Pilots abort landings at SFO after spotting plane in their path | Hacker News Reader

Pilots abort landings at SFO after spotting plane in their path

sfchronicle.com

32 pointscbhl14 comments

In the rest of the world, ATC are not permitted to give a landing clearance unless and until the runway is actually clear (hence the term "clearance"). The US is unique in that it permits "anticipated clearance" where the controller can assume the runway will be clear by the time the aircraft arrives and that is sufficient.

In this case "anticipated clearance" was not sufficient.

This is a uniquely US problem.

The last time this came up was 3 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34703626

In 1994 i was on a flight from Edmonton to Vancouver, and in the absolute final seconds of approach during landing it took off again as straight up as I can imagine a passenger jet going.

After a while the pilot said they just missed a plane on the runway that shouldn’t have been there. He just had to take a while to gather himself after the ordeal before talking to us.

We circled for about 40 mins before landing again.

The pilot was busy executing the missed-approach procedure, running checklists with the rest of the flight crew, and coordinating the hold with ATC before talking to the passengers. "He just had to take a while to gather himself after the ordeal" seems hyperbolic.

A similar incident happened at SFO a few years ago where an Air Canada flight tried to land on a taxiway since the normal runway was closed and unlit and the pilots missed the memo.

I was on a plane during an aborted landing over the weekend, I think the 2nd/3rd I've experienced. I always assume death will occur shortly after but it hasn't yet.

Go-arounds are pretty common. I've experienced several in the last 20 years.

* Aborted after wheels on ground at Sheremetyevo (obstacle on runway or perhaps messed up the landing; I never found out)

* Aborted 30' off ground in Albuquerque (severe weather; plane was all over the place on approach)

* Aborted 600-800' off ground on final approach to SeaTac (most passengers never noticed, probably runway did not clear)

* Aborted 400' feet off ground on final approach to O'Hare (severe squall, it was pretty obvious the pilots were not going to land so no surpise)

In the second one there was audible relief in the plane when the pilot gunned the engines to go around. The winds died down and the 2nd pass was a perfect landing.

Oddly, on the ATC recordings, the controller advises subsequent landing traffic of the two prior go arounds but tells the flight that that the reasons for the go arounds was unknown, when in fact she knew that they were due to conflicting traffic on the runways 28L and 28R since she gave the go around instructions in both cases (albeit belatedly in the case of the United flight.)

Looks like this was controller error, but I guess the Narrative doesn't permit news sites to report that any more after last year's incidents.

From what I understand, part of the problem as well is that pilots cannot really see what's on the runway when they are landing, even in good conditions, because of the angle of the plane (usually pitched up during landing) and also because they are focused on instruments to be ready to execute a go-around.

Why can they not install cameras?

Unless the landing aircraft is a Concorde or Tu-144, there's no need for a camera system.

Pitch attitude on approach does not cause the nose to block out the runway. Yes, the nose is high in the the moment of flare, but a) the nose of almost any commercial aircraft is not long enough to block the pilots' view of the runway even at that attitude, and b) the moment of flare is far too late to be safely noticing another aircraft occupying your intended runway.

Selective attention or visual confirmation bias (I'm really not sure what the precise cog-psych term would be, sorry) is more likely to be a problem. E.g., 20 seconds out, there is another plane already on the runway, but the flight crew is too focused on their instruments to notice it. Or they look in the right place, but they don't notice the obstacle because in the hundreds or thousands of times they've looked at an approaching runway before, there hasn't been an obstacle. And at that moment the flight crew is much more focused on glidepath and alignment than on obstacle search, so they see the runway but fail to actually notice the obstruction.

ATC miscommunications seem to be happening a lot these days. I'm looking forward to the VASAviation video about what happened here. If it's really bad maybe blancolirio will chime in.

This isn’t a ATC problem it sounds like everyone was in the right it’s a procedural edge case problem where ATC can give clearance to land without the runway being clear in anticipation that it will be. Some percentage of the Time the runway does not clear in time and you have a problem .Eventually we’re going to kill 400-600 to stop this practice but in the mean time we’re just waiting for the blood to write the regulations with

Neo recently covered string of similar incidents and how this seems to be a recurring problem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIiPt1YVkP8

https://archive.is/hGnsY

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