Originally Posted by
Dan Dare
The assistant seems to be a hero of this story being the first to draw attention to the low approach and missed approach, but the role is going the way of the runway-caravan leaving a controller with ever more ancillary tasks and less chance to continuously observe safety essentials such as runway and gear. The first approach wasn’t far off the energy profile being slightly fast and slightly low, but correcting? Wouldn’t this have been a successful, if messy landing without ATC intervention and we’d have heard no more about it? Most ATCOs have zero flying experience and often never see anything other than 3 degree glide path approaches so don’t really have the required knowledge to say when a flight is dangerously positioned. If every missed approach adds a degree of risk it could be argued than an ATCO could lead to a more dangerous situation with an unnecessary go-around instruction than by leaving the pilots to fly the plane.
This is always the dilemma faced by the Aerodrome Controller. Clearly the ac position in terms of azimuth, and range (in terms of glidepath) is a judgement call, based on experience at their present (& previous) airfield/s.
Those who have experience at airfields where significant light ac training occurs will have seen some ‘interesting manoeuvres’ and are well placed to know just what “does not look pretty”.
What has not been published are the thoughts of the aircraft commander and the CRM aspects. The CVR transcript might well be very revealing.
The ropey G/A is hardly due to the ATCO. That is simply down to a FO overwhelmed by the occasion and failed by pitch to +15° as the opening bid. Was the Capt as PM at that point MONITORING carefully?
Blindly following the FDs is not recommended. Disconnect the FD, and then rebuild the automatics carefully.
Overall the ATCO gets my vote.