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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
by ralph84 3y ago
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.
- perihelions 3y ago- "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 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://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Canada_Flight_759 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14741605 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18071966 ("Abstract of the NTSB Report on Air Canada flight 759's taxiway overflight at SFO", 127 comments)
- MBCook 3y agoI think that same sentence with “allowed” swapped for “prepared” is what the GP meant. It seems very clear from the transcript that the pilots are just working with a stupid rule, not that they are incapable of actually doing it. A pilot who could only land with the help of ILS couldn’t possibly be assigned to a transcontinental flight that lands in the evening right?
- r053bud 3y agoA pilot who could only land with the help of ILS doesn’t get their commercial license.
- rmk 3y agoAirline pilots can lose their jobs if they do not follow the airline's SOP (Standard Operating Procedure). SFO controllers have gotten a shitty rep, with good reason, it appears. This wouldn't have happened at any of the other many busy airports in the US. This seemed to be the majority opinion on a couple other forums where this has been discussed.
- pdonis 3y ago> This wouldn't have happened at any of the other many busy airports in the US. I'm not aware of any other busy airport in the US that has the same parallel runway situation SFO has, with two parallel runways only 750 feet apart both doing landings. Plenty of other large US airports have parallel runways, but they're further apart and they're staggered between landings and takeoffs.
- whycome 3y agoCan you link me to some of those forums?
- the_mitsuhiko 3y agopprune and reddit discussed it at length.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ralph84 3y agoSure, 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 only direct routings with straight-in approaches.
- filleduchaos 3y agoDescribing this as "barging in" is rather strange to me. The aviation industry is neither a charity nor the average software engineering shop; not only is air traffic control something that airlines pay for, this is far from the first or the last time that Lufthansa will fly into SFO.
- leodag 3y agoNow I am confused - I have no actual knowledge on this but on the post there is a comment from an experienced pilot saying the opposite: > [...] But IMO ATC was absolutely not doing what they are supposed to do. Air traffic control is literally a service provided to and paid for by the airlines.
- filleduchaos 3y ago...how is that the opposite of what I said?
- mixdup 3y agoThey didn't "barge in" or expect any priority. They arrived just like everyone else. As a matter of fact, they travelled farther than probably most arrivals that day so ATC had much more warning they were approaching than, say, a flight from Denver or Atlanta
- pdonis 3y ago> 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 information might be filed with the flight plan, which if true would put more of the onus on ATC.)
- david422 3y agoI dunno. If everyone is doing 75 on the freeway, "safest" might be 65, but you can also create more unsafe conditions by not matching the speed of all the other traffic.
- freeopinion 3y agoThis is a very popular argument. I run into it a lot. I have been criticized for following the speed limit when there were six vehicles spaced across five kilometers. It seems I am expected to speed up to match the one vehicle that passed me. If nobody obeys the speed limit and it is in fact safer to exceed the speed limit, why do we have speed limits? Why does the government make it illegal to do the safest thing? And why does the public put up with it? Why is there no MADD-like organization protesting the insane government policies that put everybody at risk? I don't have any data to show that 65 is safer than 75, or to show that 75 is safer than 65. I don't know if speed limits are based on any real safety data. But I'm pretty sure that your rationalization is not. This is my little (misguided) campaign to combat that argument. Even if 95% of the population embrace it as a plausible excuse for breaking rules and to malign rule-keepers.
- david422 3y agoIt's literally the premise of the article though. One airplane not matching the other traffic creates a larger problem.
- tass 3y agoThe air Canada issue can still be mitigated, even on a visual approach, by programming the plane for the runway’s instrument approach (ILS or otherwise) assuming one is available. Many pilots do this, and you don’t need a special ILS clearance or its corresponding separation to do so.
- addicted 3y agoThe person you’re commenting to is missing the context you’ve provided, which is the U.S. has seen an incredible number of near misses this past year. The ATC situation in the U.S. is dire. It would be insane for an airline to reduce their safety standards especially in the U.S. right now.
- ExoticPearTree 3y agoYou are right to a certain point, but all you are required is to follow the airplane in front of you and land. It's a dumb simple requirement. If it was such a big issue, FAA would have put a stop to it at SFO, but just because one Air Canada flight tried to land on the taxiway does not make it a safety critical issue. Mistakes happen all the time. Asking for an airport to break its arrival sequence because your airline has a different policy than the airport is bonkers.
- briandear 3y agoThe FAA deviating from ICAO standards for visual approaches is more bonkers.
- freeopinion 3y agoYes, mistakes happen all the time. One aspect of the aviation industry that I have always noted is the reluctance to adopt this as an excuse for failure. When a pilot pushes Button X instead of Button Y, it isn't just chalked up to pilot error. Somebody asks why Button X and Button Y are arranged right next to each other to begin with. Why was a situation created in which "pilot error" becomes so easy? Then things are changed so that such pilot error becomes harder and less likely. It's an admirable thing when somebody has to go out of their way and go through some contortions to make critical mistakes.
- notwhereyouare 3y ago"The flight was initially supposed to leave Munich at 4:20PM, but only departed at 6:30PM The flight was supposed to arrive in San Francisco at 7PM, but ended up landing in Oakland at 9:43PM, after a 12hr13min flight" Don't think they intended to arrive at the busiest time
- briandear 3y agoCommercial pilot here. The Lufthansa prohibition on night visuals isn’t a new thing. Proper flow control when that airplane entered US airspace could have ensured correct spacing long before the aircraft entered ZOA (Oakland ARTCC) airspace. That NorCal approach expected to give the Lufthansa a night visual is puzzling because anyone that has worked in an approach control at night would know that it’s common for many operators especially biz jet operators and Lufthansa to have a operational prohibition on night visuals (many operators also have prohibitions on night circling approaches, but these aren’t common in large airliner airports.) Flow Control is also part of the problem: they knew that aircraft was en route many hours before, they should have sequenced the airplane correctly. But this is also a result of staffing and priorities at the FAA. Buttigeg is essentially incompetent. A small town mayor of debatable accomplishment in even getting road potholes repaired being elevated to lead the U.S. Dept of Transportation was mind-blowing. If he deserved any cabinet role, HUD would have been the closest fit, but we all know that all presidents have a tendency to appoint people as political favors rather than subject-matter excellence. Ask controllers and pilots who have been in this business for more than a few years and the giant belly-flop of the FAA is profound. Controllers are far less experienced and greatly overworked than they were pre-2020. And interestingly, the FAA does not follow ICAO rules for visual approaches — the international standard requires consent of both the pilot and ATC — it’s not something that ATC initiates unilaterally. For those interested, here is a helpful document on the consequences of the FAA/ICAO differences: https://ops.group/blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/21atsbl04-visual-approach-considerations-in-the-usa.pdf https://ops.group/blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/21atsbl04-... And here is an article that is significantly more informed on this incident than some frequent flyer blog written by backseaters rather than aviation professionals: https://ops.group/blog/us-visual-approaches-lh458/ https://ops.group/blog/us-visual-approaches-lh458/