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A Lufthansa A350's frustrating Oakland diversion

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Re: A Lufthansa A350's frustrating Oakland diversion

#321

Post by ho_schi »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #213
ho_schi wrote: post #156

This is not a special Lufthansa thing. The majority of airlines from Europe limit visual approaches to daylight. 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. Takin…

Nice post. This part: > This sounds reasonable to me as a safety precaution. I tried Googling, but I couldn't find anything. How do you know this information?

https://youtu.be/qNtDdmq-b5M?si=hoMslBXthGoj9YZU

09:50

    It is not Lufthansa specific and applies also for many other airlines.
Quote

German pilot working for Condor. Sadly there are no closed-captions in English available.

https://aviation.stackexchange.com/a/47652

    In Europe it is quite common for airline companies to only allow their aircrews visual approaches at their home bases (e.g. Amsterdam for KLM) or, in case the company uses several hubs, on those hubs.
Quote

I anssume access to the individual company procedures isn’t possible.

Re: A Lufthansa A350's frustrating Oakland diversion

#322

Post by RamblingCTO »

thriftwy wrote: post #101
koyote wrote: post #89

Earlier 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.

Pilots are not going to be accustomized of visual landings in case of emergency, if you have a corporate policy that forbids them in controlled setting! This one is bizzare, not only European pilots on average have less experience than US ones, but they are not allowed to gain experience by corporate policy. (This one coming from a country where aviation is a big mess)

Visual landings are only disallowed at night. Get your facts straight.

Re: A Lufthansa A350's frustrating Oakland diversion

#323

Post by thriftwy »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #214
thriftwy wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pilots are not going to be accustomized of visual landings in case of emergency, if you have a corporate policy that forbids them in controlled setting! This one is bizzare, not only European pilots on average have less experience than US ones, but they are not allowed to gain experience by corporate policy. (This one coming from a country where aviation is a big mess)

You wrote: > Can you provide more details?

Russia - a history of crashes caused by rapid growth and weird aircraft park, followed by the war where the whole industry is now out of international law.

Re: A Lufthansa A350's frustrating Oakland diversion

#324

Post by epse »

toast0 wrote: post #149
KennyBlanken wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Are controllers expected to manage the details of the take off and landing queues and also expected to be be looking quite a bit upstream to see what's coming up and check the details of the flight and company policies? I suspect the controller assumed this flight would use visual separation, like everyone else, when it entered the landing queue; and the pilot expected to use ILS, like everywhere else given the condi…

> Are controllers expected to....

Yes. Yes they are

Now granted there is usually a second planner controller that does not talk to traffic but is responsible for looking ahead, perhaps that was affected by the shortage

Re: A Lufthansa A350's frustrating Oakland diversion

#325

Post by thriftwy »

RamblingCTO wrote: post #322
thriftwy wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pilots are not going to be accustomized of visual landings in case of emergency, if you have a corporate policy that forbids them in controlled setting! This one is bizzare, not only European pilots on average have less experience than US ones, but they are not allowed to gain experience by corporate policy. (This one coming from a country where aviation is a big mess)

Visual landings are only disallowed at night. Get your facts straight.

What if they have to do one in emergency scenario, and they only ever did this in daylight?

Re: A Lufthansa A350's frustrating Oakland diversion

#326

Post by jcalvinowens »

RamblingCTO wrote: post #322
thriftwy wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pilots are not going to be accustomized of visual landings in case of emergency, if you have a corporate policy that forbids them in controlled setting! This one is bizzare, not only European pilots on average have less experience than US ones, but they are not allowed to gain experience by corporate policy. (This one coming from a country where aviation is a big mess)

Visual landings are only disallowed at night. Get your facts straight.

>> Pilots are not going to be accustomized of visual landings in case of emergency

> Visual landings are only disallowed at night

I don't agree with the rest of what he said... but he actually has a valid point here. Emergencies happen at night too, and sometimes the nature of the emergency will make an instrument approach impossible.

Re: A Lufthansa A350's frustrating Oakland diversion

#327

Post by epse »

lxgr wrote: post #163
toast0 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had flights that were delayed, and then during the start of the boarding process, we had to stop and switch to a different aircraft, because the delay meant we'd be too loud for the noise curfew when we arrived, so we needed to take a quieter plane. That was a domestic flight into a small airport (LGB), but I imagine there's something to manage total flight volume in general; there's certainly exception handling…

That’s a static rule that the pilots can (and have to) comply with based on information available to them, though. I wonder if an updated (international) flight plan is checked for projected congestion levels (based on other flight plans?) at all and can be declined for that reason?

The flightplans get shared and updated with every involved area. Usually those can say no ahead of time and always at the time of airspace entry (entering US airspace for example) What checks the FAA does to those plans, I doubt we'll ever know

Re: A Lufthansa A350's frustrating Oakland diversion

#328

Post by dmurray »

cycomanic wrote: post #256
ralph84 wrote: post #178

Earlier 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…

> 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 seems bizarre to blame the airport for being profit seeking for having two runways and wanting to use them both to their maximum safe capacity. You might as well blame Lufthansa for the same thing - if they only operated one airliner, this issue would likely never have come up.

Re: A Lufthansa A350's frustrating Oakland diversion

#329

Post by dmitris »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #279
krisoft wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So this controller, knowing the plane was near a fuel emergency, gave the pilots the option to either crash their plane with 240 people on board, or to divert to Oakland. Oh please. Fuel emergency is not when the plane falls out of the sky. It is calculated as when the airplane has just enough fuel to go to the alternate airport plus multiple landing attempts there plus navigational reserve in case you get lost on…

Being too polite crashed a plane that got diverted many times and run out of fuel (was on the cloudberg site). I think it may have been coming from Colombia IIRC. But that is super rare. They kept asking for “Priority” but never said “Emergency” or “Mayday” or “Pan Pan”

Avianca Flight 052 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avianca_Flight_052 (mentioned above in the comments)

Re: A Lufthansa A350's frustrating Oakland diversion

#330

Post by kqr »

ww520 wrote: post #191
lsh123 wrote: post #128

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…

Yes. I got the feeling that the pilot was playing the cry-wolf game with the threat of declaring fuel emergency. ATC then responded with, ok, divert. It’s a case of FAFO.

I can definitely see it both ways. When I imagine myself as a pilot who has been on spacing/holding vectors for 30+ minutes with repeated delays and no sign of even trying to slot me in, I may very well also have fallen for the temptation of informing ATC of the upcoming fuel issue in a sarcastic way. Still unprofessional, of course, but in a different context the exact same words could be taken as a lighthearted reminder rather than a threat. (And for all my stereotypes about Germans, it may very well have been a failed attempt at humour in a strained situation.)

But yeah, from that point on ATC did seem very professional to me.

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