller and a pilot were put in this situation. They have a controller shortage that they are not doing enough to fix, and they have a troublesome airport with limited capacity to accommodate traffic, that they are being too bureaucratic about fixing. The controllers at SFO have used…
There are plenty of well-qualified applicants to be air traffic controllers, but they were born White or Asian and the Government is illegally reserving the jobs for favored ethnicities. https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/08/16/faa-should-rely-on-ab...
How is it that it is unreasonable to expect meritocratic process when selecting people for life or death situations?
Re: A Lufthansa A350's frustrating Oakland diversion
#318Earlier quoted context omitted.
The FAA (and specifically Transport Secretary Buttigieg) hold all the cards here. That they're not doing more to address the issues speaks volumes about the FAA's mission and abrogation of it.
Aye. Increasing taxes is basically the only way to ensure the system is funded sufficiently to: (1) hire enough people to perform the ops (2) hire enough people to update and modernize the policy Any other solution that doesn't emphasize building up the human capital is easy to argue against, IMO. You simply cannot draw from an empty well, and you really really don't want text GPTs attempting to land you no matter ho…
Why are taxes paying for ATCs at all? The airports/airlines should be footing the entire bill
Re: A Lufthansa A350's frustrating Oakland diversion
#319Earlier 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…
In order to drive this point—What kind of arbitrary safety policies are ATCs to expect and service?
If there are 200 airlines landing at SFO, you surely cannot expect ATC to make exceptions and argue about this or that. We need upfront, transparent and written procedures and policies.
Luthansa should notify SFO of their requirements before departing. SFO would have the right to reject their "safety" policy. And we wouldn't have this sticky situation.
Re: A Lufthansa A350's frustrating Oakland diversion
#320Earlier quoted context omitted.
FAA is completely asleep at the wheel in most areas it governs. Youtube is filled with ATC simply refusing to do their jobs, and under no circumstances should exchanges like this should be allowed to happen. There's an ATC shortage, but so what? There's an even larger shortage of safety which needs to be addressed, and FAA are doing nothing at all.
The FAA budget in 2016 was $15.8B. In 2023 dollars, this is equivalent to about $20B. The current budget is $18.6ish.
Mostly going to inadequate and incompetent new hires. We're not selecting based on merit and competence.
We make a big deal out of interview process in Software engineering. But when it comes to critical life/death situation jobs, we don't.