I got my pilot's license in the Bay Area and transited SFO's class bravo frequently. The region has one of the world's most complex airspaces (a B, two Cs, and a crap-ton of Ds), and SFO has a mind-boggling amount of traffic for an airport of its size. Based on my lived experience in that airspace, I think ATC did the best they could in a tough position, and I think that Lufthansa asking for special treatment is the asshole move. If they demand ILS in VFR conditions, they should schedule their arrival times to less-busy times.
Lufthansa does what the FAA recommends and SFO had air canada almost landing on the taxiway because of the visual approach not too long ago. So calling it an asshole move is turning things around.
It's not punishment. The reason air travel is so safe is because every near-miss is root-caused and policies are put in place to prevent the same cause from resulting in a future accident.
I mean, yes. Every single time there’s an aviation incident there’s an extremely thorough investigation and generally a set of concrete recommendations to go along with it.
Pilots are human, automated systems fail, and the goal is to maximize safety because these fuckups mean that 200-300 people on a single plane might die (or more if a plane crashes into another or into a populated area) and these safety regulations have saved a lot of lives.
ATC is supposed to accommodate to the best of their ability. Accommodating here could have been just waiting for a natural gap (which is what I think happened), but I think ATC should have just called Oakland center immediately and had a gap created for 10-20 minutes in the future. It is not like they were the only aircraft on the ILS approach that evening... Though, as I am not a norcal controller, maybe that is against policy.
The video posted by u/hansenq showed what flows were like, with traffic from the east sequenced as far out as Salt Lake City. It probably would’ve needed coordination with Oakland, LA, and Salt Lake centers
That doesn't add up with far-out sequencing.
As far as I understand all they needed to do was to move one plane down from the parallel pair and increase lateral spacing a tiny bit, all the way back while the plane in question was somewhere over Utah.
No, that's also not how it should work. Airports have a certain capacity, that's why you use slot allocations at crowded ones. You can say that day was so botched that they blew the one plane in fav of all the others, but that is not how it should work, telling a plane with an allocated slot you cannot even have a realistic estimate when we will fit you in.
You’re not wrong, but don’t forget that they were three hours late. This is really why airports operate on a first–come first–served basis; someone is always late.
> And IIRC, the FAA actually recommends foreign airlines adopt visual approach procedures at SFO, so … how does that make Lufthansa the assholes?
In 2013, temporarily:
> They also can use an instrument system called a glide slope indicator, although that has been out of service in San Francisco since June 1 because of ongoing runway improvements.
> The FAA said all foreign carriers should continue to use alternate instrument approaches until the glide slopes return to service in late August.
Because it is an FAA recommendation, not a rule. Lufthansa decided that they only do ILS at night and NorCal was not in a position to give them that in the near future because it would disrupt the flow of airplanes that could visual approaches at night and require less separation.
I am not 100% sure about the following but I think ATC instructions trumps company rules any day.
Understood, but I don’t think that makes Lufthansa the asshole here.
Between Lufthansa seemingly unaware of this situation in NorCal, and the ATC being prickly about it (the indefinite holding when they clearly had no intention of slotting them in), there’s plenty of assholes being assholes.
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."
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 scenario was that the plane lands at Oakland, which was always a possibility from the moment they took off. If landing at Oakland is such a disaster Lufthansa could have canceled the flight once it became clear that they were running 3 hours late, had missed their originally planned slot, and would be landing at night.
> 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 more like showing up two weeks late to your dinner reservation, on a Valentine's Day Friday night rush, and being upset that you don't have an accurate ETA to get seated.
