361–370 of 413 posts
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This flight came from Germany. They had hours of notice to find it an ILS slot in the pattern.
That’s not how ATC works. First come, first served.
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And the flight is twelve hours, with a filed flight plan. None of the controllers were even on-shift when SFO knew they'd need to have an ILS slot for the flight. That's why the pilot is exasperated when he finds out there isn't one. It's like calling a year in advance for a dinner reservation and showing up and having to wait 45 minutes for your table "because it's a really busy night."
It’s not the ATCs job to get the plane down at the primary airport, on the pilot’s preferred schedule, in accordance with the airline’s policy of using ILS for landing at SFO at night. Any two would be a satisfactory outcome, and it sounds like the pilot could in fact have picked any two (well, it sounds like Lufthansa policy prohibited just getting in the VFR queue). Nobody was ever in danger and the worst case scen…
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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…
> American Airlines (at JFK) proved you can call emergency just because you feel like it with no repercussion. 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 g…
ATC was in the wrong here and the attitude displayed was neither called for nor professional.
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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…
An aggressive pilot that declares an emergency simply to avoid diverting won't be a pilot for long. The ATC did nothing wrong.
It’s also arguable that the diversion was the lesser safe course of action given his location.
I had a lufthansa flight cancelled due to company policy of how long you could sit on the tarmac. They had an instrument go bad, had a spare on hand but couldn't find it in time. Flight got cancelled and I got rebooked for 4 days later. Which was after my business trip so I cancelled. I'm still waiting on my refund 3 months later. Everyone I speak to is nice, polite, agrees to refund me while saying but we'll have to…
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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.
I mean, it’s not? There was inflation. And instead of increasing the budget the FAA’s budget was reduced. At a time when the U.S. Is seeing record air travel. You don’t need conspuracies around real and fake inflation numbers to see how that doesn’t add up.
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> 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…
> 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. So they should have, what, called them when they were back over the east coast? Genuine question. They filed the flight plan, t…
In aviation, times are almost always estimates, not hard figures. Just like when the captain announces every 15 minutes there will be 15 minutes more delay, the same happens when controllers have other things to do, they route you over a holding pattern until they can deal with you.
And seriously, you don't delay 20-30 flights because one non emergency flight can't do visual approaches at night.
1/ Visual vs instrument approach. The main difference in this case is separation requirements that ATC must provide. Specifically, under IFR rules ATC mus provide 3 miles / 500 feet altitude separation minimum. For visual approaches, the separation is responsibility of the pilots and this enables parallel runway landings at SFO with much shorter intervals (there is a version of parallel landings with instrument appro…
The article and the video embedded within leave out a lot of context. The Norcal controller was extremely unprofessional. Their behavior is a great example of the US controller attitude™ US ATC is so infamous for. No idea why this unprofessionalism is so prevalent in the US; I can only presume it has to do with being overworked and understaffed, with perhaps a pinch of god complex. This was handled by Norcal, but SFO…
> What isn't reasonable is to hold Lufthansa for 30 minutes without any information or contact, then tack on another 10 minutes two more times.
Maybe because they had no available slots so nothing new to share with LH?
> And what especially isn't reasonable is to force them to divert to Oakland and say things like "this conversation is over" because your ego is bruised.
Well, LH threatened the controller with declaring a fuel emergency that would fuck up their sequence. I think the controller responded in kind.
> The NorCal controller was way out of line and with what passes for SOP in the US we're gonna have our own Tenerife disaster soon enough.
Somehow I don't think controllers care very much for company policies that they see as impeding their operations. It's not the first controller to do this to a plane if the captain objects to the instructions received from ATC in a busy airspace.
Speaking of: > On top of all that, PAL104 had received ILS just moments before without even asking for it (because it was in their flight plan).
Do you have PAL104 FP from that night? Because the longer video from VASAviation shows that PAL104 got an ILS clearance because there was a gap in traffic long enough to accommodate them.
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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…
I am usually the first to point out the cost of safety measures. But the increasing number of near-misses in the US suggests that it’s maybe not the time to brush off the risk.
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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…
> Let's keep in mind that SFOs "standard operations" is purely economical, it's about making more landings so the airport earns more money. Having more, and more regular, landings is also in the greater public interest, so long as you agree with air travel at all. If SFO changed their rules and could accommodate fewer landings, fewer people would get to travel to San Francisco and more of them would be delayed. It se…