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A Lufthansa A350's frustrating Oakland diversion

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Re: A Lufthansa A350's frustrating Oakland diversion

#391

Post by jquery »

filleduchaos wrote: post #390
jquery wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"if we are not set up for base soon, we will have to declare fuel emergency and that would really ** up your sequence" - pilot That is 100% out of line. But the ATC handled it super professionally and offered them vectors to their alternate. The article suggests that ATC should've let the pilots declare a fuel emergency instead?

I...don't see how that is "100% out of line". Again I am very confused by the sentiment here - unless you are ignoring how much time the Lufthansa bird actually spent on hold (34 minutes before the statement you're quoting) and/or the regulations on (as well as the physical reality of) fuel consumption, jumping to the conclusion that the Lufthansa pilot is bluffing is very strange. On top of that, the idea that the c…

It was a bluff because either you're in a fuel emergency, or you aren't. He was trying to scare the ATC worker hoping they'd panic and slot him in to "avoid" the emergency. But that's not how any of it works. That's why it was a bluff.

The ATC being 4 minutes "late" for a callback during the busiest landing time does not mean the plane was "forgotten". 34 minutes is not very long to spend on hold, planes carry hours worth of reserve fuel. And estimates are just estimates, not a promise (like the article framed it as).

Honestly this is akin to someone showing up to the most popular restaurant in New York 2 hours late for their reservation, asking for a VIP room, then getting huffy when they don't have a VIP room within 30 minutes and then being angry they were offered a seat at the restaurant next door. (apparently the pilot, on the PA to passengers, was talking about taking legal action against ATC on the way to Oakland... ridiculous...)

Re: A Lufthansa A350's frustrating Oakland diversion

#392

Post by p_l »

lxgr wrote: post #290
p_l wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do not train with passengers on board, period.

It can absolutely make sense to "train" with passengers on board. Automation complacency or simply being out of practice can have significant repercussions in emergencies. Consider a task where humans have a marginally higher error rate than the autopilot. Obviously, per task, the safe thing to do is to let the autopilot fly. But now consider a more difficult scenario where the autopilot just bails out, e.g. due to I…

Some of it might be terminology issue.

For me, a training flight is a flight that is written with appropriate "exercise" number into logbook and is part of the official training program. These days most airlines do those on simulators, and they will include "rarer" operations like rarely used approaches (2xNDB instead of ILS, how to fly DME arc approach, etc), instrument failures, and so on.

You do not do such flights with passengers, because you're intentionally lowering the safety level.

In addition to that, there's a recommendation to randomly, given safe conditions, do regular manual operations. Mind you, those SOPs probably explicitly say "do not experiment after long haul flight".

I might have been a bit more cross because people have died (including in ways that impacted me) because of organizations that mixed "training" and "passenger" flights.

Re: A Lufthansa A350's frustrating Oakland diversion

#393

Post by p_l »

YPPH wrote: post #288
p_l wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do not train with passengers on board, period.

A pilot's 'flight hours' is regarded as a key measure of their experience. If a pilot only ever trained visual approaches in sim, and not the real world accounting for the overwhelming majority of their flight experience, that number would be meaningless.

"Experience building" by flight hours (and in properly managed organizations, regular "manual" flying) is not the same as "training", at least in local vocabulary as used by my flight instructors and other people I know in aviation.

Thus somewhat mixed reading of what I wrote earlier. Was obvious to me, from responses wasn't obvious to others.

Re: A Lufthansa A350's frustrating Oakland diversion

#394

Post by kccqzy »

stevage wrote: post #335
KennyBlanken wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a safety issue when the plane is getting low on fuel and the crew are fatigued from a long international flight, and the only reason they're being told no is because of policies designed to maximize airport/airline profits. Controllers had hours of notice the flight would need an ILS approach. They petulantly ignored it because ILS approaches take up more space in the pattern, which means less landings per hour,…

>They petulantly ignored it because ILS approaches take up more space in the pattern, which means less landings per hour, which means less profit for the airport operator. Can you explain this? Do planes have choices over where to land once in the air? If not, all the landings needed to happen, so why does delaying some by a few minutes affect the total income for the airport on that evening? I'm just questioning how…

The total number of landings is not fixed. If landings can be more frequent, airlines will schedule more landings so they are more frequent. Just like adding lanes to a highway induces more cars to travel on the highway.

Re: A Lufthansa A350's frustrating Oakland diversion

#395

Post by stevage »

kccqzy wrote: post #394
stevage wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>They petulantly ignored it because ILS approaches take up more space in the pattern, which means less landings per hour, which means less profit for the airport operator. Can you explain this? Do planes have choices over where to land once in the air? If not, all the landings needed to happen, so why does delaying some by a few minutes affect the total income for the airport on that evening? I'm just questioning how…

The total number of landings is not fixed. If landings can be more frequent, airlines will schedule more landings so they are more frequent. Just like adding lanes to a highway induces more cars to travel on the highway.

I'm talking about the the situation on a given day when the planes are already in the air. All those scheduled flights are presumably going to end up landing at that airport and paying the agreed fee, no?

Re: A Lufthansa A350's frustrating Oakland diversion

#396

Post by jquery »

YPPH wrote: post #285
Hansenq wrote: post #29

There'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…

>It's not clear who's in the wrong here; just an unintended consequence from many well-intentioned decisions. Attention should be given not just to what was said, but how it was said. It is obvious the controller was frustrated. It conveys the impression that at least part of his decision-making was influenced by spite and not good intentions.

The controller was frustrated? I didn't detect that at all. I only detected frustration by the pilot when he started swearing and making threats.

Re: A Lufthansa A350's frustrating Oakland diversion

#397

Post by jquery »

ExoticPearTree wrote: post #342
Hansenq wrote: post #29

There'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…

I listened to the first YT video from VASAviation and then the followup video that is very long with a lot of explanations. I think Lufthansa was in the wrong here: - they knew SFO does visual parallel landings, and ILS is provided if able and it does not interrupt the flow of planes - pilots attitude was not very professional and they started on the wrong foot with "you told us 10 minutes that ended 4 minutes ago" -…

I don't understand why what seems like such obvious common-sense about this flight is so controversial. Is it the lack of deference ATC gave the pilots, treating them like equals instead of superiors?

Re: A Lufthansa A350's frustrating Oakland diversion

#398

Post by mjevans »

Analemma_ wrote: post #81
mjevans wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised a computer assisted landing sequence can't _increase_ the rate of landed planes, though I assume doing so would require subordinating all the inbound aircraft to the local traffic control system.

The problem with having computer separation be less than pilot separation is, what happens if the computers fail and the pilots have to take over? Then they're suddenly in a situation where they're already below whatever the minimum safe pilot separation is, and now you've potentially turned a recoverable failure into an unrecoverable one. If the whole point of having pilots is to be backups for the computers, the co…

'go around' but with different registered abort vectors / plans.

Also if any unit within the stack falls out of automatic mode the entire chain gets cleared; if there's sufficient window for the pilots to declare emergency manual landing they can maintain the path as everything else aborts and the failed unit lands.

Re: A Lufthansa A350's frustrating Oakland diversion

#399

Post by refurb »

lmm wrote: post #389
refurb wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like the pilots of Singapore Airlines? In the words of Lee Kuan Yew… “I gave them a choice. Continue this and I will by every means at my disposal teach you and get the people of Singapore to help me teach you a lesson you won't forget. Took them 65 minutes and they decided ok it isn't worth the fight. Why? Because they know they'll lose. They know that I'm prepared to ground the airline. They know that I can get the…

Singapore is not a representative example of... anything, honestly. Certainly not of "EU / Japan / Korea" which was the original question. So I have no idea what you're getting at.

Singapore is not unique when it comes to interactions with unions. Check out out the violent union protests in Korea or Japan.

Re: A Lufthansa A350's frustrating Oakland diversion

#400

Post by p3n1s »

ExoticPearTree wrote: post #354
p3n1s wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aerodrome traffic circuit is the ICAO term for traffic pattern, which is it what it is called in the US (it may be in the glossary but the point is that manual uses "traffic pattern" repeatedly). And this "traffic circuit" you refer to is almost always a VFR thing, as IFR approaches use specific charted procedures that generally do not end with a traffic circuit. https://skybrary.aero/articles/aerodrome-traffic-circu…

Aerodrome traffic pattern is completely different from holding patterns. And this is what LH was instructed to do, keep holding. Holding patterns are published for all airports and usually planes are stacked on those holding patterns and they are emptied FIFO style. Busier airports have multiple holding patterns to accommodate a large number of aircraft in case of on ground emergencies.

Sure, but GP stated wrt traffic patterns, "This is independent of whether the approach is IFR or VFR." which is not the case. For IFR, as was the case here, the LH was looking to execute an IFR approach, not ever enter the aerodrome traffic circuit.
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