A Lufthansa A350's frustrating Oakland diversion

There&#x27;s a follow up video to the one linked in the story that provides a lot more context missing in this piece. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=4zHxdn8oz20" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=4zHxdn8oz20</a><p>Basically, SFO normally does VFR parallel approaches at night. Approach sequences these approaches miles beforehand, so there can be a chain of 10-20 aircraft all sequenced to land before responsibility is even transferred to SFO&#x27;s tower. The incident happened during a particularly busy landing time at SFO, so there was indeed a massive chain of aircraft coming in to land.<p>Lufthansa was the only aircraft asking for ILS. Because ILS needs greater separation, that would require breaking the chain of approaches, sequencing a single ILS approach, then resuming. The chain of landings already sequenced takes priority, so Lufthansa would have to wait 30+ minutes for a gap to appear. By the time that gap appeared, Lufthansa had just decided to divert to Oakland. If Lufthansa had arrived a bit earlier or a bit later, they would have been sequenced just fine.<p>ATC could have been a bit more accommodating in rerouting their divert to SFO as soon as the a gap appeared, but Lufthansa was also the only airline requesting ILS, and they&#x27;re already dealing with sequencing 20+ aircraft during a busy time. It&#x27;s not clear who&#x27;s in the wrong here; just an unintended consequence from many well-intentioned decisions.

1&#x2F; Visual vs instrument approach. The main difference in this case is separation requirements that ATC must provide. Specifically, under IFR rules ATC mus provide 3 miles &#x2F; 500 feet altitude separation minimum. For visual approaches, the separation is responsibility of the pilots and this enables parallel runway landings at SFO with much shorter intervals (there is a version of parallel landings with instrument approaches at SFO but it discontinued during Covid and not resumed since AFAIK).<p>2&#x2F; The approach sequence is established long long long before arrival to the airport. The ATC controllers (approach and center) coordinate arrivals and create sequencing hundreds of miles from a large airport like SFO. The last minute Lufthansa request for an instrument approach would have forced dozens of planes to go into hold or fly vectors which creates a lot of work for everyone.<p>3&#x2F; SFO tower is NOT responsible for approaches and was not dealing with holding Lufthansa. This is responsibility of NorCal approach<p>4&#x2F; My personal take is that Lufthansa should have advised ATC that they need instrument approach much earlier (as soon as they got ATIS which would be 50-100 miles from airport). That would have enabled ATC to create a gap for them. Last minute request is a surprise nobody needs. The Lufthansa attitude afterwards is unacceptable. They were asking for preferential treatment (get us in and screw a couple dozen of other airplanes). They also should have communicated to ATC that they have 30 mins of fuel for hold and that would informed NorCal about time limits they are working with. Lastly, threatening ATC with a fuel emergency.... not nice, not nice at all. From my personal experience with ATC is that they are very accommodating but they don&#x27;t like surprises. Tell them what you want early and controllers usually find ways to make it work by the time you get there. Have a last minute request? If ATC is not busy they will help you. If ATC is busy -- go to the back of the line. Which is <i>exactly</i> what happened here.

Maybe the reason why Lufthansa does not allow visual approach at SFO at night, could be after the Air Canada near miss.<p>&gt; The NTSB determined the probable cause was the Air Canada flight crew&#x27;s confusion of the runway with the parallel taxiway, with contributing causes including the crew&#x27;s failure to use the instrument landing system (ILS), as well as pilot fatigue.<p>FAA changed the rules for SFO and made visual approaches forbidden at night &quot;when an adjacent parallel runway is closed&quot; [2]. Maybe Lufthansa plays it safe and requires ILS for all long haul night landings.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Air_Canada_Flight_759" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Air_Canada_Flight_759</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.flightglobal.com&#x2F;faa-changes-san-francisco-landing-procedures-after-a320-near-miss&#x2F;125135.article" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.flightglobal.com&#x2F;faa-changes-san-francisco-landi...</a>

&gt; Pilot: If we are not set up for base soon, we will have to declare a fuel emergency and that would really fuck up your sequence.<p>&gt; Controller: What is your divert field?<p>&gt; Pilot: Oakland<p>&gt; Controller: Ok you need vectors to Oakland?<p>&gt; Pilot: No, my company forbids visual separation at night, what is the problem here?<p>&gt; Controller: I can&#x27;t have this conversation with you. You either divert to Oakland or you can continue to hold. It&#x27;s up to you sir.<p>&gt; Pilot: Ok you promised me 10 minutes, that ran out 4 minutes ago, so how many more minutes?<p>&gt; Controller: This conversation is over.<p>So this controller, knowing the plane was near a fuel emergency, gave the pilots the option to either crash their plane with 240 people on board, or to divert to Oakland. This is tough for me to wrap my head around.<p>I don&#x27;t want to blame this one controller for what is obviously a pattern of systematic failures at SFO, but I&#x27;m going to seriously consider flying into Oakland or San Jose next time if this is the attitude of the controllers there.

This is not a special <i>Lufthansa</i> thing. The majority of airlines from Europe limit visual approaches to daylight.<p>It does not apply to their home base, which is Frankfurt and Munich. The pilots are familiar with these airports, traffic patterns and so on.<p>Lufthansa tries to schedule outbound flights so that they arrive at daytime - if possible.<p>I don’t know why the controller was handling the situation that way. Taking flight duration and delay into account that was uncomfortable for the crew and passengers. And a waste of fuel. Mind the necessary repositioning of the plane, they had to move it to SFO later anyway.<p>I think it is tough when people discuss your work in public. And I’m not involved and lack knowledge! I hope the involved people learn and improve. We are all humans and make mistakes and&#x2F;or misbehave. I have a lot to improve.

I got my pilot&#x27;s license in the Bay Area and transited SFO&#x27;s class bravo frequently. The region has one of the world&#x27;s most complex airspaces (a B, two Cs, and a crap-ton of Ds), and SFO has a mind-boggling amount of traffic for an airport of its size. Based on my lived experience in that airspace, I think ATC did the best they could in a tough position, and I think that Lufthansa asking for special treatment is the asshole move. If they demand ILS in VFR conditions, they should schedule their arrival times to less-busy times.

There was a major airliner crash at JFK caused (partly) by poor communication between pilots and ATC, resulting in the plane running out of fuel,<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Avianca_Flight_052" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Avianca_Flight_052</a> (1990)<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;admiralcloudberg.medium.com&#x2F;the-words-not-spoken-the-crash-of-avianca-flight-052-c69145b326f2" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;admiralcloudberg.medium.com&#x2F;the-words-not-spoken-the...</a><p>There was a similar fact pattern to the OP: the pilots relied on time estimates from ATC which turned out to be inaccurate,<p>- <i>&quot;Due to the air traffic controllers giving ultimately untrue delay estimations the flight became critically low on fuel.&quot;</i>

Like in the youtube video&#x27;s comments section, I suspect everyone on HN is going to assume that the ATC was simply being petty, and perhaps that was the case. But...<p>We don&#x27;t know what the approach into SFO looked like that night, but you can bet it was busy. VASAviation videos are often highly misleading in this regard. Most of the talk on the ATC frequency is cut (sometimes explicitly, sometimes not) leaving just that relevant to the videos content, the time is compressed and they only plot a few of the planes involved, making the airspace look clear.<p>My understanding is that SFO often has two closely spaced parallel runways taking arrivals. The visual approach is preferred because then the pilots on parallel approaches keep visual separation from each other, allowing more frequent landings. An ILS approach requires more space between planes (because ATC remains responsible for separation). Hence, the Lufthansa had to wait for a gap big enough to fit that ILS approach in, or the whole stack of planes lined up for the approach would have to be juggled - how feasible that would be I don&#x27;t know.

Just a clarifier for everyone - a fuel emergency is not what you think it is. They don’t run until the last drop. While it indicates the aircraft should be handled without delay, it’s also not going to fall out of the sky immediately either.<p>A fuel emergency would never be severe enough that they would be forced to land at SFO in this situation. In fact, if they were truly forced to land the pilots would lose their jobs because they left it way too late. Oakland was always a reasonable option.<p>Finally, fuel emergencies are not actually a standard call. It is a thing that is adhered to in the industry as courtesy. Unless there is a malfunction with the fuel system (which would be a mayday call) then it is mostly avoidable.

Pilots can be d*cks, but recently there was a string of ATC related incidents, where ATC show questionable judgment and become too &quot;moody&quot; too soon. Here is another example: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;jasonrosewell&#x2F;status&#x2F;1733645088473989245" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;jasonrosewell&#x2F;status&#x2F;1733645088473989245</a> JBU going too slow, instead of assigning a new speed and then scolding the pilot, ATC starts giving the attitude before telling him what he wants.

I see a huge problem here with &quot;Everybody Knows&quot;, even among the people who sound like air transport professionals.<p>Lufthansa Requirement: Instrument landing<p>SFO Preference: Visual landing<p>Reason for Lufthansa requirement: IFR&#x2F;ILS is safer than visual<p>Reason for SFO preference: Visual allows more planes with lower separation, leading to better throughput.<p>More context: Lufthansa would be using their instruments anyway, without declaring instrument flight rules landing. Declaring ILS in some generic sense is &quot;safer&quot;, but specifically it means that the controllers cannot clear them to land in a degraded ILS environment, where perhaps some beacons are offline.<p>The SFO preference is not just something that the airport or the controller decided - it&#x27;s also good for the airlines and the flying public. More planes land faster. The planes took off with the expectation that they would be able to land at a certain rate; otherwise they wouldn&#x27;t schedule them to arrive so frequently.<p>The problem with &quot;Everybody Knows&quot; is that you really don&#x27;t. The controller may assume that Lufthansa means &quot;hey are all the beacons on?&quot; when they say &quot;IFR landing&quot;. Lufthansa may assume that IFR clearance means that the ILS equipment is operational, but that they can still fit into the VFR sequence.<p>In this case, those assumptions probably would have worked out Ok. But if &quot;Everybody Knows&quot; is part of your work culture and you work on life critical systems, than someone will eventually die, as you can see from the history of investigations into air transport incidents.<p>If you feel like someone is saying or implying &quot;Everybody Knows&quot; in a safety critical or life critical system, that is bad culture. Start documenting.

This feels &#x27;of a type&#x27; with the rest of the crisis in the United States&#x27;s air traffic control system. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2023&#x2F;12&#x2F;02&#x2F;business&#x2F;air-traffic-controllers-safety.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2023&#x2F;12&#x2F;02&#x2F;business&#x2F;air-traffic-cont...</a>

There&#x27;s a better discussion of the Lufthansa situation at [1]. ILS landings require more spacing. The ILS system itself just shows the way to the runway, not what other aircraft are doing. In a visual approach in busy conditions, the pilot can see the aircraft ahead. In an ILS approach, it&#x27;s assumed that they can&#x27;t. This leads to ATC wanting to use visual approaches to get more planes landed.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ops.group&#x2F;blog&#x2F;us-visual-approaches-lh458&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ops.group&#x2F;blog&#x2F;us-visual-approaches-lh458&#x2F;</a>

The article seems to be misleading a little, because it was not 10 min in total.<p>Lufthansa asked for ILS, was put on hold for 20 min, then ATC promised another 10 minutes, and then 14 more min passed and this is when the pilot got frustrated.

I can&#x27;t find a source, but I thought I read somewhere that these policies came following the Asiana Flight 214 crash [1], during which a plane did a visual approach to SFO instead of ILS. My understanding was that there was a rule change requiring ILS approaches at night at SFO, then the airlines implemented policies duplicating the rules in their policies, but then the rules were revoked - still leaving airline policies in place.<p>Anybody have any sources on this?<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Asiana_Airlines_Flight_214" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Asiana_Airlines_Flight_214</a>

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;o7RId2iiZng?si=ERMLyrSwkrLL6xmh" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;o7RId2iiZng?si=ERMLyrSwkrLL6xmh</a><p>Recently there was a separation issue with a very similar night time visual approach into SFO.<p>It&#x27;s not like trying to squeeze two flights into close parallel runways at the same time to maximizer capacity is a very safe thing to do considering everything that could go wrong

I had a lufthansa flight cancelled due to company policy of how long you could sit on the tarmac. They had an instrument go bad, had a spare on hand but couldn&#x27;t find it in time.<p>Flight got cancelled and I got rebooked for 4 days later. Which was after my business trip so I cancelled. I&#x27;m still waiting on my refund 3 months later. Everyone I speak to is nice, polite, agrees to refund me while saying but we&#x27;ll have to call you back &quot;because policy&quot;, pretty annoying. Whatever, i&#x27;ll get it eventually I&#x27;m sure<p>I don&#x27;t particularly care for Lufthansa.

The bigger issue here is that the ILS is being set aside in favor of visual approaches in order to slot in a few more approaches per hour.<p>What&#x27;s the point of equipping SFO with ILS if it&#x27;s just going to sit idle?

I thought I would just briefly pop into this thread to say that if I, as a passenger, were to learn that the flight* I was unexpectedly diverting across the bay, I just know I&#x27;d somehow embarrass myself from getting all hyphy about my &quot;bonus&quot; trip to Oaktown. Raising my daughter there through the grade school years conjures up some warm memories. Love that town.<p>But I&#x27;m not just here reppin&#x27; for Oakland – apparently, there&#x27;s a lot of dysfunction at the FAA that I had no idea about. Glad I clicked.<p>*(well, maybe not a 12+ hr one)

I wonder if it was an option to say &quot;okay&quot;, continue circling, then declare a fuel emergency and land. Seems like ATC was being a dick here.<p>Not sure: 1) How long this would take 2) If this actually endangers anyone&#x2F;anything

What’s the big deal? Sounds like everything got negotiated just fine. SFO couldn’t accommodate an ILS landing at the moment, the Lufthansa flight required landing sooner, so they diverted. Some people got inconvenienced? That’s a shame.

Overall it feels like a punitive measure against Lufthansa, rather than spending the time to get them an ILS clearance.<p>For reference the flight is usually a 6:45p arrival but was very late on the evening in question.

A couple of things to add:<p>Having watched the planes land at SFO at night provides an additional context. There are often two long streams of planes, like a spaced necklace, coming in to land. They look far apart when flying but then you notice just have fast another one comes.<p>And to those who fault the traffic controller - it is on the controller if something bad happens. Politeness, even a charge of grumpiness goes out the window in the face of that responsibility. Period. IMHO.

I see this as a reap what you sow moment for Lufthasa.<p>Why should ATC at a busy airport be so accommodating? Lufthasa is the one making this hard on everyone.<p>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.

Previous HN discussion of another article on this same incident:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=38511140">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=38511140</a>

Regardless of what everyone is saying about the controller, I think the pilots behavior was disrespectful (to both ATC and to the lives of those on their plane) and unprofessional.<p>You don’t get to cry wolf and cut the line because you were late and want preferential treatment. Go to Oakland as told, wait, or declare an actual emergency for emergency procedures to be run for you.

So much talk of who&#x27;s at fault here, but what strikes me is that it ever got to this point. I feel like competence is at an all-time low in recorded history. Maybe we need to take a step back and go back to horse-drawn carriages until we&#x27;ve re-learned how to be responsible. I have a flight this week and this isn&#x27;t helping my anxiety.

I find it fascinating that pilots and ATC from around the world can understand each other on such a poor resolution channel.

as an aside, i&#x27;d feel safer if more airlines had this policy

Hey guys - airline pilot here. Will respond shortly.

If you read Sabre annual statements going back 10 years it’s well know the FAA has been totally deprived of ability to remedy these issues.<p>Frankly I don’t care since Delta dumped my Dad’s pension on me and my generation fuck that industry.

I’m sure the industry has standards for assigning blame, but it looks to me that ATC is clearly being assholes here.<p>Even from this article that clearly seems to think Lufthansa is in the wrong I walked away with a feeling that ATC and small town cops are one and the same.

Seems like Lufthansa has decided it&#x27;s not able to land planes at SFO at night.

I was just booking a flight through Lufthansa and was amused to see the English in all their emails&#x2F;website is kind of bad, 2000s Japan-level.<p>Like &quot;You are pre-ordering of the pretzel to eat on board of the aircraft? Then klick here!&quot;.<p>I get the impression Germans think they&#x27;re great at English and so don&#x27;t actually check to see if they are or not.

This is coming from someone who only has experience as a commercial flight passenger, but I would expect AI to be very promising for ATC. Obviously there are various concerns ranging from potential attack vectors and the need for failsafes if any automated system fails, but has this been explored?