Originally Posted by
stilton
.......Why should they get special treatment? No other operators are demanding this, not sure how they thought swearing at the controller would help them, that was highly unprofessional, LH sops are the source of the problem here but this pilot made things much worse with his attitude and made a diversion inevitable......
ATC are there to help and assist aircraft, so if someone needs a different approach, that should be granted, as indeed the SFO ATC did. My reading of this is that it started entirely reasonably, with the LH stating their restriction and ATC agreeing to facilitate that request, but they would have to hold until a suitable gap could be found in the inbound sequence. So far so good. Then it seems that the LH started getting arsey, complaining about having to wait longer than 10 mins. At this point ATC basically said if you want an ILS you will have to wait, if you don't want to wait, you will have to go to your alternate, which sounds reasonable to me. Given this LH company imposed restriction at SFO, and knowing about procedures at SFO, one would imagine that their flights there would take extra holding fuel, just in case. This LH clearly hadn't, and they sounded quite arrogant to me, which unsurprisingly annoyed ATC, who then refused to continue what was turning into an argument.
Going “visual” at night is an oxymoron surely?
If you think this, how do you ever land at night ?! On clear nights we can see the runway from miles away. Maintaining separation from a very close parallel approach at night is not so easy, hence, presumably, the Lufthansa restriction - probably made by their flight safety team, not just 'some bloke in an office'.
