151–160 of 413 posts
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Arrived on time? They left hours late from the departing airport.
Flight plans get updated when plans are delayed on takeoff. SFO should have had the arrival time from the updated flight plan for quite a while.
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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…
This is right on point. This issue is squarely on the FAA and they need to provide better guidance to controllers and pilot. Great comment.
Certainly, the FAA is a contributing factor through wages and working conditions leading to controller shortages, but airlines can also do more to better accommodate pilots.
This is a system headed to failure, with those responsible not making responsible choices and who won’t be held accountable when failure occurs (hundreds of passenger air transport deaths).
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…
You're leaving out that they had a filed flight plan which for an international flight means controllers had many hours of notice as to when the flight was scheduled to arrive and that they would be looking for an ILS approach and it was the responsibility of approach controllers to have a spot in the pattern for them. They arrived in the area on time, and controllers had not allocated it a spot, which is why the pil…
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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…
> 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.
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 standard step down approach where the pilots have much better visibility.
Earlier 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…
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.
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 kind of thing. (Unless the inflexibility creates new forms of safety issues, in which case I have no idea).
Also, I'm mindful there was a recent near-disaster at SFO with exactly the issue this Lufthansa policy mitigates: a non-ILS landing attempt at night, which attempted the wrong runway due to confusion over visual markers,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Canada_Flight_759
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14741605 ("SFO near miss might have triggered ‘greatest aviation disaster in history’", 414 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18071966 ("Abstract of the NTSB Report on Air Canada flight 759's taxiway overflight at SFO", 127 comments)
It does not apply to their home base, which is Frankfurt and Munich. The pilots are familiar with these airports, traffic patterns and so on.
Lufthansa tries to schedule outbound flights so that they arrive at daytime - if possible.
I don’t know why the controller was handling the situation that way. Taking flight duration and delay into account that was uncomfortable for the crew and passengers. And a waste of fuel. Mind the necessary repositioning of the plane, they had to move it to SFO later anyway.
I think it is tough when people discuss your work in public. And I’m not involved and lack knowledge! I hope the involved people learn and improve. We are all humans and make mistakes and/or misbehave. I have a lot to improve.
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> 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…
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They normally do- this flight left MUC two hours late which was why it was part of the VFR landing sequence on this one day and is not normally a problem.
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."
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You know I thought you were right but apparently for that day sunset was 6:30PM. https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/san-francisco?month=10
Sure, but my point is that this flight arriving in darkness is not something they never would have considered when planning the route and setting company policies prohibiting visual approaches at night.
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This is right on point. This issue is squarely on the FAA and they need to provide better guidance to controllers and pilot. Great comment.
Pilots and controllers who are already in short supply? That’s the problem, the individual actors are helpless in a system optimized against them. Certainly, the FAA is a contributing factor through wages and working conditions leading to controller shortages, but airlines can also do more to better accommodate pilots. This is a system headed to failure, with those responsible not making responsible choices and who w…