I am not a commercial airline pilot but it is a topic of fascination for me for a long time - wouldn't this cause a terrain warning? How were the pilots unaware until ATC told them? Something very strange about this story - I guess fatigue makes sense, but that doesn't explain rerouting to fort lauderdale very well to me.
I'll toss out a theory - there has been a pilot shortage for the last several years. Are corners getting cut on pilot training? Incompetence explains a lot. This is a really baffling incident to me on its face and reading some takes from aviation experts it seems like I am not the only one that thinks so.
They didn't get a terrian warning because they were landing. Being close to the ground is what they expected. They have both radar & pressure altimeters.
What might have happened is that due to the poor weather they thought they were closer to the airport, or they weren't closely following their glide path, or the aircraft was misconfigured for the RNAV approach. Perhaps a combination of the three.
If they are too low according to TAWS map, there would be warning even if they were landing. You can inhibit some of the alerts by switching TAWS into "Terrain Inhibit" mode, but that's usually done for landing at runways outside of TAWS database.
That said, TAWS won't fire if you're below airspace-mandated altitude but above "minimally safe" altitude.
I'm not a commercial pilot but as a private pilot it looks like they were doing a manual approach .... and were lined up with the freeway bridge and attempting to land on it? The blog linked elsewhere looks like a perfect glide path for that ... which you shouldn't be doing.
In which case, the terrain warnings would be the standard "you're landing, idiot" noises which wouldn't alert them to anything, because they'd be expecting them.
As noted in the article, nothing about their explanation makes sense.
Fort Lauderdale is over 260 miles from Tampa. How in the world is that closer than trying to turn around and land in Tampa?
Between stories like this and the ones about runway incursions, it does sometimes feel like our system is beyond the breaking point and that we're on the precipice of a disaster. On the other hand, I can't remember the last time there actually was one and it's very possible that the fact that we only hear about when things go wrong is coloring my perception.
The weather was deteriorating, and it looks like it might have been better at Fort Lauderdale from the weather map. If you're suspecting an issue with the instrument approach equipment and you're low on fuel, you might want to divert to somewhere with better weather to minimize the likelihood of having to execute a second go around and getting in a situation where you don't have enough fuel for a diversion.
For instance, if they have enough fuel to get to Fort Lauderdale and the weather there allows for a visual approach, diverting there gives them a lot more options in the case of malfunctioning instruments.
I'm just a private pilot without an instrument rating, but this diversion doesn't seem crazy to me.
I feel like there was a "lost in translation" issue with the way they phrased the diversion. My assumption was that they didn't have enough fuel to attempt another landing in Tampa AND THEN to divert if it failed (which, given the deteriorating conditions, seems reasonable). The diversion is the least weird part of this story to me too.
Unless they became fixated on the causeway thinking it was the runway--I live here and that runway is not heavily used for commercial flights, so it might simply have been a familiarity issue even for someone regularly flying into TPA--I cannot for the life of me figure out why they ended up where they were. Just a bizarre situation, unless the weather was so bad that they got task saturated and didn't know what was happening.
I did wonder to myself whether they were lucky to be flying a MAX8 due to the power of the engines--an older plane might have taken longer to stop the descent.
The reason for diverting is more about rules than simply the distance. If the weather was marginal at Tampa and the pilots were worried that another failed attempt would lead them to have less than the required fuel to reach the diversion airport (Ft Lauderdale) while still staying above their minimum reserve fuel, then they'd be required to divert without making that additional attempt. Realistically, they'd still probably have enough fuel to reach Ft Lauderdale, but there'd be more paperwork to fill out....
When a commercial jet schedules a flight plan, they must specify alternate airports, usually two are required especially when weather is predicted to be bad. The closest airport may not be the best one to divert to due to runway restrictions, normal capacity, and it must be far enough away for the possibility of it to not be affected by the same weather conditions that the destination is (which would be a reason to divert). Ft Lauderdale is 225nm away which is not far at all for a aircraft to divert to.
Landings in which the approach is entirely over water is tricky and is done with instruments all of the time, typically ILS. This is normal for commercial flights in general, but should the localizer lose the glideslope, autopilot on the b737 defaults to the last mode it was in, which for the approach, they may have been performing a flight level change (FLC) mode down to the airports elevation which will cause a decent more rapid than the 3% guild slope, which allows the aircraft to descend into and catch the glideslope localizer.[note 1] At some point the gluideslope was lost (or was never caught to begin with) which to the pilots’ surprise, they likely encountered a “terrain, pull up” notice and recovered before the situation got worse.
So why divert? Why not go around? Well they had to make that decision because they may not be able to divert if they made the decision to go around and try again due to fuel burn. They likely did not know why they captured the glideslope and then, all of a sudden, they were getting ready for a water landing. Was it the aircraft’s ILS or guideslope localized receiver? Due to the weather, they certainly could not do a visual approach, and there may not be sufficient RNAV points in the water on that approach to land there, so they diverted to an alternate where they know they could land visually if they absolutely had to.
Making decisions while flying aircraft is a calculated process and may not be immediately obvious. It’s easy to see in hindsight how things could have turned out differently but pilots often have minutes or seconds to make a decision and they will always choose the one that results in a safe landing over a convenient one. Media that doesn’t understand how these decisions are made love to poke fun at these silly pilots and it does a huge public disservice.
Note 1: this was explained to me from a friend who flew b737 for an airline
"The weather in Tampa at the time was poor and getting worse. Thunderstorms were prevalent in the area and visibility was decreasing. The relevant METAR (below) indicated thunderstorms at the airfield."
Or maybe it is just over-reporting. Aviation is safe according to the data, but not according to the amount of reporting given to every minor problem. As this story pointed out one of the many backups, ATC, called out that they were low before anything bad happened. If we had even remotely close to this standard of over-reporting on any other transportation sector we would have stories multiple times a day. People are injured on busses due to rough driving all the time, no stories. 40k people die on the roads every year, barely a news story. A plane descends but is stopped before anything happens, it is a story.
It’s the sort of behaviour, and explanation, that you might expect from someone who is far too tired to function, and is operating purely on ingrained habit.
Things went well in this case, but I’ve seen the sort of schedules that are considered safe, and I can’t help but notice that if you asked me to work the same schedule then I would, at best, be exhausted at the end of every workday. If I for any reason didn’t get proper rest, if I had a subclinical cold, anything, then I’d be falling asleep at the wheel.
The article notes it was their fourth flight of the day, which means eight takeoffs or landings. And they started at 6am.
I’m not a pilot, but doing eight rounds of mentally intensive work in a day is exhausting, especially when that day begins with a 4am wake up call in a hotel.
I think both pilots and air traffic control are stretched thin due to labor shortages, and these incidents are the symptom (pilot and ATC errors, the latter appearing to be occurring far more often than previously wrt runway conflict and incursions). The system will continue to operate to the best of abilities, but failure will eventually result, because tired people make mistakes.
An interesting exercise would be to consume ADS-B data flow and surface anomalous aircraft behavior (based on historical flight path look back and airspace/airspeed/altitude logic) for triage and reporting outside of formal reporting by ATC or pilots.
The flight path looks like they were approaching for the east-west runway which is pretty rarely used at Tampa so that might have caused some confusion but that's what instruments and ATC are for.
If they had to divert, St. Pete Clearwater is right there and big. They probably flew right over it. Orlando and Sarasota are also much closer than Ft. Lauderdale. Maybe they didn't want St. Pete/Clearwater or Sarasota because of weather or Southwest doesn't use them, but Orlando gets plenty of Southwest traffic.
This is the sticking point for me and somewhat feels like they did this deliberately to erase the cockpit voice recorder so they could try and limit lawsuits and negative press.
Most CVRs are overwritten in 2 hours unless it’s a brand new aircraft.
There was another incident recently I recall where the pilots accidentally descended too fast and were seconds from crashing. I can’t recall specifics, but I’m surprised that wasn’t also mentioned in the article.
Good day, ladies and gentlemen. This is your, uh, captain (obvious) speaking. It, uh, couldn't be any clearer here, based on all the circumstances, that, uh—these pilots truly believed they had the runway in sight when it was, in fact, the Courtney Campbell Causeway.
I can only speculate, but I hope one of the things we get out of an analysis of the Crowdstrike incident is a thorough analysis of the consequences. Airports just a few days ago were packed with passengers, delayed planes, misplaced luggage, and general chaos in scheduling. I imagine flight crews were impacted just as much, if not more, even if their own airline wasn't directly involved.
I'll toss out a theory - there has been a pilot shortage for the last several years. Are corners getting cut on pilot training? Incompetence explains a lot. This is a really baffling incident to me on its face and reading some takes from aviation experts it seems like I am not the only one that thinks so.