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.
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.
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).
It's so "justified and reasonable" that nobody else does it. Maybe it's not quite so justified or as reasonable as you think.
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].
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).
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
"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?
(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)
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.
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.
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.
Seems to me that ATC need to get it together also.
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.
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.
From a safety perspective, this all seems to have worked as intended.
But that's not what they said on the radio.
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.
They are supposed to directly reflect funding of airport maintenance, thus fees decided based on how damaging the plane is to the runway etc.
It's extremely detailed and I would assume every major airport publishes them.
Also, let's just say that landing a heavy plane after midnight gets very, very expensive.
[0] https://media.flughafen-zuerich.ch/-/jssmedia/airport/portal...
Unfortunately this airport sounds like it's seriously overcrowded and not designed well for the amount of traffic it's getting.
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.