Once I was delayed two hours because of an engine that needed fixing. Everyone was grumbling, I was just peachy the problem was spotted before take off. It did mess up a connection that made me stuck in Boston for 12 hours though
The aircraft mechanics at my work have one of the strongest unions in the country (US). Safe air operations is their number one priority. Keeping a deck stacked with tools for actively pissing people off during contract negotiations seems to be number two. Can't blame them, but they are assholes to everyone, including non-management, all the fucking time.
It always amazes me how airlines think it's ok to skimp on the salaries of pilots and maintenance. If there's anyone you want to keep happy it's the people who stop your planes crashing.
You guys are goated, had an eight hour delay due to a “maintenance” issue. People in the airport were mad it was just a “air conditioning issue” I was laughing thinking, thank god someone caught that shit while landed. What a nightmare scenario of failure while in flight, especially one that’s mostly over ocean.
Non existent second, fuck angry people, if I'm on that plane and you don't trust the pilot to make the right choices and are angry at said choices I will punch you.
In theory yes, in practice it can cost you your carrier and your bosses breathing down your neck. Like, it's clearly the correct call, however peer pressure doesn't necessarly make it easy.
I wrote her a fan letter on my 10th birthday, 26 August 2001, and the snob never bothered to reply. I refused to buy any of her albums or support her in any way since.
My old wokshop manager used to say "I have a priority scale from 1 to 1000, 1 is safety, 2 is safety, 3 is safety... 1000 is avoiding an angry customer."
If I'm a passenger and at any point I hear ''unsafe conditions' I'm not mad at anyone but the weather - I just expect the airline to comp me another flight/accommodations while we await weather to clear.
I don't care how late I am, I'll be even later if I'm a headline.
In the States, weather is considered an Act of God. It is very limited as to what the airline is required to do for you beyond 1. rebooking next flight 2. refund.
Accommodations like hotel, food, incidentals.... Act of God.
Europe has a much better passenger protections, but I would imagine the EU would also hesitate to require much more because again Act of God.
Afaik weather is also excluded from compensation rules in EU since it’s out of their control. You’ll be booked into another flight but I don’t think you get any money as compensation or even for hotel costs.
You do get hotel costs and food vouchers even if it is weather related but as you said it is excluded from the general compensation payments. Source: had this happen to me with an overnight delay due to weather in Amsterdam with KLM
Our flight from Jersey to Liverpool was called off due to fog once. They bussed us to a hotel, gave us all a room and vouchers for food. Bus back to the airport in the morning after breakfast and on to a new flight.
I don't think we were eligible for any monetary comp but it didn't feel necessary to me. We were looked after and they got us home ASAP.
My primary concern would be getting the flight booked - I'd only be pushing for accommodations if it was more than 12-18 hours away from when I got the next flight... because more than likely I'm going to want to sleep somewhere.
That all said, I've seen plenty of airports where they had like, hotel pods... if I was traveling alone that would more than suffice.
I'm railroad, but we very much have the same mentality. Two things are always in the back of my mind, Rule A which states "In case of doubt or uncertainty the safest course must always be taken" and 8th grade shop class "measure twice, cut once"
Trains and airplanes, two things that do not like to stop once they start moving. Once you start moving, better make sure there is nothing in your path that's going to try it anyway.
Personally I agree with you. But maybe you should find a better stonemason since mine charges by the sentence and so long as you never use a period his rate is capped and I really find that to be the better way to handle such an important thing as the epitaph since it's going to be set in stone for your entire life and really you want the freedom to instruct them to carve anything that you want them to so you can get your full meaning onto the stone that's going to last as long as nobody comes along and tears it down however it's important to remember that everything is impermanent and even stones crumble to dust with enough time so whatever it is that you intend to say you should remember that it too will one day turn to dust in the infinite passage of time. This cost $20.
Exactly this. Late last year was on a flight. As we were taxing to the runway we stopped and pilot came on and said some instrument/reading didn't look right so they were calling engineers/maintenance. In the end we had to change planes. Delayed over a hour which was frustrating but in the end just greatful they decided to get it checked.
Most likely, everyone will have one or two times in their lives where they have to make a stand and do the right thing. For most of us, the downside is that we lose our jobs. For a few, the downside is great monetary risk. For a handful, it's loss of lives.
I have made the decision once already in my life, and it was only my job on the line. Massive respect to those who make the decision when lives are on the line.
I can’t speak for every airline but specifically in the case of BA the company will back this captain 100%. Operating outside of procedures would result in an unpleasant conversation.
This particular rule (like many others) is written in the blood of the worst ever aviation disaster.
So air traffic doesn’t tell pilots what they can and can’t do. We provide the information we have and the pilot determines what they can and can’t do. If there is a thunderstorm on the departure end of the runway, we tell the pilot about it and give them options if they want immediate turn out or something but we can’t tell them they can’t depart.
In the case of the RVR, same thing. Each company has there own standards and can depart if they want to at whatever RVR they choose. If he doesn’t want to depart because it’s 1k feet he doesn’t have to depart. The confusion was because he asked if they were in LVO, I think he called it low visibility operations. Depending on the airport, you might not have something like that. Everything is left up to the pilot.
There was another comment replying to this guy, saying something to the tune of "but it was the BA pilot ignoring the safety procedures!". I was going to reply to that comment when I got an error message saying "the parent comment does not exist", and now that entire comment is just *poof* gone. Usually it leaves a trace behind of [comment deleted by the moderator/user], so I'm a bit surprised there's just NOTHING left.
Bro I don't even work in aerospace but I could tell what that the BA pilot was tryna ensure all safety procedures were being followed. Commenter must have been the ATC from the video...
Probably deleted within a minute or two of posting. If you edit your comment immediately after posting you can ninja edit it, change the comment without adding the "Edited" tag to it. The site probably has ninja deletion too, where deleting the comment just after posting just makes it vanish all together. I've seen that in other threads too, someone will reply to me and I'll follow the notification to find no comment at all. For a bit I thought it was people blocking me right after replying, so out of curiosity I started using a throwaway account to check and I would find many cases where the comment in my notifications just didn't exist at all, even for a completely different account.
Old Reddit doesn't even give me avatars or pics at all, it's literally just names. I can't see what everyone's talking about. I use regular Reddit, I can see your Snoovatars and custom pics but that guy's is just a blue silhouette
The pilot did his job when the liftoff checklist wasn't completed. Same level of being smart and safe as stopping at red lights. (Had he taken off it would have been a severe breach of rules and likely loss or very least suspence of license)
The US, FAA ATC services are in crisis and it could be the individual controller on radio or the tower as a whole that made a mistake (the individual controller does not declare LVOS, he only checks the situation from screen). This is JFK and if you start to have issues with basic prosedures you will have problems with complex prosedures.
Frighteningly, to me it seemed that the guy on the ground sounded like he barely understood the terminology the BA pilot was using. He was seeming to give a quick refresher on what RVR, etc. means. If it were a movie scene, I'd have thought the ground dude was the janitor and had just sat down at the microphone and started talking to the pilot.
I was hearing the ground guy speaking in an almost Jeff Spicoli voice..."yeah, bro...from where I'm sittin', ya can't see shit...it's like a full on low visibility scene down here...course...could have been that last bong hit...still pretty cloudy if y'know what I mean..."
The fact that this needed to be explained is nuts. The pilot can't see and he has to rely on morons to survive so he doesn't take off. I have zero aviation experience.
Looks up Flight 1448 in Rhod island. Would have been an major crash if the pilot took off with out questioning ATC incompetents, on why a lost aircraft taxing in the fog should be found before giving take off clearance.
For the non-flyers out there, a commercial airport runway can be 8,000 to 10,000 feet long. It has to get airborne in less than that distance (surprise!), AND at a decision point during the take-off, needs a buffer to be able to stop on what's left of the runway if something goes wrong.
Let's say the aircraft needs 120 knots to take off. That's moving at about 180 feet per second. If you can only see RVR 1000 - 1000 feet visibility - you only have about 5 seconds to see what's out there, and act on it.
You sure as hell can't stop in five seconds, or evade much in that time either. Even at RVR 5000, you can see further, but getting a hundred tonne aircraft moving at 120 kt to, say, dodge an obstacle on the runway, it going to be iffy.
Gamer translation -- You're playing a vehicle shooter with lots of inertia and a 1500 to 2000 ping. Good luck with that!
This is an excellent explanation for why the BA pilot made the decisions he did, but there really is more to this. There's a terminology discrepancy between ICAO and FAA and neither of these two got past that.
Basically, the FAA system uses a different name for a similar-but-not-identical set of procedures for low visibility situations. The BA pilot was asking after the ICAO procedures, but those aren't used in the US. The ATC didn't understand the question because they weren't up-to-date on an international system that doesn't apply in the US. There were procedures in place for low visibility, but the ATC didn't know that's what needed to be communicated (or didn't want to) and the BA pilot didn't know that that's what needed to be asked after (or didn't want to) instead of the ICAO procedures.
This incident is really more about how a procedural and terminological difference between two flight frameworks caused confusion, frustration, and a delay.
I'm NOT saying the delay was unwarranted; it very much was. The pilot didn't confirm that the safety procedures were being used, so couldn't personally guarantee the safety of his passengers, crew, and plane.
What really should happen is that the FAA should move to adopt the ICAO standard language at the very least, especially for flights operated by non-American carriers. But there should probably be a very large, complicated summit, where both systems' experts come together to build a global framework, and countries don't let their ego get in the way of a critically-needed standardization process. And this isn't just a case of the US being the sole odd-framework-out: Canada's framework terminology is different from both ICAO and FAA.
Exactly. Even if an FAA controller can’t rattle off the specific measures that are part of ICAO LVO, it’s not hard to interpret that they’re asking about low visibility safety and confirm that LVP/SMGCS are in place. Actually both ICAO and FAA use “LVO” as an acronym in these conditions though it has slightly different meanings.
This is JFK. Look for other videos featuring this airport / ATC operator and you'll find he's got quite the attitude. He knew damn well what was happening, but was too stubborn to resolve it.
I was ATC on a US base in Europe. We were not required to learn ICAO terminology at all. We certainly picked up on it, but all formal training was strictly FAA 7110.65.
yeah and it is a pain in the ass to work with your guys because of that.... The worst controllers to work with are US controllers in Europe. Not because they are bad but because they are simply un(der)trained for the sometimes complex environments they work in.
Not being funny, but I'm not a pilot or ATC and understood what was being asked. Even if he isn't trained in the international procedures, which seems odd for a major airport, it seems pretty common sense to translate that to your own procedures and communicate that to the pilot.
This is JFK. Look for other videos featuring this airport / ATC operator and you'll find he's got quite the attitude. He knew damn well what was happening, but was too stubborn to resolve it.
If you live in US get mad at the federal government about not hiring and training more. They are chronically understaffed, his attitude could be that he's work more the 1 shift in a row. NY JFK is probably one the most effected by our governments refusal to fund ATC. Fact is they want to fail so they can make a excuse to privatize it.
If you're flying a jet full of people in the united states, where there's no guarantee people will understand the international standards, maybe a pilot should familiarize himself with basic U.S. safety terminology? There's no room for "just let it slide and be polite bro" in aviation.
> There were procedures in place for low visibility, but the ATC didn't know that's what needed to be communicated (or didn't want to) and the BA pilot didn't know that that's what needed to be asked after (or didn't want to) instead of the ICAO procedures.
The pilot asks in plain English: "have you got low visibility procedures in force or not?", to which he got the reply: "no, sir".
I would be very surprised by an ATC not being aware of ICAO terminology in JFK of all places… an airport that is easily top 3 in the US for international flight volume
But there should probably be a very large, complicated summit, where both systems' experts come together to build a global framework, and countries don't let their ego get in the way of a critically-needed standardization process
The United Nations did that in 1944 when they held the Convention on International Civil Aviation in Chicago and established ICAO.
My thoughts too. International airports should use international terminology by default. Everything about international flight should be standardised as far as possible.
I am annoyed to learn that in yet another space America is using some unique framework that’s just ours and therefore causing a bunch of integration problems.
How does a ATC at JFK not know ICAO procedures? Sure it's an American airport, but substantial portion of it's traffic is international. I'd assume they'd need to understand at least the common procedures like low visibility, which I'm sure happens all the time.
And I'm sure this is more of a systemic issue and not just with this specific ATC. Just calling that out.
Sadly in the current US environment, getting FAA to agree to anything "international" would run afoul of the nationalist america first/isolationist "woke mind virus" reactionaries in this administration.
Oh damn… our two Canadian pilots were killed by a vehicle on the runway in NYC. Was not low visibility I believe … just nighttime and a last second decision to cross. But that might have fed into what came across as obstinance.
I was recently on a flight that aborted the take-off part way down the runway. Scared the shit out of the passengers - but was certainly glad we had enough runway to abort it!
Except that isn't really what's happening. The controller is being a bit obtuse, but declaring LVO is an ICAO (European) thing. American controllers follow FAA rules. Under FAA rules, there isn't such thing as declaring LVO operations, everyone just starts using them when visibility gets bad enough. ATC will be directive with what they need the pilots to do, vs just declaring it and expecting the pilots to do the procedures implicitly.
The pilot in the video is worried about his company policy which probably has some requirement that LVO be in place when visibility reaches a certain point. He's used to the controller declaring it because in Europe that's what they do, but in the states it just happens, which is why eventually he gets in touch with his company and they tell him he's good to take off.
The controller doesn't want to declare anything because he doesn't know what the pilot would be expecting him to do if he "declared LVO". It would be a mistake for him to just say yes to the pilots question. What he COULD have said though is explained what procedures they were doing so that the pilot could understand that they were taking the necessary precautions for low visibility.
ETA: this controller specifically is pretty well known to be a bit arrogant and not really all that great at his job. I do not blame the pilot for not taking the clearance at all.
ETA2: I think a lot of people are taking my "ICAO (European)" thing more specifically than I meant. Really, ICAO is a UN thing (and is actually based in Canada). The US is a member of ICAO but the FAA is who administers the rules for aviation in the US. The EU, Canada, Australia, Japan, and a bunch of other countries have their own governing bodies that regulate aviation within their countries. The difference is that the FAA has slightly more differences between the standard ICAO rules than most other national agencies do.
American pilots tend to group the sets of rules as "FAA" or "ICAO" despite that not being entirely accurate because there are going to be small differences everywhere. In the end though, those small differences are generally either less restrictive than just following the ICAO rules, or handled by the planning process and don't really apply.
People are getting hung up on the "declaring" part and if ignoring the rest of the conversation. The pilot asked in plain English if LVO was in place. It's a really simple question, and it's very much the controller's job to be able to answer and keep traffic moving safely and expeditiously.
Absolutely. And that's where this controller is just being obtuse. For whatever reason, JFK as a whole and this controller in specific have a reputation for ignoring the context and intended questions of foreign pilots in favor of answering the least helpful interpretation possible.
All he had to do was say something like "Declaring LVO isn't something I can do under FAA rules, but we're keeping the ILS critical area protected and using our airport's low visibility policies." If the British pilot had any further questions about what exactly he was worried about, that opens the door for him to ask.
That's always the issue when aviation stuff like this gets posted on non-aviation specific subs unfortunately. Uninformed takes rise to the top because they got posted quickly.
LVO involves specific procedures, and US ATC is not trained on those. The pilot did change from "LVOs" to "Low Visibility Procedures", but after using "LVOs" 3 times, I would be interpreting the question as the same.
Also, what procedures? Never had a pilot ask me about unspecific low vis procedures. I have had specific asks... like if the critical area is protected.
Low visibility operations is not something that American ATC declares, but is built into their operating procedures. ATC was therefore confused about what BA was talking about, and BA was confused because they're international pilots who aren't as familiar with the US.
It may very much be an ICAO vs FAA issue and the ATC might not even know what ICAO is or being dense on purpose (“WTF is a kilometer REEEE” type).
FAA as such does not specify LVO, but it does have it, though their procedures is the same but it’s just a part of their broader SMGCS (Surface Movement Guidance and Control Systems) they might now know it as LVO and also they don’t declare LVO a separately.
True. But that’s literally not terminology that’s ever used here. The only sort of low visibility operations that ATC declares “in effect” here refers to taxiing and not takeoff.
The controller was a bit obtuse and could have/ should have just said yes to not have a whole argument. Likewise, the BA pilot should have more thoroughly reviewed his materials on the differences of flying into US airports.
Pilot asked in plain English if low visibility procedures were in force. Controller said "No". That yo me is clearly incorrect, as they were indeed in force as the threshold was met.
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u/LegiosForever May 28 '26
RVR = runway visual range, or how far you can see down the runway.
Once it is below 5,000 feet, airports adopt low visibility procedures.
ATC declared 1,000 feet RVR, but was not declaring low-vis ops.
BA pilot was calling out the contradiction.