I hope someone can help me out, I've listened to this a couple of times and this is what I've come up with. Is this basically a correct sequence of events?
1. American is not on an emergency/mayday at the start of the tape when he makes contact with tower.
2. He's cleared to land 22L.
3. He's told the wind.
4. He can't accept the wind and declares an emergency.
5. He lands on another runway.
He cannot accept the wind limits on 22L. It's only a short tape and we can't know too much but it doesn't sound like he's operating with a stack of failures on board - it's simply out of a/c limits. Correct?
So then I presume he now will go below bingo fuel if he doesn't break off immediately for the other runway - hence an emergency, because of his fuel state. It will become an emergency if he can't route there directly, but it isn't at this point right now.
My question is therefore, if he's just gotten to that stage of fuel - disregarding any warnings he's given along the route - surely it's a bit drastic to start carving up the skies when you're at a major airfield and got (I presume) half an hour or so of fuel left?
Am I missing something important here?