Originally Posted by
ATC Watcher
In this go around situation we are not talking about separation standards but collision avoidance. 2 very different things.
Given that the purpose of separation standards is collision avoidance, I don’t understand your distinction. Are you saying that once a pilot declares a go-around, ATC is no longer obligated to apply separation standards?
The 7110.65/5-8-4 (radar departures) requirement to maintain between arriving and departing aircraft a minimum of 2 miles if increasing to 3 miles within 1 minute would seem to apply in the KMSP incident. I don’t see any exclusion to this requirement if the arriving aircraft initiates a go-around. If the AA pilot had followed the offset-to-the-right instruction correctly, the end result would have been two airliners flying on the same heading, within 200 feet in altitude, with a lateral separation determined by how much the AA pilot decided to offset from the runway centerline. Not sure how this would have made much difference compared with the offset-to-left actual flight path.
This incident is a nearly identical to the Sarasota (KRSQ), Austin (KAUS), and Burbank (KBUR) incidents. In all of those, the NTSB referred to those incidents as loss of separation incidents.