Of course it's relevant! If they had been cleared for an ILS approach, the FO probably wouldn't have "accidentally omitted" to tune it. :rolleyes:

Added: it also makes you wonder what the captain was (not) doing if it was SOP to tune it on a Vis.

Heavy traffic arriving from an international long haul flight at night time, complying with sensible company procedures, and then being treated by ATC like this. I don´t see this as anything else but unprofessional and very inflexible by ATC - which I do not find common in the US of A in general. I commend the Lufthansa for not bending over to the economical pressure. I´m not sure what specific aircraft LH were operating on this sector, and they possible carried max load (cargo and fuel), but this reinstates the consideration of always carrying that extra bit of fuel - unless you want to extend your duty by 2 hours and see pax missing connecting flights etc.

No need for inverted commas. let us put it another way. The FO failed to follow SOP for a visual which was to tune the ILS the captain was PF If SOP had been followed the problem would not have occurred in spite of not having been cleared for an ILS

Thoroughly unprofessional ATC behaviour, both petty and childish. This is how accidents occur. The ATC is in the wrong job; he should be managing shopping carts at Walmart.

The flight was 4 hours late.

FAA vs ICAO
 

Another typical example of why it was (still is imo) wrong to have 2 sets of rules when flying into the US .
ICAO main goal when created was to allow cross border seamless air traffic , with sets of rules valid for every country that signed up to its convention.
So, according ICAO if you file an IFR flight plan you expect an instrument arrival . ATC can propose but not force you to do a visual approach if you are on an IFR flight plan . . But it can delay / put you in the hold for separation / sequencing, but mot refusing you which is basically what happened here .

LH is right to demand an instrument APP , and ATC should have accommodated it. Now that said US controllers are trained according FAA rules which differ from ICAO . It not only visual approaches, also at night ,it is also LAHSO procedures for instance . All are typical US procedures and can be ( and are sometimes ) refused by non US airlines .
This know issue is not new and should definitively not be resolved on the frequencies.

What we see now in 2023 is pushing for more and more traffic into saturated airports suffering ATC staff shortages and bending the rules ro make it work .
This is going to end up badly .

That is not going to be an uncommon experience though. They will have at least a few flights a month that may be delayed by that much.

SFO seems to have international traffic coming in at all hours of the day. As someone alluded to, DLH insisting on an ILS would have meant inconveniencing maybe a dozen other airplanes.



It seems better to have one plane holding somewhere than 12. They were asked to evacuate a visual approach in night VMC. Not an unreasonable request for the holder of an ATP. It’s San Francisco, not Innsbruck.



I’m not faulting the crew, they have to follow the SOP. It’s just a dumb SOP.

Croosair 3597 was having a guy in the LHS who wasn’t up to flying jets..iirc he was one of Moritz’s first pilots, had failed conversion onto the 146 twice and spent nearly 6 months line training before he passed his third shot not long before the accident..
Glad that I missed the red tape flying..we had final approach configuration selected by 400ft..stabilised by 300ft in practice and could “bend” the rules if we could demonstrate that it was “best use of équipement”. Those were the days where we understood airmanship.

Instead of forcing LH to Oakland, I’m sure a small delay for a few arrivals into SFO to accomodate them would not have been a great impost.
If I was LH, I would have just declared Mayday Fuel and landed at SFO.

Well we know the USA does not have much regard for ILS. The Asiana accident report shows the ILS was out of action at San Francisco, both main landing runways at the same time, for three months, "for construction". The fact that the Asiana crew had hardly any experience of visual landings outside their Sim sessions shows there are few if any other administrations who might do this.

So what happens at SFO if cloud prevents aircraft on approach from being visual with each other? Does the entire system grind to a halt because such a vast international airport can't cope with IFR arrivals? Sounds beyond belief.

Appalling, inflexible, "service".

I think even Malaga ATC is better than this shower...whilst OJT!

This was not a Mayday situation and was managed in spite of the aggro to not become one.

The post flight report on this will be problematic enough for management of LH and for the SATCO, engineering a Mayday would not be received with amusement.

After a 4 hour delay to start with on a long flight, and 2 hours to turn around to swim across the ditch from oaktown to SFO, ATC managed to increase threats, not reduce them. They should look inwards and reflect on what their task actually is, being a hazard to flight is not normally included, that is optional.

The answer is if Lufthansa are unable to comply with local procedures then SFO should initiate an approach ban on operators who cannot comply or withdraw their operating permit.
Had Frankfurt ignore approach sequencing so that LH could jump the queue including descending a 747 through our level in the hold which caused me to duck..complaint said 1000ft séparation my @rse.
Seem to remember that when Big Airlines lost a donk out of LAX and attempted to fly back to base only to get their knickers into a twist going into Manchester that the FAA invited them across the pond for a without tea and biscuits discussion.

Whow ! And on which legal basis could they do such thing ?
Is enforcing an IFR flight to perform visual apprach/separation at night an FAA mandatory published procedure ? or is it just another unwritten local capacity enhancement practice ?

Intending that another interruption (from SLF/attorney) of discussion by the pros will be tolerated, maybe even interesting.

How does the aftermath of this particular situation get worked out, if it ever does get worked out? Intuitively and by common sense an outside observer would think within FAA, and also up the reporting chain of the established international air carrier, reports filed by the participants (or supervisors) will express frustration that such a situation could occur. They'll cite different reasons depending on whose report it is, and neither ATC nor LH will think another instance of this sequence of events is one that should be just shrugged off, not anything worth doing something to solve or prevent. But my uneducated guess is, FAA has imposed certain rules, and if I get the flow of the discussion FAA would back the ATC actions (because it sees inconveniencing one flight operator as better than disrupting a lot more other operators). I won't guess about whether LH's SOP makes sense enough to warrant its imposition (SLF . . .).

But ATC Watcher points to ICAO as intended to create - though the post didn't use these exact words - complete uniformity, even on the level of operational procedures for approach and landing. That's an overstatement, though - ICAO was created and organized, and today it operates, to create and uphold standardization. The fact that "Differences" can be filed establishes that uniformity of procedural choices for operational matters wasn't and isn't what ICAO does. (During her stint as Secretary General of ICAO, Fang Liu repeatedly emphasized in remarks delivered to professional conferences that standardization, and not necessarily uniformity, is the objective.)

If the FAA's view of the operational procedures the ATCOs were following is incorrect, who is going to direct FAA to change things? - you would think LH would be entitled to some positive action about this type of situation. Germany hosted the (very large) AirDefender 2023 NATO aviation exercise last summer, and the EUROCONTROL Global Civil-Military Aviation Summit was held in Brussels during that exercise. One would think that, if LH deserves some positive action to prevent a recurrence, somebody in the vast U.S. Fed. Government would motivate change. (I'm not referring to ATCO attitude or manners, just the facts or operating procedures.) And this even despite the more than a little inconvenient fact that United States at present does not have a Permanent Rep at ICAO and there appears zero prospect of the current administration presenting a nominee to the Senate.

SFO ops clarification
 

1) SFO no longer conducts PRM due staffing, training, reduced offset separation. They do, however so “close space parallel runway” ops. That requires 2 straight in approaches with 1nm “stagger”, heavy always trails. See
https://www.faa.gov/documentLibrary/...es_to_CSPR.pdf

2) IFR stagger, even in VMC, (vs visual “sideby”reduces arrival rate from 54 to 45.

3) the 8p-10p arrival “bank” is scheduled to the max. miles in trail sequencing for the 28R steam begins almost 1hr out with salt lake center.

4) back to note 1, even with reduced stagger at 1mi, departures off of 1L, 1R, are affected as the “gap” to launch departures is smaller, slowing ops tempo.

Makes you wonder what Lufthansa have been doing every other time they've operated into SFO at night.

It doesn’t grind to a halt but it slows way down. The closer in domestic flights are ground stopped with some cancels and most regional jet flights are simply canceled. That provides the cushion needed to bring the international flights in.

They were probably assigned the quiet bridge visual. This is a published procedure which is built into the FMS and uses the localizer. If every airline refused I suspect they would need to cut the arrival rate by 30% at night.

The US understanding of visual approaches speeding up arrivals is a bit flawed. Lining up a stream of visual traffic is no different to lining up a stream of ILS traffic if done properly. This is simply ATC being lazy and passing the buck.
Also, US controllers don't understand that pilots arriving from Europe are doing their approaches in survival mode with very little room for acrobatics. A night visual is not a healthy way to land a widebody given awake times of 16-18 hours.

It had an STD of 1620 and was airborne at 1830 - probably a bit less than two hours late, allowing for taxi time at MUC. https://www.flightradar24.com/data/f...lh458#3275cdb3

Same flight on other days: https://www.flightradar24.com/data/flights/lh458

Of all the factors to be blamed for that, the lack of an ILS shouldn’t be one. If you can’t execute a straight in visual approach, the ILS isn’t at fault. Reminiscent of the bad workman quarrelling with his tools…

I’d assume they’d revert to instrument approaches, which would slow the arrival rate.

Not sure if you’ve ever done the approach in question to SFO, but I’d hardly call a visual approach “acrobatics”.

Also, do we know how many pilots were on board? I gather many EU operators come to the east coast of the US with only 2 pilots. I imagine a flight to sfo would have at least 3 pilots, so everyone would’ve had a chance to rest. It’s not like they were asked to fly a circling approach at minima after operating for 12 hours.

To your first point, it’s not about lazy controllers. The separation requirement is reduced for visual approaches, so by doing visuals, ATC can provide service to a greater number of customers.

Would you rather do a visual approach (in nice weather on a nice night) or hold for half an hour waiting to do an ILS?

What I really don’t get in this whole US Airports optimization via visual separation strategy:
there are official definitions for radar separation. They were designed for a reason. They are being used to set airports capacities all over the world.
is it really prudent to increase capacity by saying that aircraft will not be separated via radar but have to do it themselves?
just the idea of doing parallel approaches on an airport that is not designed for that seems scary for me (as a non professional pilot)

With the runway spacing at SFO doing visuals increases the arrival capacity substantially. Even at other airports visuals increase arrival rate as it allows for reduced spacing. As far as the SFO approach it’s a charted visual to intercept the ILS. The entire approach can be done on autopilot and is basically exactly the same as flying the instrument version. There is one difference. You have to report the traffic to the parallel runway in sight. If LH feels that difference is unacceptable then they need to evaluate their service to SFO.

Yet somehow widebody operators flew the checkerboard approach into Kai Tak, in all sorts of weather transitioning to a pure visual at low level after such long flight times, a far more challenging approach by any measure ‘acrobatics’ seriously?


This visual approach into SFO has lateral and vertical guidance provided by LNAV / VNAV, if LH decided it’s outside their pilots capabilities to look out the window to spot other aircraft ATC points out to them they should consider whether they want to continue service there


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

Im surprised the controller didn’t tell him to squawk VFR, radar service terminated

From what i understand from my friends in Lufty they have no restriction on flying visual approaches at night, unlike other german airlines, in my previous one there was a blanket ban on it and we had no problem flying into SFO with that. However, they are not allowed to use visual separation from other traffic at night, which can be done independently of the approach type flown.

To me as an outsider it looks like the type of approach is not the problem, it is the transferring of responsibility in regards to traffic separation from ATC to flight crew which seems to be the issue.

Follow-up video with a controller’s comments. It wasn’t the controller from the original video, but an excellent analysis from the ATC perspective.

Identifying some of the landmarks on these charts is difficult enough during the day, let alone at night. Given it's such a noise-sensitive area I'm always surprised that SFO hasn't been at the forefront of implementing RNP-AR approaches.

SFO is noise sensitive? Didn’t know that.

Why else would the Quiet Bridge be cranked 9° off the CL (with no published waypoints)?

No waypoints on the FAA chat that I can see for the QB... I can understand LH not wanting to do a visual at night based (what's not) on the chart.

Get out of the dark ages. Do you seriously think that that approach would be allowed now? For goodness sake...

Presumably the traffic going into SFO are filing IFR flight plans. If SFO cannot offer an instrument approach then maybe they should advise if unable visual to add X minutes of holding fuel. I can see it makes sense to expedite traffic flow when it’s VMC but the problem seems, to me at least, that it is entirely reasonable for an operator to specify no visual approaches at night unless specific rules are in place. Just like foreign operators don’t conduct LAHSO. Similarly the circling protected area is larger under ICAO then TERPS. Different jurisdictions have different standards.

Also, I was under the impression that after the Asiana accident that foreign carriers wouldn’t be expected to fly visual approaches? It would be fascinating to visit NORCAL and understand the challenges they face and equally to impress on them that at the end of a long day asking a crew to maintain separation based on visual acquisition at night isn’t ideal.

Lastly, I think both parties in this particular incident used inappropriate language. We’re on the same side or at least should be!

Can you do that in the US ? Just curious. In ICAO land , which is basically the rest of the world, only the PIC can cancel IFR , never the controller.

Just checked with a colleague flying for LH on 747s: Denti is correct , the “daylight only” SOP restriction is not about visual approches but visual acquisition of other traffic .
Has apparently never been a real issue before probably because normal LH OPS to SFO are daylight.

Looks like this time some people became or were inflexible , the tone and language used did not help either .
As safety was never impaired I am even not sure the FAA will investigate . A diversion is not an incident , although DLH might see it differently .
.

Forgive me here. I'm 14 years retired from a large European operator and operated regularly into many US airports(incl SFO) as Captain of a B747-400.

In my day, iirc, all European operators declined to be part of the LAHSO procedures, and I believe that was annotated in the FPL remarks.

It would seem that this could be a way of giving advance notification of Lufty's restrictions - no visual approaches at night, or some such?

It’s a charted procedure in the FMS! There are no landmarks you need to find other than the runway. It’s hard to miss that at night. It’s flown just like an instrument approach. It’s a very easy and benign charted visual compared to some other airports like LGA and DCA. The ILS is available for glideslope and FMS for lateral.

[irony] Back then pilots were real pilots (and for fans of Douglas Adams, small furry creatures were real ...). [/irony]

they have rnp-ar to 28r. The visuals are now rnav visuals and selectable from fmc.