I see this as a reap what you sow moment for Lufthasa.
Why should ATC at a busy airport be so accommodating? Lufthasa is the one making this hard on everyone.
I used to watch both these airports fairly frequently from Oyster bay regional park, they are both super busy with flights often lining up to the horizon.
"Why should ATC at a busy airport be so accommodating? Lufthasa is the one making this hard on everyone."
It is literally ATC's job to facilitate the safe separation of aircraft. Note I said facilitate, not ensure, because ensuring safe separation and operation remains in the cockpit. When a pilot arrives at an airport and requests a specific approach, whether that reason is company policy or the limitations of weather, it is ATC's job to accept that request or deny it, and not to beat around the bush suggesting doing one thing and calling it another. When they give an expected time for something the pilot makes decisions in the cockpit if that new limitation will work with whatever limitations already exist. If ATC is not operating honestly then that should be viewed as what it is - a compromise of safety, and a petty unnecessary one at that. If ATC is unable to accommodate the request then it needs to be stated so explicitly and as soon as possible because lives are literally part of the equation. Air traffic can be lined up from SFO all the way back to London and that still doesn't change ATC's responsibilities one bit. ATC does not "accommodate" because that implies they exercise some arbitrary discretion and not clear binary criteria.
This wasn't some new policy of Lufthansa though, apparently it's their SOP for basically all airports. Outside the US, I'm not sure if visual approaches are all that common for (heavy) aircraft at night. Overall, the reason that SFO wants visual approaches is to increase rate of landing, and the reason that Lufthansa wants ILS is to increase safety -- your phrasing "Lufthasa is the one making this hard on everyone" just seems wrong, having more safety seems totally justified and reasonable here.
I'm actually surprised SFO still allows visual approaches at night after that Air Canada 759 flight nearly landed on the taxiway ~5 years ago (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGQlQFn0euI).
Instrument approaches are the norm in Europe, visual approaches are the norm in the US. Visual approaches can and normally do still use ILS when possible; SFO's incidents were when ILS was out of service (Asiana 214) or not engaged (Air Canada 759)
Which is why ATC obliquely asked whether Lufthansa bans visual approaches altogether, or simply requires the use of ILS. If it had been the latter, that's fully compatible with normal SFO operations.
> I'm actually surprised SFO still allows visual approaches at night after that Air Canada 759 flight nearly landed on the taxiway ~5 years ago
The Air Canada incident happened because one of the runways at SFO was closed for maintenance, and after it happened the FAA specifically updated their regulations to require ILS when there's a possibility of runway confusion. There's no reason to think VFR landings at SFO are unsafe in normal conditions.
> There's no reason to think VFR landings at SFO are unsafe in normal conditions.
"No reason" seems like a very strong claim. Is that the reason Lufthansa cites for prohibiting visual separation at night? I mean it would clearly be in their interest to increase throughput as well, so they must think there's a reason. Why do you think that reason is invalid?
I'm surprised a computer assisted landing sequence can't _increase_ the rate of landed planes, though I assume doing so would require subordinating all the inbound aircraft to the local traffic control system.
The problem with having computer separation be less than pilot separation is, what happens if the computers fail and the pilots have to take over? Then they're suddenly in a situation where they're already below whatever the minimum safe pilot separation is, and now you've potentially turned a recoverable failure into an unrecoverable one. If the whole point of having pilots is to be backups for the computers, the computer situation has to have more margin than the equivalent pilot one, even if efficiency is being left on the table.
(The only way around this is to not have pilots as backup, and turn the whole thing over to the computers, but we're not ready or willing to take that step yet)
'go around' but with different registered abort vectors / plans.
Also if any unit within the stack falls out of automatic mode the entire chain gets cleared; if there's sufficient window for the pilots to declare emergency manual landing they can maintain the path as everything else aborts and the failed unit lands.
Considering that only one runway (28R, IIRC) at SFO even winks in direction of supporting autoland, and there's no continental USA support for controller-pilot datalink (only used for oceanic flight), at least outside of test flights (correctme if I'm wrong, not an expert here).
On top of that current CPDLC doesn't seem to be as well integrated to autopilot support other than pilots acking each command, and then I do not think Mode S is mandated (or exact enough) to provide good enough separation.
> reason that Lufthansa wants ILS is to increase safety
Yes because "more technology is more better" right? And forgetting about how to do things by hand (or eye) doesn't pose a risk to anyone neither
A visual approach is no more unsafe than an ILS one in good weather. Sure, ok, the caveat here is "at night" but I don't think the multiple pilots that were doing it at the time were being risky on purpose
(and people are quoting Asiana, but understand that fumbling a visual approach landing is not a thing that should be common)
> Yes because "more technology is more better" right? And forgetting about how to do things by hand (or eye) doesn't pose a risk to anyone neither
That's a very nifty strawman, but that's not my claim (at least not in such a general way). In this case it's become SOP by experts in a field, specifically for safety reasons. Other experts in the field have said "well, we don't think it's necessary - there are downsides such as aircraft landing rate". These groups of experts don't disagree on the fact that it's more safe - they just disagree as to what the optimal combination of (safety, financial value) is appropriate.
(speaking about strawmen) I'm not saying ILS is less safe
I'm saying that have people rely on ILS and never practice visual landings, especially when the conditions are favourable, makes pilots lose skill and confidence on it, making the overall situation less safe
Then people wonder how come other pilots miss a perfect good approach on a sunny day.
Apparently some Canadian carriers do also have this as a SOP.
Around the time this happened I spoke to some friends who are ATCs (in the US) who all immediately agreed it was a very reasonable request, especially given that the request was made far enough out (so it wasn't like they'd have to quickly scramble to respace the incoming planes correctly in the sequence).
Because Lufthansa left a few hours late they arrived during a super busy arrival window. AFAIK ATC had nearly 30 planes already in the queue for landing with spacing for visual. To get Lufthansa in any sooner they'd need to send updated instructions to a lot of planes to make a gap.
If Lufthansa had arrived two hours earlier or later it wouldn't have been an issue. Indeed they were able to depart OAK around two hours later and land at SFO via IFR with no problems.
SFO handles a lot of traffic for having just two active runways - one of the reasons they constantly operate in parallel. Much like other super busy constrained airports (eg JFK) they have very little room to accommodate special requests.
Ideally Lufthansa would have let ATC know of this need while still a long way out so they could build a bubble in the sequence ahead of time but I don't know if procedures even allow for that.
> It's so "justified and reasonable" that nobody else does it.
Airlines are a cutthroat business and many will go for profit rather than for safety if they're allowed to. The large American airlines, for what it's worth, are actually loss leaders [1].
The controller didn't have an ETA, the pilot was offered to hold or divert. The pilot didn't want to divert, and hoped that complaining would get them out of the hold.
From a safety perspective, this all seems to have worked as intended.
Yeah, whether Lufthansa's polices are reasonable or excessively cautious is debatable, but the ATC here obviously gave unambiguously wrong information about the delay.
Estimates and predictions that turn out to be wrong are still wrong.
And when the estimate was wrong by 50% and counting, and the ATC wasn't offering any information other than another dubious estimate, and the ATC was not handling the flights in a FIFO order, the Lufthansa pilots were left with uncomfortably little useful information about their situation.
Just a note the estimate wasn't just wrong by 50% the pilots had already been told 10min twice before, so estimate was more than 300% off by that time.
That also means that when ATC tells someone they will inform them in 10 minutes,they are obliged to tell them in 10 minutes, even if it's "sorry, we don't have a slot, we can get you info in next ten minutes or help you to diversion airport".
Not have to be reminded that there's a plane in holding waiting for information.
Unless they want a repeat of telling a plane to hold till it crashed into sea.
> Why should ATC at a busy airport be so accommodating?
Apropos of the other issues already being well debated:
1. ATCs role is to facilitate use of the airport.
2. They/the airport are being paid by Lufthansa to do so:
~$4,000 landing fee based on the OEW + 5% fuel being 340,000lb at $9.11/1000 lb.
~$800 for up to 8 hours at a gate (or a flat rate of $36,000/mo per aircraft for a frequently visiting ship).
~$1,000 for common use of terminal facilities (for airlines that don't have dedicated terminals - often with internationals, where they have the common check in area that is used by multiple airlines).
And that's not all the charges the airline gets from the airport, that's just the majority of the charges for "1 aircraft, 1 landing/departure" at SFO.
Yes, landing fees are public and in most countries are set same for everyone based on type of aircraft and sometimes operations, but not who is flying.
They are supposed to directly reflect funding of airport maintenance, thus fees decided based on how damaging the plane is to the runway etc.
Additionally, there's a whole laundry list of charges you can see on most international flight tickets. For example on my last flight ticket from Nigeria (my country of residence) to the US with United, there are Nigeria-specific sales taxes and airport service charge fees listed as well as two separate US Customs and Immigrations fees, a "September 11th Security fee", and a US transportation tax.
> Why should ATC at a busy airport be so accommodating?
Is it really so much to ask that an ILS-equipped airport... provide an ILS approach?
I'm generally on your side here; the controllers did a good job with what resources they had. But there seem to be an awful lot of oddities / operational hangups through NorCal TRACON.
Driving south on a clear night on Highway 101, from SFO on down, is a neat experience because you can see these planes lined up clearly for about 20 miles. All the way down to the South Bay and beyond.
Why should ATC at a busy airport be so accommodating? Lufthasa is the one making this hard on everyone.
I used to watch both these airports fairly frequently from Oyster bay regional park, they are both super busy with flights often lining up to the horizon.