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 during a particularly busy landing time at SFO, so there was indeed a massive chain of aircraft coming in to land.
Lufthansa was the only aircraft asking for ILS. Because ILS needs greater separation, that would require breaking the chain of approaches, sequencing a single ILS approach, then resuming. The chain of landings already sequenced takes priority, so Lufthansa would have to wait 30+ minutes for a gap to appear. By the time that gap appeared, Lufthansa had just decided to divert to Oakland. If Lufthansa had arrived a bit earlier or a bit later, they would have been sequenced just fine.
ATC could have been a bit more accommodating in rerouting their divert to SFO as soon as the a gap appeared, but Lufthansa was also the only airline requesting ILS, and they're already dealing with sequencing 20+ aircraft during a busy time. It's not clear who's in the wrong here; just an unintended consequence from many well-intentioned decisions.
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 a number of tools to address the handicap, but the FAA recently put a lid on that by forbidding side-by-side IFR/VFR approaches while also failing to authorize custom precision landing procedures like SOIA.
The request for ILS is entirely reasonable in this context, and the decision to hold the flight out of the sequence is also reasonable in the context, but to hold the flight with no updates for half an hour is not reasonable and to require it to divert is not reasonable either. The FAA should be held responsible for planning things better than this.
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.
FAA is completely asleep at the wheel in most areas it governs. Youtube is filled with ATC simply refusing to do their jobs, and under no circumstances should exchanges like this should be allowed to happen.
There's an ATC shortage, but so what? There's an even larger shortage of safety which needs to be addressed, and FAA are doing nothing at all.
If I remember correctly, this Lufthansa flight usually arrives during the day, when the company permits visual approaches, but had a delayed departure, which is what let to their policy prohibiting visual approaches and the bad timing with the huge chain of other arrivals.
> The FAA themselves recommend that foreign pilots do not use visual approaches at SFO.
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.
Was that referring to the Primary Glide Slope Indicator being out of order at the time though? I find the article a little unclear if that's a general recommendation even if all the aids are functional for a visual approach.
One useful part of that video is how they play clips of ATC telling flights to “join the localizer”.
SFO has two published visual approaches (https://www.airnav.com/airport/KSFO, scroll to the bottom): Both visual approaches have pilots fly to intercept their runway’s localizer, the part of the ILS equipment that provides lateral positioning, relative to the localizer’s centerline (which is generally coincident to the corresponding runway’s centerline).
So, by flying the published visual approach and remaining “on the localizer”, you have separation from the planes on the parallel runway. What’s missing is careful monitoring and separation, and that’s what Lufthansa wanted.
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 pilot sounds a bit peeved when told there isn't a spot. When he asks for one and they tell him that they can't give an estimate, that's the second strike.
Strike three was telling him to fuck off ("what's your alternate, sir?")
Controllers pulled a power play to bully him for wanting an ILS approach that reduces airport traffic capacity (larger separation distances) and in the process created a risk compounding another risk (a fatigued long-distance flight crew.) This is how crashes happen. All because the airport and airlines want to shove more flights through the airport to make more money.
The sad thing is that they'll get away with it because we have a massive shortage of controllers right now (because they're underpaid and overworked. Thanks, Reagan.)
The flight plan factors into flow timing, which is used to manage capacity, but there's no reservation of a landing time. Flight plan timings aren't accurate enough for that to be feasible when you have landings at close to one a minute.
The flow timing rate used for approaches to SFO during visual conditions is based on visual approaches, so this particular aircraft didn't fall into the expectations used for that planning mechanism. Even then it's not a forward looking plan, just a rate limit on arrivals that causes departure clearances to be delayed. I'm not even sure if it works for international flights.
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 conditions, when it entered the landing queue. The difference in expectations became apparent only when clearance was given, at which point there's not enough flexibility to accommodate an ILS landing, and it's hard to guess when there will be a place to slot it in. Diverting to Oakland and repositioning later is a reasonable, if not optimal outcome.
My guess is, if either side had mentioned their expectations when the flight entered approach control, and it had been cleared up then, it would have been quite possible to get an ILS landing on the first go round. (ATIS recordings did say simultaneous visual approaches)
I think the real issue is they promised 10 minutes max then once 15 minutes elapsed and the pilot complained, tower told the pilot to GTFO. It just feels wrong.
Why are we thanking Reagan (sarcastically)? The mandatory retirement age for air traffic controllers is 56 and he fired them all 42 years ago. Presumably none of them were prepubescent, so they wouldn't be working today.
A small nitpick: the other aircraft were doing _visual_ approaches, not VFR approaches. A visual approach is a type of instrument approach operated under IFR regulations. Practically, this has no affect on your comment. Just pointing this out in case its interesting to you or others (if you didn't know this already).
Does this mean controllers still have a responsibility of separating aircraft under a visual approach? (A comment in a sibling thread mentioned that Lufthansa pilots are allowed visual approaches, but are not allowed to be responsible for visual separation at night.)
Edit: sounds like visual approach means ATC do not have responsibility for separation. I thought the entire point of IFR (which – according to you – visual approach falls under) was that ATC is responsible for separation!
From what I understand, despite the tower not being able to create a gap for 30+ minutes,which although extreme may be understandable due to SFO being the way it is, another major factor was the fact that the tower was unable to provide a realistic estimated time to enter the circuit. That is completely unacceptable.
As for not being able to give an accurate estimate, that is not for the on-the-radio approach controller to calculate, given their view of the airspace. The video posted by parent shows how long the inbound flows were (at least on the east side); approach wouldn’t have seen that.
I found that part delightfully ironic, because it's basically a meme that whenever a flight is delayed ground staff/pilots will always tell passengers "we'll just be off in just a few minutes" over and over again regardless of how long the delay is going to be.
The controller tried to give an estimated time, but that original estimate was blown out of the water by the other planes in the queue taking longer than expected, and the controller didn't have time to keep trying to give an updated estimated time to the one plane in the queue that wanted to do things the hard way (that also, due to circumstances within its own control, departed its original airport late and arrived outside of the window where SFO could have accommodated its silly request without any delays).
The key bit of information missing here and from all these replies is that Lufthansa’s no SFO night time VFR policy was a reaction to and SFO and NorCal notice requiring this limitation from inbound international carriers after a few incidents but the requirement of how to implement this was ambiguous and Lufthansa is complying as best they can
>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.
I don’t think this makes much sense in the real world. Shit happens and plans change. What if an aircraft needs to do a go-around, do they suddenly face 45m of delay or immediately need to divert, because The Sequence is immutable?
No, they’d move things around a bit. SFO decided that this plane wasn’t going to land there as soon as they asked for ILS, instead of doing their job and making a gap.
> What if an aircraft needs to do a go-around, do they suddenly face 45m of delay or immediately need to divert, because The Sequence is immutable?
You would be surprised, but if it is a busy time, they will not be put in the sequence right away and will be put at the back of the line, which will take as long as it is going to take.
If you do a go around, you will be passed to APP which will decide what to do with you.
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"
- then they told ATC they're gonna fuck up their sequence
- then they started complaining again that why is everyone sequenced before them even though ATC told them that they will be cleared once there's a hole in the arrivals sequence long enough to accommodate an ILS landing, and the new estimate was 15-20min more
It is a requirement for pilots to know how an airport operates and what to expect when they get there or depart.
I guess in the end Lufthansa needs to send pilots with better manners to SFO and put more fuel in their airplanes in case they need to wait for a gap in the arrival sequence to accommodate ILS.
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?
A bit of an aside, but: I live and drive along 101 south of SFO, and you can literally see this chain of landings- typically if I can see the plane flying between San Mateo Bridge and SFO, I can see the next pair of planes, and at night/clear weather, I can see one or two more pairs.
I went to check flightradar but I can see right now they are landing planes in the opposite configuration (approaching from the northeast instead of the south east), I guess because of wind conditions (see Operational Flow, https://www.flysfo.com/about/community-noise/noise-office/fl...).
Another important detail: they did this because it was company policy, not because it's what the pilots wanted. The pilots would have been more than happy to do a visual approach.
IMHO the blame lies with the Lufthansa corporate office.
I agree that Lufthansa has to accept the repercussions of their policy, and if somebody asks me for a favor and says they need to because "it's their policy", I'd squint pretty hard at them, that's not really the jurisdiction of policy.
For all the people who believe that the policy is the safest and safety comes first, that's a fine opinion, but if other people don't agree to that tradeoff (absolute safety versus demands on a crowded airport timeslot) you have to accept that, you can't impose your opinion about safety on everybody else's schedule.
I can also see that the air traffic controller might have messed up. Perhaps they intended to squeeze Lufthansa in when they told them to wait, and maybe they forgot and didn't, and then when pressed they got irritated, that's how overworked people typically would react; but still it was their call.
Perhaps this flight is never late so they never encountered this situation before. We can't expect everything to go smoothly all the time, so we don't necessarily need policy changes because of what happened, simply adjust what expectations we should have. And if Lufthansa expects future conflicts, now is the time to work it out with the appropriate parties (i.e. not the whole internet)
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 approaches at SFO but it discontinued during Covid and not resumed since AFAIK).
2/ The approach sequence is established long long long before arrival to the airport. The ATC controllers (approach and center) coordinate arrivals and create sequencing hundreds of miles from a large airport like SFO. The last minute Lufthansa request for an instrument approach would have forced dozens of planes to go into hold or fly vectors which creates a lot of work for everyone.
3/ SFO tower is NOT responsible for approaches and was not dealing with holding Lufthansa. This is responsibility of NorCal approach
4/ My personal take is that Lufthansa should have advised ATC that they need instrument approach much earlier (as soon as they got ATIS which would be 50-100 miles from airport). That would have enabled ATC to create a gap for them. Last minute request is a surprise nobody needs. The Lufthansa attitude afterwards is unacceptable. They were asking for preferential treatment (get us in and screw a couple dozen of other airplanes). They also should have communicated to ATC that they have 30 mins of fuel for hold and that would informed NorCal about time limits they are working with. Lastly, threatening ATC with a fuel emergency.... not nice, not nice at all. From my personal experience with ATC is that they are very accommodating but they don't like surprises. Tell them what you want early and controllers usually find ways to make it work by the time you get there. Have a last minute request? If ATC is not busy they will help you. If ATC is busy -- go to the back of the line. Which is exactly what happened here.
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.
The article and the video embedded within leave out a lot of context.
The Norcal controller was extremely unprofessional. Their behavior is a great example of the US controller attitude™ US ATC is so infamous for. No idea why this unprofessionalism is so prevalent in the US; I can only presume it has to do with being overworked and understaffed, with perhaps a pinch of god complex.
This was handled by Norcal, but SFO has an infamous controller whose poor behavior can be found all over the internet and the nearby smaller SQL controller who thought he was enough of a hot shit that he could lecture a designated examiner after the latter stepped in when the controller was acting like an unprofessional asshole on the radio.
A lot of this asshole behavior is targeted at international pilots, but enough of it is targeted at US pilots that I know of pilots who throw retirement parties for certain asshole controllers without inviting the retiree.
Anyways, let's focus on this particular incident.
For starters, SFO is a huge mess in every sense of the word. The design of the airport is just plain stupid, primarily the distance between the parallel runways that cause severe limitations when the weather isn't perfect.
Then there's the matter that SFO is just not suitable for the amount of traffic it gets, coupled with overworked controllers who rather kick the responsibility over to the pilots, leading to the visual approach and visual seperation preference by SFO.
Secondly, the notion that this is something new and novel that SFO has never heard of and can't do, or as the article puts it: "when all other planes are landing just fine", is just BS.
This flight from Munich comes in every night at SFO with the same IMC flight plan and the same path, so SFO/Norcal should be familiar with this, especially since it's their home base and Lufthansa is a regular customer.
Not only that, but many European airlines have the same regulations on visual separation at night as do other international airlines. The reason this is SOP with so many airlines is for a couple of reasons.
1) You cannot maintain visual separation at night based on lights only, there is no depth perception, and by the time you realize something's fucked, you're too late. TCAS isn't accurate enough for aircraft separation and explicitly states this in the manual.
2) The incident history in the US related to taking visuals at night supports the idea that this should not be allowed. The FDX170 incident in Tulsa comes to mind, or the ACA759 incident that nearly clipped a tail at SFO, no less.
3) The FAA advised against letting international airlines take visuals at night.
4) METAR had SCT and BKN cloud below 1500ft
On top of all that, PAL104 had received ILS just moments before without even asking for it (because it was in their flight plan).
So there's no need to act like this is some kind of extremely weird thing that blindsighted Norcal/SFO.
Thirdly, ultimately, the captain makes the determination of what they need, and the controller is supposed to provide that to the best of their ability.
Had the controller taken the flight plan into account and had their experience with Lufthansa's daily flights, then none of this would've happened, and nobody would've had to be delayed.
Nevertheless, the controller could've still granted ILS without much issue, it would've caused about 5 minutes of delay for the next flight.
That said, it's also not unreasonable to delay Lufthansa if the controller doesn't want to go through that effort.
That's the only reasonable thing the controller did.
What isn't reasonable is to hold Lufthansa for 30 minutes without any information or contact, then tack on another 10 minutes two more times.
And what especially isn't reasonable is to force them to divert to Oakland and say things like "this conversation is over" because your ego is bruised.
The Norcal controller was way out of line and with what passes for SOP in the US we're gonna have our own Tenerife disaster soon enough.
VASAviation released a very long video afterwards with the whole conversation (LH talking to NorCal APP) and the written document from a controller explaining why LH was put on a holding pattern.
> What isn't reasonable is to hold Lufthansa for 30 minutes without any information or contact, then tack on another 10 minutes two more times.
Maybe because they had no available slots so nothing new to share with LH?
> And what especially isn't reasonable is to force them to divert to Oakland and say things like "this conversation is over" because your ego is bruised.
Well, LH threatened the controller with declaring a fuel emergency that would fuck up their sequence. I think the controller responded in kind.
> The NorCal controller was way out of line and with what passes for SOP in the US we're gonna have our own Tenerife disaster soon enough.
Somehow I don't think controllers care very much for company policies that they see as impeding their operations. It's not the first controller to do this to a plane if the captain objects to the instructions received from ATC in a busy airspace.
Speaking of:
> On top of all that, PAL104 had received ILS just moments before without even asking for it (because it was in their flight plan).
Do you have PAL104 FP from that night? Because the longer video from VASAviation shows that PAL104 got an ILS clearance because there was a gap in traffic long enough to accommodate them.
> The Norcal controller was extremely unprofessional. Their behavior is a great example of the US controller attitude™ US ATC is so infamous for.
I have no idea where you're getting this from. I've personally flown hundreds of hours in Norcal, and I find the ATC controllers there to be some of the most competent and excellent professionals I've ever interacted with in my entire life. The vast majority of pilots I know feel the same way.
> 1) You cannot maintain visual separation at night based on lights only
There are multiple position lights on an aircraft, and you can perceive depth from their apparent angular distances. I've flown visual approaches at night myself, and thousands upon thousands of airplanes do this safely every night across the US.
> say things like "this conversation is over" because your ego is bruised.
Maybe it had more to do with attending to the dozens of other jets the controller was actively responsible for at the time? Do you understand how busy these frequencies can get?
> Nevertheless, the controller could've still granted ILS without much issue, it would've caused about 5 minutes of delay for the next flight.
I guess you didn't read the big response on the YT channel? They categorically refuted this idea.
> 2) The incident history in the US related to taking visuals at night supports the idea that this should not be allowed.
No, it really doesn't. Both incidents you cite were caused by fatigue, and may well have been no different during the day. There have probably been literal millions of safe nighttime visual approaches in the last decade in the US.
Maybe you've heard bad things about circling approaches at night? That those are unsafe is a much more widely held opinion among pilots, some US airlines don't allow them. But that's very different.
> 3) The FAA advised against letting international airlines take visuals at night.
The government isn't a monolithic entity, and neither is the FAA. Assuming ATC must allow the ILS because the FAA put out this PR statement is as silly as assuming the USPS must know what address to use when the IRS demands a document from you.
> 4) METAR had SCT and BKN cloud below 1500ft
Doesn't matter if the approach was clear.
> The Norcal controller was way out of line and with what passes for SOP in the US we're gonna have our own Tenerife disaster soon enough.
Maybe the reason why Lufthansa does not allow visual approach at SFO at night, could be after the Air Canada near miss.
> The NTSB determined the probable cause was the Air Canada flight crew's confusion of the runway with the parallel taxiway, with contributing causes including the crew's failure to use the instrument landing system (ILS), as well as pilot fatigue.
FAA changed the rules for SFO and made visual approaches forbidden at night "when an adjacent parallel runway is closed" [2]. Maybe Lufthansa plays it safe and requires ILS for all long haul night landings.
Asiana 214 crashed (in broad daylight and perfect visibility) because Asiana pilots were overused to landing on the autopilot, which was off on this landing; also because they ignored the "sink rate" warning going off for a minute.
Not because landing at SFO is particularly dangerous.
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)
> Pilot: If we are not set up for base soon, we will have to declare a fuel emergency and that would really fuck up your sequence.
> Controller: What is your divert field?
> Pilot: Oakland
> Controller: Ok you need vectors to Oakland?
> Pilot: No, my company forbids visual separation at night, what is the problem here?
> Controller: I can't have this conversation with you. You either divert to Oakland or you can continue to hold. It's up to you sir.
> Pilot: Ok you promised me 10 minutes, that ran out 4 minutes ago, so how many more minutes?
> Controller: This conversation is over.
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. This is tough for me to wrap my head around.
I don't want to blame this one controller for what is obviously a pattern of systematic failures at SFO, but I'm going to seriously consider flying into Oakland or San Jose next time if this is the attitude of the controllers there.
Pilot was bluffing. If they call an emergency, they can do whatever they want. But they can't just call a fuel emergency if they have enough fuel to divert to a viable alternate - that's not how the system is supposed to work. They're supposed to divert if they get close to minimum fuel and can't land at their primary airport.
Of course, if it's a real emergency they can call any emergency (weather at alternate preventing them from landing there for example), but not threaten a controller to call an emergency just to get priority handling at their primary.
The controller knew that and just called it. A diversion is a major annoyance but not a safety issue.
Communicating to a controller that they are close to a fuel emergency is not a threat, it is good practice. People have died because their pilots did not communicate their fuel situation sufficiently to their controllers [1].
This was communicated in this instance, and the controller maintained that to land at SFO, they would have to risk running out of fuel, since the controller refused to give a time-window for landing, or to declare an emergency.
American Airlines (at JFK) proved you can call emergency just because you feel like it with no repercussion.
And really the pilot in command is the one in control. For the attitude that controller had he should have declared an emergency and told him what he was going to do and have him clear all airplanes around them.
Bullying attitude don’t belong in a game with 500mph (~300mph in this case) objects. If you’re going to be a bully expect others to play the game in the same manner.
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, which means less profit for the airport operator.
In the EU visual separation at night is not permitted but it's routinely done in the US because airports and airlines can run more flights in and out of the airport due to closer separation distances and it also reduces controller labor.
Airlines are pushing the system to the breaking point.
That would also mean it's really incredibly difficult to declare a fuel emergency around SFO, since Oakland and San Jose and (I guess, if it were really urgent) Moffat Field are all a five minute flight away, right?
> 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. This is tough for me to wrap my head around.
They weren't even close to a fuel emergency (about to become unable land with less than the 45 minute reserve fuel amount), considering they didn't even declare minimum fuel, which is the stage before emergency (enough to fly to your alternate and land there without going below reserve).
IMO the only mistake by the controller was giving them a 10 minute delay (which I didn't hear in the video, maybe it was skipped?) instead of telling them about an indefinite delay (which was in the video) without having a plan to actually slot them in. Bay Area airspace is incredibly crowded and you have traffic pipelined in all over the place, so it's pretty difficult for the controllers to increase separation for one flight without causing a cascading traffic jam.
> I don't want to blame this one controller for what is obviously a pattern of systematic failures at SFO, but I'm going to seriously consider flying into Oakland or San Jose next time if this is the attitude of the controllers there.
Considering NorCal Approach controls the sequencing for SFO, SJC, and OAK, I don't think that's going to do what you think it does.
Those aren’t the options presented, you’re being dramatic. The pilot has the options to wait or divert, no matter what the controller says, in any situation where they cannot get into an airport.
There is no risk of crashing here. The pilot cannot call the controllers bluff and declare a fuel emergency to land at SFO because Oakland is so close and it would be unprofessional.
The controller doesn’t have time to explain why the previous estimate was wrong or discuss company policy.
> The controller doesn’t have time to explain why the previous estimate was wrong or discuss company policy.
Absolutely. ATC might have been less helpful than possible here, maybe because they had too much on their plate. In that case, if they waste further time on long discussions and get behind on their other planes, the whole carefully juggled sequence might break down, sending many planes to holding or even their alternate.
Declaring a fuel emergency doesn’t mean that they have run out of fuel, or that they will run out of fuel soon. It means that if even they diverted to their alternate right now, they would expect to go below their reserve fuel level before they could land. The reserve fuel level is there to give them an extra half hour or more of flight time. Absent some mechanical problem with the engines, or a fuel leak, declaring a fuel emergency would mean that the pilots waited too long at their destination airport before thinking about diverting. You’re supposed to simply divert _before_ you would need to declare an emergency, rather than declare an emergency simply in order to skip ahead in line.
There was no risk of a crash in this circumstance, because the plane still had plenty of fuel to divert to their alternate and land before going into their final reserve.
It's pretty easy to explain: the controller took the pilot at his word, and immediately offered the fastest and safest option to get them on the ground, which was to land at Oakland. The runway thresholds at SFO and OAK are less than ten miles apart.
If there was a fuel emergency the pilot would have declared a fuel emergency. This was more him getting pissy for having to wait. Big jets normally have enough extra fuel to circle for hours without a problem.
Depends on some factors, but required and also common is 30/45 minutes, +10% longer flights, before diversion (that fuel not included).
Recently experienced a closed airport, needed to divert, and even with chances high that we need to circle again for a while, we only took 1 hour fuel for circling before 2nd divert (and luckily made it after 40 minutes). It was no big jet, but some bigger especially cannot even land with too much fuel.
Fwiw fuel emergency is nowhere near crashing the plane.
A full blow “mayday fuel” may be declared because at that point the usable fuel on landing will be less than final reserve. Final reserve is 30mn of holding flight.
Either the plane has a fuel emergency, or it doesnt. If they had a fuel emergency, the pilot wouldnt have threatened to call one, they would have just done it.
Instead, by threatening to issue an emergency, the pilot reveled his cards - he was annoyed at the delay. The controller called the bluff and told him to fuck off and wait at the back of line or land in Oakland.
In the future, Lufthansa cam call ATC before hand if they want special treatment.
I guess the controller shouldn’t make recommendations but give choices. If the controller is saying “you must divert” they are give advice based on a very short conversation. Whereas the pilot has all the information.
HN understands this concept well. Look at any advice asking thread. People don’t tell the asker what to do.
> 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 the way there. The plane was not there, but just thinking about maybe being there soon. You know what you do when your primary airport is unable to land (for any reason) you are approaching the fuel emergency line? You head to your alternate, that is what it is for. And it is not some unheard of thing, this is literally how you have to calculate how much fuel you have to put in the airplane. When you take off you have to have enough fuel to get to your primary destination, waste your time there, then head to your alternate, get a bit lost on the way, have a go around on your secondary and then still have enough juice for a second landing.
> This is tough for me to wrap my head around.
Because you are thinking “oh my, oh my, the controler was risking so many lives”. When what the controller heard is that they still had plenty of fuel to go to their alternate, so he suggested that they do so.
You know what crashes airplanes and kills people? It is not airplanes flying to their alternate. It is plan continuation bias, or in laymen terms “get-there-itis”. It is when pilots want to reach their destination so much that they make poor decisions. Such as for example delaying leaving for their alternate until it is too late.
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”
> > 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 the way there. The plane was not there, but just thinking about maybe being there soon. You know what you do when your primary airport is unable to land (for any reason) you are approaching the fuel emergency line? You head to your alternate, that is what it is for.
Well the point was that based on the time estimates that ATC gave the pilots assumed they would be well on the ground before they get close to the fuel emergency line. The pilot could have just been a dick and waited for his slot and until he has to declare emergency (which would have caused lots of trouble for at), instead he asked.
> You know what crashes airplanes and kills people? It is not airplanes flying to their alternate. It is plan continuation bias, or in laymen terms “get-there-itis”. It is when pilots want to reach their destination so much that they make poor decisions. Such as for example delaying leaving for their alternate until it is too late.
You know what also crashes airplanes, ATC, airports and airlines prioritising profits over safety (like it was the case here).
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. 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.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
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."
As a pilot, your first job is to fly the airplane, not listen to ATC.
A family member was a commercial airline pilot for many decades, and had stories of having to declare an emergency when ATC direction conflicted with facts in the air. ATC would get pissed, but they're safely on the ground.
Another family member was ATC, and so holiday dinners could be interesting.
> major airliner crash at JFK caused (partly) by poor communication between pilots and ATC
IMHO that doesn't accurately represent the NTSB's conclusions. They didn't cite ATC as a cause at all, only as a secondary contributing factor (along with the weather):
>> The National Transportation Safety Board determines that the
>> probable cause of this accident was the failure of the flightcrew to
>> adequately manage the airplane's fuel load, and their failure to
>> communicate an emergency fuel situation to air traffic control
>> before fuel exhaustion occurred.
>> Contributing to the accident was the flightcrew's failure to use
>> an airline operational control dispatch system to assist them during
>> the international flight into a high-density airport in poor weather.
>> Also contributing to the accident was inadequate traffic flow
>> management by the FAA and the lack of standardized understandable
>> terminology for pilots and controllers for minimum and emergency fuel
>> states.
>> The Safety Board also determines that windshear, crew fatigue and
>> stress were factors that led to the unsuccessful completion of the
>> first approach and thus contributed to the accident.
Like in the youtube video's comments section, I suspect everyone on HN is going to assume that the ATC was simply being petty, and perhaps that was the case. But...
We don't know what the approach into SFO looked like that night, but you can bet it was busy. VASAviation videos are often highly misleading in this regard. Most of the talk on the ATC frequency is cut (sometimes explicitly, sometimes not) leaving just that relevant to the videos content, the time is compressed and they only plot a few of the planes involved, making the airspace look clear.
My understanding is that SFO often has two closely spaced parallel runways taking arrivals. The visual approach is preferred because then the pilots on parallel approaches keep visual separation from each other, allowing more frequent landings. An ILS approach requires more space between planes (because ATC remains responsible for separation). Hence, the Lufthansa had to wait for a gap big enough to fit that ILS approach in, or the whole stack of planes lined up for the approach would have to be juggled - how feasible that would be I don't know.
I live in West Menlo Park and often see planes overhead coming from the West or Northwest to the Bay. I didn't fully understand they may need to slot into a really long flow from the East and even the South.
The prior Philippine Airlines flight did get ILS due to a temporary gap. Lufthansa wasn't as fortunate. The guy on the video didn't think anyone was at fault based on his interpretation and the comments from his insider.
Readit News
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 during a particularly busy landing time at SFO, so there was indeed a massive chain of aircraft coming in to land.
Lufthansa was the only aircraft asking for ILS. Because ILS needs greater separation, that would require breaking the chain of approaches, sequencing a single ILS approach, then resuming. The chain of landings already sequenced takes priority, so Lufthansa would have to wait 30+ minutes for a gap to appear. By the time that gap appeared, Lufthansa had just decided to divert to Oakland. If Lufthansa had arrived a bit earlier or a bit later, they would have been sequenced just fine.
ATC could have been a bit more accommodating in rerouting their divert to SFO as soon as the a gap appeared, but Lufthansa was also the only airline requesting ILS, and they're already dealing with sequencing 20+ aircraft during a busy time. It's not clear who's in the wrong here; just an unintended consequence from many well-intentioned decisions.
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 a number of tools to address the handicap, but the FAA recently put a lid on that by forbidding side-by-side IFR/VFR approaches while also failing to authorize custom precision landing procedures like SOIA.
The request for ILS is entirely reasonable in this context, and the decision to hold the flight out of the sequence is also reasonable in the context, but to hold the flight with no updates for half an hour is not reasonable and to require it to divert is not reasonable either. The FAA should be held responsible for planning things better than this.
There's an ATC shortage, but so what? There's an even larger shortage of safety which needs to be addressed, and FAA are doing nothing at all.
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.
The volume of flights and their chaining flights wouldn’t seem to change in that case would it?
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Dead Comment
https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/faa-wants-foreign-...
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.
* https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/faa-tells-foreign-pilo...
SFO has two published visual approaches (https://www.airnav.com/airport/KSFO, scroll to the bottom): Both visual approaches have pilots fly to intercept their runway’s localizer, the part of the ILS equipment that provides lateral positioning, relative to the localizer’s centerline (which is generally coincident to the corresponding runway’s centerline).
So, by flying the published visual approach and remaining “on the localizer”, you have separation from the planes on the parallel runway. What’s missing is careful monitoring and separation, and that’s what Lufthansa wanted.
It’s worth noting that SFO does have a Simultaneous Offser Instrument Approach procedure: See https://www.tc.faa.gov/its/worldpac/techrpt/afs420-84-1.pdf (detail) or https://www.flysfo.com/sites/default/files/PRM_SOIA_version_... (summary). But that procedure requires, among other things, additional controllers handling approach and monitoring. SFO might not have the spare controllers right now.
They arrived in the area on time, and controllers had not allocated it a spot, which is why the pilot sounds a bit peeved when told there isn't a spot. When he asks for one and they tell him that they can't give an estimate, that's the second strike.
Strike three was telling him to fuck off ("what's your alternate, sir?")
Controllers pulled a power play to bully him for wanting an ILS approach that reduces airport traffic capacity (larger separation distances) and in the process created a risk compounding another risk (a fatigued long-distance flight crew.) This is how crashes happen. All because the airport and airlines want to shove more flights through the airport to make more money.
The sad thing is that they'll get away with it because we have a massive shortage of controllers right now (because they're underpaid and overworked. Thanks, Reagan.)
The flow timing rate used for approaches to SFO during visual conditions is based on visual approaches, so this particular aircraft didn't fall into the expectations used for that planning mechanism. Even then it's not a forward looking plan, just a rate limit on arrivals that causes departure clearances to be delayed. I'm not even sure if it works for international flights.
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 conditions, when it entered the landing queue. The difference in expectations became apparent only when clearance was given, at which point there's not enough flexibility to accommodate an ILS landing, and it's hard to guess when there will be a place to slot it in. Diverting to Oakland and repositioning later is a reasonable, if not optimal outcome.
My guess is, if either side had mentioned their expectations when the flight entered approach control, and it had been cleared up then, it would have been quite possible to get an ILS landing on the first go round. (ATIS recordings did say simultaneous visual approaches)
So just being in the system hours beforehand doesn’t really mean much. ATC don’t plan ahead based on what’s in the system, per se.
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Huh?
They arrived way outside their window. I realize they also left MUC late, but still.
Edit: sounds like visual approach means ATC do not have responsibility for separation. I thought the entire point of IFR (which – according to you – visual approach falls under) was that ATC is responsible for separation!
As for not being able to give an accurate estimate, that is not for the on-the-radio approach controller to calculate, given their view of the airspace. The video posted by parent shows how long the inbound flows were (at least on the east side); approach wouldn’t have seen that.
The coordination necessary to get an accurate estimate should’ve involved managers, which might be affected by the current shortage (see https://www.npr.org/2023/11/09/1211838624/air-traffic-contro...).
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.
No, they’d move things around a bit. SFO decided that this plane wasn’t going to land there as soon as they asked for ILS, instead of doing their job and making a gap.
You would be surprised, but if it is a busy time, they will not be put in the sequence right away and will be put at the back of the line, which will take as long as it is going to take.
If you do a go around, you will be passed to APP which will decide what to do with you.
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" - then they told ATC they're gonna fuck up their sequence - then they started complaining again that why is everyone sequenced before them even though ATC told them that they will be cleared once there's a hole in the arrivals sequence long enough to accommodate an ILS landing, and the new estimate was 15-20min more
It is a requirement for pilots to know how an airport operates and what to expect when they get there or depart.
I guess in the end Lufthansa needs to send pilots with better manners to SFO and put more fuel in their airplanes in case they need to wait for a gap in the arrival sequence to accommodate ILS.
I went to check flightradar but I can see right now they are landing planes in the opposite configuration (approaching from the northeast instead of the south east), I guess because of wind conditions (see Operational Flow, https://www.flysfo.com/about/community-noise/noise-office/fl...).
Another important detail: they did this because it was company policy, not because it's what the pilots wanted. The pilots would have been more than happy to do a visual approach.
IMHO the blame lies with the Lufthansa corporate office.
(And FWIW, I am a private pilot.)
For all the people who believe that the policy is the safest and safety comes first, that's a fine opinion, but if other people don't agree to that tradeoff (absolute safety versus demands on a crowded airport timeslot) you have to accept that, you can't impose your opinion about safety on everybody else's schedule.
I can also see that the air traffic controller might have messed up. Perhaps they intended to squeeze Lufthansa in when they told them to wait, and maybe they forgot and didn't, and then when pressed they got irritated, that's how overworked people typically would react; but still it was their call.
Perhaps this flight is never late so they never encountered this situation before. We can't expect everything to go smoothly all the time, so we don't necessarily need policy changes because of what happened, simply adjust what expectations we should have. And if Lufthansa expects future conflicts, now is the time to work it out with the appropriate parties (i.e. not the whole internet)
2/ The approach sequence is established long long long before arrival to the airport. The ATC controllers (approach and center) coordinate arrivals and create sequencing hundreds of miles from a large airport like SFO. The last minute Lufthansa request for an instrument approach would have forced dozens of planes to go into hold or fly vectors which creates a lot of work for everyone.
3/ SFO tower is NOT responsible for approaches and was not dealing with holding Lufthansa. This is responsibility of NorCal approach
4/ My personal take is that Lufthansa should have advised ATC that they need instrument approach much earlier (as soon as they got ATIS which would be 50-100 miles from airport). That would have enabled ATC to create a gap for them. Last minute request is a surprise nobody needs. The Lufthansa attitude afterwards is unacceptable. They were asking for preferential treatment (get us in and screw a couple dozen of other airplanes). They also should have communicated to ATC that they have 30 mins of fuel for hold and that would informed NorCal about time limits they are working with. Lastly, threatening ATC with a fuel emergency.... not nice, not nice at all. From my personal experience with ATC is that they are very accommodating but they don't like surprises. Tell them what you want early and controllers usually find ways to make it work by the time you get there. Have a last minute request? If ATC is not busy they will help you. If ATC is busy -- go to the back of the line. Which is exactly what happened here.
But yeah, from that point on ATC did seem very professional to me.
The Norcal controller was extremely unprofessional. Their behavior is a great example of the US controller attitude™ US ATC is so infamous for. No idea why this unprofessionalism is so prevalent in the US; I can only presume it has to do with being overworked and understaffed, with perhaps a pinch of god complex.
This was handled by Norcal, but SFO has an infamous controller whose poor behavior can be found all over the internet and the nearby smaller SQL controller who thought he was enough of a hot shit that he could lecture a designated examiner after the latter stepped in when the controller was acting like an unprofessional asshole on the radio.
A lot of this asshole behavior is targeted at international pilots, but enough of it is targeted at US pilots that I know of pilots who throw retirement parties for certain asshole controllers without inviting the retiree.
Anyways, let's focus on this particular incident.
For starters, SFO is a huge mess in every sense of the word. The design of the airport is just plain stupid, primarily the distance between the parallel runways that cause severe limitations when the weather isn't perfect.
Then there's the matter that SFO is just not suitable for the amount of traffic it gets, coupled with overworked controllers who rather kick the responsibility over to the pilots, leading to the visual approach and visual seperation preference by SFO.
Secondly, the notion that this is something new and novel that SFO has never heard of and can't do, or as the article puts it: "when all other planes are landing just fine", is just BS.
This flight from Munich comes in every night at SFO with the same IMC flight plan and the same path, so SFO/Norcal should be familiar with this, especially since it's their home base and Lufthansa is a regular customer.
Not only that, but many European airlines have the same regulations on visual separation at night as do other international airlines. The reason this is SOP with so many airlines is for a couple of reasons.
1) You cannot maintain visual separation at night based on lights only, there is no depth perception, and by the time you realize something's fucked, you're too late. TCAS isn't accurate enough for aircraft separation and explicitly states this in the manual.
2) The incident history in the US related to taking visuals at night supports the idea that this should not be allowed. The FDX170 incident in Tulsa comes to mind, or the ACA759 incident that nearly clipped a tail at SFO, no less.
3) The FAA advised against letting international airlines take visuals at night.
4) METAR had SCT and BKN cloud below 1500ft
On top of all that, PAL104 had received ILS just moments before without even asking for it (because it was in their flight plan).
So there's no need to act like this is some kind of extremely weird thing that blindsighted Norcal/SFO.
Thirdly, ultimately, the captain makes the determination of what they need, and the controller is supposed to provide that to the best of their ability. Had the controller taken the flight plan into account and had their experience with Lufthansa's daily flights, then none of this would've happened, and nobody would've had to be delayed. Nevertheless, the controller could've still granted ILS without much issue, it would've caused about 5 minutes of delay for the next flight.
That said, it's also not unreasonable to delay Lufthansa if the controller doesn't want to go through that effort. That's the only reasonable thing the controller did.
What isn't reasonable is to hold Lufthansa for 30 minutes without any information or contact, then tack on another 10 minutes two more times.
And what especially isn't reasonable is to force them to divert to Oakland and say things like "this conversation is over" because your ego is bruised.
The Norcal controller was way out of line and with what passes for SOP in the US we're gonna have our own Tenerife disaster soon enough.
> What isn't reasonable is to hold Lufthansa for 30 minutes without any information or contact, then tack on another 10 minutes two more times.
Maybe because they had no available slots so nothing new to share with LH?
> And what especially isn't reasonable is to force them to divert to Oakland and say things like "this conversation is over" because your ego is bruised.
Well, LH threatened the controller with declaring a fuel emergency that would fuck up their sequence. I think the controller responded in kind.
> The NorCal controller was way out of line and with what passes for SOP in the US we're gonna have our own Tenerife disaster soon enough.
Somehow I don't think controllers care very much for company policies that they see as impeding their operations. It's not the first controller to do this to a plane if the captain objects to the instructions received from ATC in a busy airspace.
Speaking of: > On top of all that, PAL104 had received ILS just moments before without even asking for it (because it was in their flight plan).
Do you have PAL104 FP from that night? Because the longer video from VASAviation shows that PAL104 got an ILS clearance because there was a gap in traffic long enough to accommodate them.
I have no idea where you're getting this from. I've personally flown hundreds of hours in Norcal, and I find the ATC controllers there to be some of the most competent and excellent professionals I've ever interacted with in my entire life. The vast majority of pilots I know feel the same way.
> 1) You cannot maintain visual separation at night based on lights only
There are multiple position lights on an aircraft, and you can perceive depth from their apparent angular distances. I've flown visual approaches at night myself, and thousands upon thousands of airplanes do this safely every night across the US.
> say things like "this conversation is over" because your ego is bruised.
Maybe it had more to do with attending to the dozens of other jets the controller was actively responsible for at the time? Do you understand how busy these frequencies can get?
> Nevertheless, the controller could've still granted ILS without much issue, it would've caused about 5 minutes of delay for the next flight.
I guess you didn't read the big response on the YT channel? They categorically refuted this idea.
> 2) The incident history in the US related to taking visuals at night supports the idea that this should not be allowed.
No, it really doesn't. Both incidents you cite were caused by fatigue, and may well have been no different during the day. There have probably been literal millions of safe nighttime visual approaches in the last decade in the US.
Maybe you've heard bad things about circling approaches at night? That those are unsafe is a much more widely held opinion among pilots, some US airlines don't allow them. But that's very different.
> 3) The FAA advised against letting international airlines take visuals at night.
The government isn't a monolithic entity, and neither is the FAA. Assuming ATC must allow the ILS because the FAA put out this PR statement is as silly as assuming the USPS must know what address to use when the IRS demands a document from you.
> 4) METAR had SCT and BKN cloud below 1500ft
Doesn't matter if the approach was clear.
> The Norcal controller was way out of line and with what passes for SOP in the US we're gonna have our own Tenerife disaster soon enough.
rolls eyes
There are definitely some legitimate ATC incidents to pick on in the last year, but this isn't one of them. This is: https://data.ntsb.gov/carol-repgen/api/Aviation/ReportMain/G...
Can/ should be applied to so many on-the-ground situations, too.
> The NTSB determined the probable cause was the Air Canada flight crew's confusion of the runway with the parallel taxiway, with contributing causes including the crew's failure to use the instrument landing system (ILS), as well as pilot fatigue.
FAA changed the rules for SFO and made visual approaches forbidden at night "when an adjacent parallel runway is closed" [2]. Maybe Lufthansa plays it safe and requires ILS for all long haul night landings.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Canada_Flight_759
[2] https://www.flightglobal.com/faa-changes-san-francisco-landi...
This was ultimately pilot error but also due to the fact that the pilots were not as accustomed to doing visual landings.
Not because landing at SFO is particularly dangerous.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asiana_Airlines_Flight_214#Cra...
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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)
> Controller: What is your divert field?
> Pilot: Oakland
> Controller: Ok you need vectors to Oakland?
> Pilot: No, my company forbids visual separation at night, what is the problem here?
> Controller: I can't have this conversation with you. You either divert to Oakland or you can continue to hold. It's up to you sir.
> Pilot: Ok you promised me 10 minutes, that ran out 4 minutes ago, so how many more minutes?
> Controller: This conversation is over.
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. This is tough for me to wrap my head around.
I don't want to blame this one controller for what is obviously a pattern of systematic failures at SFO, but I'm going to seriously consider flying into Oakland or San Jose next time if this is the attitude of the controllers there.
Of course, if it's a real emergency they can call any emergency (weather at alternate preventing them from landing there for example), but not threaten a controller to call an emergency just to get priority handling at their primary.
The controller knew that and just called it. A diversion is a major annoyance but not a safety issue.
This was communicated in this instance, and the controller maintained that to land at SFO, they would have to risk running out of fuel, since the controller refused to give a time-window for landing, or to declare an emergency.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avianca_Flight_052
And really the pilot in command is the one in control. For the attitude that controller had he should have declared an emergency and told him what he was going to do and have him clear all airplanes around them.
Bullying attitude don’t belong in a game with 500mph (~300mph in this case) objects. If you’re going to be a bully expect others to play the game in the same manner.
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, which means less profit for the airport operator.
In the EU visual separation at night is not permitted but it's routinely done in the US because airports and airlines can run more flights in and out of the airport due to closer separation distances and it also reduces controller labor.
Airlines are pushing the system to the breaking point.
They weren't even close to a fuel emergency (about to become unable land with less than the 45 minute reserve fuel amount), considering they didn't even declare minimum fuel, which is the stage before emergency (enough to fly to your alternate and land there without going below reserve).
IMO the only mistake by the controller was giving them a 10 minute delay (which I didn't hear in the video, maybe it was skipped?) instead of telling them about an indefinite delay (which was in the video) without having a plan to actually slot them in. Bay Area airspace is incredibly crowded and you have traffic pipelined in all over the place, so it's pretty difficult for the controllers to increase separation for one flight without causing a cascading traffic jam.
> I don't want to blame this one controller for what is obviously a pattern of systematic failures at SFO, but I'm going to seriously consider flying into Oakland or San Jose next time if this is the attitude of the controllers there.
Considering NorCal Approach controls the sequencing for SFO, SJC, and OAK, I don't think that's going to do what you think it does.
There is no risk of crashing here. The pilot cannot call the controllers bluff and declare a fuel emergency to land at SFO because Oakland is so close and it would be unprofessional.
The controller doesn’t have time to explain why the previous estimate was wrong or discuss company policy.
Absolutely. ATC might have been less helpful than possible here, maybe because they had too much on their plate. In that case, if they waste further time on long discussions and get behind on their other planes, the whole carefully juggled sequence might break down, sending many planes to holding or even their alternate.
There was no risk of a crash in this circumstance, because the plane still had plenty of fuel to divert to their alternate and land before going into their final reserve.
It's pretty easy to explain: the controller took the pilot at his word, and immediately offered the fastest and safest option to get them on the ground, which was to land at Oakland. The runway thresholds at SFO and OAK are less than ten miles apart.
Note the pilot was not willing to even dare to break his company rules and do a visual, so why should ATC break theirs?
Recently experienced a closed airport, needed to divert, and even with chances high that we need to circle again for a while, we only took 1 hour fuel for circling before 2nd divert (and luckily made it after 40 minutes). It was no big jet, but some bigger especially cannot even land with too much fuel.
A full blow “mayday fuel” may be declared because at that point the usable fuel on landing will be less than final reserve. Final reserve is 30mn of holding flight.
Instead, by threatening to issue an emergency, the pilot reveled his cards - he was annoyed at the delay. The controller called the bluff and told him to fuck off and wait at the back of line or land in Oakland.
In the future, Lufthansa cam call ATC before hand if they want special treatment.
HN understands this concept well. Look at any advice asking thread. People don’t tell the asker what to do.
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 the way there. The plane was not there, but just thinking about maybe being there soon. You know what you do when your primary airport is unable to land (for any reason) you are approaching the fuel emergency line? You head to your alternate, that is what it is for. And it is not some unheard of thing, this is literally how you have to calculate how much fuel you have to put in the airplane. When you take off you have to have enough fuel to get to your primary destination, waste your time there, then head to your alternate, get a bit lost on the way, have a go around on your secondary and then still have enough juice for a second landing.
> This is tough for me to wrap my head around.
Because you are thinking “oh my, oh my, the controler was risking so many lives”. When what the controller heard is that they still had plenty of fuel to go to their alternate, so he suggested that they do so.
You know what crashes airplanes and kills people? It is not airplanes flying to their alternate. It is plan continuation bias, or in laymen terms “get-there-itis”. It is when pilots want to reach their destination so much that they make poor decisions. Such as for example delaying leaving for their alternate until it is too late.
They kept asking for “Priority” but never said “Emergency” or “Mayday” or “Pan Pan”
> 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 the way there. The plane was not there, but just thinking about maybe being there soon. You know what you do when your primary airport is unable to land (for any reason) you are approaching the fuel emergency line? You head to your alternate, that is what it is for.
Well the point was that based on the time estimates that ATC gave the pilots assumed they would be well on the ground before they get close to the fuel emergency line. The pilot could have just been a dick and waited for his slot and until he has to declare emergency (which would have caused lots of trouble for at), instead he asked.
> You know what crashes airplanes and kills people? It is not airplanes flying to their alternate. It is plan continuation bias, or in laymen terms “get-there-itis”. It is when pilots want to reach their destination so much that they make poor decisions. Such as for example delaying leaving for their alternate until it is too late.
You know what also crashes airplanes, ATC, airports and airlines prioritising profits over safety (like it was the case here).
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.
This sounds reasonable to me as a safety precaution. I tried Googling, but I couldn't find anything. How do you know this information?
09:50
QuoteGerman pilot working for Condor. Sadly there are no closed-captions in English available.
https://aviation.stackexchange.com/a/47652
QuoteI anssume access to the individual company procedures isn’t possible.
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.
Lufthansa’s rules shouldn’t have been a surprise to anybody here. The route isn’t new and operates on the edge of daylight much of the year.
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.
* https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/faa-tells-foreign-pilo...
I am not 100% sure about the following but I think ATC instructions trumps company rules any day.
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."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avianca_Flight_052 (1990)
https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/the-words-not-spoken-the...
There was a similar fact pattern to the OP: the pilots relied on time estimates from ATC which turned out to be inaccurate,
- "Due to the air traffic controllers giving ultimately untrue delay estimations the flight became critically low on fuel."
A family member was a commercial airline pilot for many decades, and had stories of having to declare an emergency when ATC direction conflicted with facts in the air. ATC would get pissed, but they're safely on the ground.
Another family member was ATC, and so holiday dinners could be interesting.
But if you declare an emergency the first thing you may do is not insist on flying the ILS separation.
IMHO that doesn't accurately represent the NTSB's conclusions. They didn't cite ATC as a cause at all, only as a secondary contributing factor (along with the weather):
We don't know what the approach into SFO looked like that night, but you can bet it was busy. VASAviation videos are often highly misleading in this regard. Most of the talk on the ATC frequency is cut (sometimes explicitly, sometimes not) leaving just that relevant to the videos content, the time is compressed and they only plot a few of the planes involved, making the airspace look clear.
My understanding is that SFO often has two closely spaced parallel runways taking arrivals. The visual approach is preferred because then the pilots on parallel approaches keep visual separation from each other, allowing more frequent landings. An ILS approach requires more space between planes (because ATC remains responsible for separation). Hence, the Lufthansa had to wait for a gap big enough to fit that ILS approach in, or the whole stack of planes lined up for the approach would have to be juggled - how feasible that would be I don't know.
[1] https://youtu.be/4zHxdn8oz20?si=6ENIvIot7Q3LSJHO
I live in West Menlo Park and often see planes overhead coming from the West or Northwest to the Bay. I didn't fully understand they may need to slot into a really long flow from the East and even the South.
The prior Philippine Airlines flight did get ILS due to a temporary gap. Lufthansa wasn't as fortunate. The guy on the video didn't think anyone was at fault based on his interpretation and the comments from his insider.