Originally Posted by
chazontour
The last minute decision to swap to Runway 12 seems incongruous with the flight history of the aircraft (9N-ANC) between Kathmandu and the new airport at Pokhara. All previous flights appear to take the straight in approach to Runway 30 (as shown on Flightradar 24).
If the decision to use Runway 12 was for a training exercise why would the crew have notified ATC at the last minute when its only a 25 minute flight. Surely it would have been included in the flight plan.
Flightradar24 also shows that the aircraft had been running around an hour behind schedule that morning on its previous sectors. Assuming it was still behind schedule for YT691 then surely the quickest approach would have been straight in via Runway 30?
The *potential* influence of the old airport and familiar patterns of behaviour related to it may have been subtle, nuanced and partial.
This is VERY interesting. Looks like every YT flight into Pokhara for previous 5 days, was straight into runway 30 on the new airport. The YT flight just 3 hours earlier in the day, again was straight into runway 30. ATC cleared them to land on runway 30, but plane asked for runway 12. So pretty darn clear this was unplanned at least from ATC perspective. Hard to argue with that.
Everyone posting that no way they were trying to land at old airport, they were 100s of feet in the air when they passed the stadium, they were too high. Well ya of course at THAT point they were not landing at the old airport. It's pretty clear they are in the air and yes not landing at the old airport at that point. But back up in the flight 3-4 minutes. All evidence we have so far shows an abnormal plan to land on runway 12. When did they make that decision? Was it late in the flight? To me it seems like they were not prepared for runway 12 landing, they were clearly not on a good path to make runway 12, and probably distracted at how they were going to make it, were too low and too slow, and stalled. But contributing factor based on all the current evidence, is that they made a change to runway 12, and probably late in the flight. If it was 5-10 minutes earlier they would have just landed at runway 30.
Anyone know the wind direction that day? Were they landing with the wind behind them?