Sure, Lufthansa can make up whatever rules they want for “safety”. Safest would be to not venture 7 miles above the arctic at 500mph at all. But if their rules are obviously in conflict with the standard operations at an airport, it’s on Lufthansa to adjust not everyone else. You can’t barge in and expect to get ATC priority on account of “company policy” or suddenly there’d be a lot of company policies requiring only direct routings with straight-in approaches.
Let's keep in mind that SFOs "standard operations" is purely economical, it's about making more landings so the airport earns more money. Now you might be happy to compromise your safety so others can earn more money, I think many others are not.
It's also not like SFO doesn't have other LH flights arriving who all have the exact same rules, so it could've hardly come as a surprise.
Finally, the pilot was in some ways quite considerate. He could have just waited and declared a fuel emergency that would have really screwed things up for ATC.
He would be in the wrong to wait and then declare a fuel emergency. He’s supposed to divert once he reaches a certain level. Only if he then had some problem diverting would declaring a fuel emergency become a real option.
> Let's keep in mind that SFOs "standard operations" is purely economical, it's about making more landings so the airport earns more money.
Having more, and more regular, landings is also in the greater public interest, so long as you agree with air travel at all. If SFO changed their rules and could accommodate fewer landings, fewer people would get to travel to San Francisco and more of them would be delayed.
It seems bizarre to blame the airport for being profit seeking for having two runways and wanting to use them both to their maximum safe capacity. You might as well blame Lufthansa for the same thing - if they only operated one airliner, this issue would likely never have come up.
Why do automatic landings require wider separation than visual approaches? If anything, shouldn’t it allow for more dense approaches, since the computer has more situational awareness?
> Finally, the pilot was in some ways quite considerate. He could have just waited and declared a fuel emergency that would have really screwed things up for ATC.
Not really, he would have been sent packing very fast to OAK which is just 10NM from SFO.
They 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
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.)
If I recall from listening to the ATC conversation back at the time, the ATC acknowledged that they had received this information from Lufthansa in a phone call far ahead of the arrival.
Does ATC know your flight plan? My recollection from the Channel 9 days was that pilots requested whatever landing clearance they wanted when they pinged the appropriate ATC, but I’m neither a pilot nor ATC, so don’t know if there were processes I wasn’t seeing.
ATC knows the flight plan, but in the US (as opposed to Europe) the last few steps to the ground are generally not filed as part of the flight plan, but are negotiated when closer to landing. There are pros and cons of this, of course.
Describing 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.
Now 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.
Let’s revisit this comment in 3 years when one of the increasing number of near misses has resulted in an accident.
I am usually the first to point out the cost of safety measures. But the increasing number of near-misses in the US suggests that it’s maybe not the time to brush off the risk.
You might be interested to know that the FAA doesn’t follow standard ICAO procedures for visual approach clearance. So when SFO “rules” are in conflict with how the entire rest of the world handles visual approach clearances, perhaps the FAA is the one that needs to get their act together.
In order to drive this point—What kind of arbitrary safety policies are ATCs to expect and service?
If there are 200 airlines landing at SFO, you surely cannot expect ATC to make exceptions and argue about this or that. We need upfront, transparent and written procedures and policies.
Luthansa should notify SFO of their requirements before departing. SFO would have the right to reject their "safety" policy. And we wouldn't have this sticky situation.
