For the first part of your post, I don’t say I didn’t believe a word they’d said (and you got one of the two wrong, although it appears there’s been either some self-deletion or moderation since). I said you can’t guarantee it’s accurate, which is very different to saying it’s all incorrect. I don’t doubt for one minute there’s ground stops when it’s IMC. I very much doubt they’re
regularly seeing dual go arounds, but if they’ve not all had to deal with them in training at some point, I’d be surprised.
Originally Posted by
PukinDog
Do you believe LH bears any responsibility for their situation? Could they have done nothing themselves to have prevented ATC's last minute notice? It seems that you're assuming they did, not unlike the assumption that SFO ATC would be used to conducting dual go-arounds when In fact they plan and sequence so they don't.
As both Del Prado and I have said on multiple occasions, and as the DLH pilot made clear on the RT when initially informed of the delay (“if that’s the case, that’s the case”), you’d expect some delay. By the time the pilot is mentioning fuel on the RT when he says an emergency would **** the sequence, it’s almost 40 minutes since they first mentioned being unable to provide visual separation. 40 minutes is absolutely, categorically,
not last minute. By the end of the last delay estimate given, it will be almost an hour since they first asked for the ILS. If an approach controller needs an hour to make a plan, that’s not planning.
They have to make a single gap for the lost paired aircraft, and potentially an extra mile on top of that behind the DLH. That’s almost exactly what they’d need to do for a
single aircraft going around, give or take a mile. Do you think a 40-minute additional delay if you went around would be acceptable?