Could the incident of Commutair 4933 in Presque Island be of relevance to this incident? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CommutAir_Flight_4933

...and that the ILS localizer was out of tolerance by about 200 ft (61 m) to the right, a condition that had been noticed during six previous CommutAir flights, including by the accident first officer, but had not been properly reported to the FAA

NTSB has released a video of the debriefing of the Southwest chief pilot by the FAA tower supervisor with the incident pilots listening in.

Liked. :ok:

WSJ, reporting by AP
"Federal officials are investigating a Southwest Airlines flight that flew close to the air traffic control tower at LaGuardia Airport last month.

The Federal Aviation Administration said Thursday that the plane flew off course due to bad weather as it approached for landing.

The plane flew as low as 300 feet before an air traffic controller, speaking in an unusually urgent tone, told the pilots to abandon the landing and climb to 2,000 feet, according to audio captured by LiveATC.net.

The controller said the plane wasn’t lined up with the runway; it appeared to be east of the intended landing route. “He was not going to land on the runway,” the controller said. The flight was diverted to Baltimore, where the plane landed safely. Southwest didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment."

Yes, it's suddenly everywhere:

https://news.google.com/stories/CAAq...S&ceid=US%3Aen

Unsurprisingly, the Daily Mail prominently features a deliberately-misleading photo and claims that the aircraft "came within 67 feet of the air traffic control tower."

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...ed-around.html

I don't mean to minimize the incident. It's certainly concerning.

It did descend to within 70 feet of the tower elevation, and it wasn't far from directly overflying the tower. There is no minimizing this event...like the close call runway incursions of a year ago, another narrowly missed disaster!

Yeah, I initially thought, "Go around in crappy weather, so what? Media hype." But when you look at the actual deviation and the fact that the crew really didn't realize how far to the right of the centerline that they actually were, it's bad.

Juan Browne has a very-good, non-dramatic video just out that lays it all out, and I commend it. That's like more than 3 dots deviation off centerline, so I'd be inclined to be judgy, but out of respect to a a generally-excellent pilot group, I will wait and be interested to see how this all happened.

True. As I said, I don't want to minimize it — it was a near miss of an accident that would have been catastrophic. But accuracy counts and we can usually count on the Daily Mail not to bother with accuracy.

Yes, as usual, he does a very good and level-headed job of summarizing what's known so far. Thanks for the link.

Definitely scary.

Every aircraft that lands goes 200’ below the tower elevation. Context is everything…..

But it is a very disturbing and curious event. The wx wasn’t even that bad - visibility was 6,000’ which is a nautical mile, so it’s not even an RVR!

A concern to me is why the control safety equipment didn't pick up the issue. The report seems to say all was serviceable, in which case, why didn't it alert?

The viz was variable. One aircraft broke off the approach because RVR went below limits, it is on the recording