Originally Posted by
Request Orbit
As I said at the time when stating the numbers, I don’t really feel it’s relevant to the point at all for the most part. What is of more relevance, at least to me, was the absolute belief the two original posters had that they were correct. Even when stated the numbers from the places they’d requested, they still refused to believe them or alter their position. This then leads me to take anything else they say with an absolute mines worth of salt, which is a pity as it appears at least one of them had a lot of first-hand, relevant info to add to the discussion. There may be an interesting tangential discussion to be had about why they’re so convinced SFO is much busier.
That is of far more interest to me. It explains why the DLH pilot was so baffled that he was still being vectored around 40 minutes after first confirming they were unable to apply visual separation. If it was never an issue before why was it this time?
No telling, but the traffic situation can and does change daily/nightly. There's nothing in the video that paints the larger picture but it's 100% certain it differed from previous LH flights because even the previous night would have been different. There could've been a stream as far east as Salt Lake City, or perhaps the other LH aircraft gave far more advance notice, or arrived at a different time after sundown, or a different day of the week.
The entire comparison between LHR and SFO or any other European airport as it pertains to "the ability to handle traffic" just because they have parallel runways is silly because LHR is slot-governed for all aircraft arrivals like almost every other European airport is slot-governed for all aircraft arrivals. Unlike the US, the airways of Europe are also essentially slot-governed. The US has only 1 slot-governed airport that any international flight has to deal with, JFK, and that's only the 9th busiest airport in the US and world. At their busiest, LHR is comparable to JFK (movements, widely-spaced parallels, IATA Level 3). The US doesn't even cap the traffic for airports 1-8, so they don't for SFO either. Point is, the level of congestion can change a great deal day-t0-day, week-to-week, month-to-month.
Because of this, you certainly can't take previous LH aircrafts' ability to get worked-in for an ILS as a historical guide to assume there should have been an easy way to do so that night.