Comment by perihelions | Hacker News Reader

Comment by perihelions | Hacker News Reader

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- "their pilots aren’t prepared to do the approaches everyone else is doing"

Is this is a fair framing? My read of it is that Lufthansa's enforcing a minimal standard of safety—one that's higher than both other airliners' and the ATC's. They're not incapable of doing visual landings at night; rather, they have a policy banning it in non-emergency situations. It (naively) seems reasonable to me not to budge on this kind of thing. (Unless the inflexibility creates new forms of safety issues, in which case I have no idea).

Also, I'm mindful there was a recent near-disaster at SFO with exactly the issue this Lufthansa policy mitigates: a non-ILS landing attempt at night, which attempted the wrong runway due to confusion over visual markers,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Canada_Flight_759

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14741605 ("SFO near miss might have triggered ‘greatest aviation disaster in history’", 414 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18071966 ("Abstract of the NTSB Report on Air Canada flight 759's taxiway overflight at SFO", 127 comments)

Airline pilots can lose their jobs if they do not follow the airline's SOP (Standard Operating Procedure). SFO controllers have gotten a shitty rep, with good reason, it appears. This wouldn't have happened at any of the other many busy airports in the US. This seemed to be the majority opinion on a couple other forums where this has been discussed.

> This wouldn't have happened at any of the other many busy airports in the US.

I'm not aware of any other busy airport in the US that has the same parallel runway situation SFO has, with two parallel runways only 750 feet apart both doing landings. Plenty of other large US airports have parallel runways, but they're further apart and they're staggered between landings and takeoffs.

Can you link me to some of those forums?

pprune and reddit discussed it at length.

The person you’re commenting to is missing the context you’ve provided, which is the U.S. has seen an incredible number of near misses this past year.

The ATC situation in the U.S. is dire. It would be insane for an airline to reduce their safety standards especially in the U.S. right now.

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.

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.

...how is that the opposite of what I said?

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

> They arrived just like everyone else.

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.)

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.

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.

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?

Where did you get "automatic"? "ILS" means the pilot flies on instruments.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

I think that same sentence with “allowed” swapped for “prepared” is what the GP meant.

It seems very clear from the transcript that the pilots are just working with a stupid rule, not that they are incapable of actually doing it.

A pilot who could only land with the help of ILS couldn’t possibly be assigned to a transcontinental flight that lands in the evening right?

A pilot who could only land with the help of ILS doesn’t get their commercial license.

The air Canada issue can still be mitigated, even on a visual approach, by programming the plane for the runway’s instrument approach (ILS or otherwise) assuming one is available.

Many pilots do this, and you don’t need a special ILS clearance or its corresponding separation to do so.

I dunno. If everyone is doing 75 on the freeway, "safest" might be 65, but you can also create more unsafe conditions by not matching the speed of all the other traffic.

This is a very popular argument. I run into it a lot. I have been criticized for following the speed limit when there were six vehicles spaced across five kilometers. It seems I am expected to speed up to match the one vehicle that passed me.

If nobody obeys the speed limit and it is in fact safer to exceed the speed limit, why do we have speed limits? Why does the government make it illegal to do the safest thing? And why does the public put up with it? Why is there no MADD-like organization protesting the insane government policies that put everybody at risk?

I don't have any data to show that 65 is safer than 75, or to show that 75 is safer than 65. I don't know if speed limits are based on any real safety data. But I'm pretty sure that your rationalization is not. This is my little (misguided) campaign to combat that argument. Even if 95% of the population embrace it as a plausible excuse for breaking rules and to malign rule-keepers.

It's literally the premise of the article though. One airplane not matching the other traffic creates a larger problem.

You are right to a certain point, but all you are required is to follow the airplane in front of you and land. It's a dumb simple requirement. If it was such a big issue, FAA would have put a stop to it at SFO, but just because one Air Canada flight tried to land on the taxiway does not make it a safety critical issue. Mistakes happen all the time.

Asking for an airport to break its arrival sequence because your airline has a different policy than the airport is bonkers.

The FAA deviating from ICAO standards for visual approaches is more bonkers.

Yes, mistakes happen all the time. One aspect of the aviation industry that I have always noted is the reluctance to adopt this as an excuse for failure. When a pilot pushes Button X instead of Button Y, it isn't just chalked up to pilot error. Somebody asks why Button X and Button Y are arranged right next to each other to begin with. Why was a situation created in which "pilot error" becomes so easy? Then things are changed so that such pilot error becomes harder and less likely.

It's an admirable thing when somebody has to go out of their way and go through some contortions to make critical mistakes.

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