Trumped-Up JFK Emergency? Email this blog |Print this blog

[EHM-1749 Hector]

Source: By Paul Bertorelli, AVweb Insider

Last week's emergency landing at New York's JFK offers yet another example of how a group of pilots—when presented with the same scenario and risk factors—may make diametrically different decisions. The distilled summary: An American Airlines 767 enroute into JFK from Los Angeles arrived to be assigned runway 22L as the landing runway. The wind was out of 310 at 22 knots, gusting to 34 knots—a direct crosswind that might have had a slight tailwind component.

The Captain refused the landing runway and, when ATC declined to assign 31R, he declared an emergency and landed on it anyway. Here's a condensed clip on the incident.

It's illuminating for several of reasons. It's an example of what most pilots and controllers have seen before: a "sort of" or "paper" emergency. Second, regardless of who you think was right or wrong, the incident shows that the person sitting in the left seat is sometimes confronted with judgment calls for which there is no easy answer, even though the Captain is vested with the ultimate final authority on how the flight is conducted. It may be good to be King, but it's not always easy. Worth noting is that there's more going on here than most of us know and, as the Gunny likes to say, there will be consequences. Last, this incident starkly reveals how our air transport system is a tug of war between efficiency and safety.

Since March, JFK has had 31L closed for upgrades and this bollixes up the airport's acceptance rate. The airlines were asked to scale their operations accordingly. I don't know if they have done that or if this was in factor in the May 4 incident. (See above: consequences.) Either way, ATC will configure the airport to suit its concerns, which usually relate to throughput and noise restrictions. Pilot concerns about crosswind limits? Not so much. So it becomes a little bit of a blood sport in a situation like this. If crews keep gutting out landing in a crosswind to the limits of man and machine, controllers will happily let them do it until someone says—enough.

The Captain of American Flight 2 decided he wasn't going to accept a 34-knot crosswind. According to what data I could find, Boeing says 40 knots is the max recommended crosswind component for a 767 on a dry runway. If someone else can dispute that, let me hear from you. Also, American's op specs may call for something lower and those are hard limits. Either way, the Captain decided it wasn't safe and informed the tower he would declare an emergency if he wasn't given 31R. The controller seemed to note this as if he'd take it under advisement and the situation blossomed from there. Remember, the controller is thinking about separation and his flow plan, the pilot is worried about cramming that thing on the runway in a gusty crosswind.

After the emergency was declared, the controller evidently thought it was a "gentleman's" emergency in which he would be allowed to vector the airplane back around for 31R in a more less orderly fashion. The Captain, on the other hand, clearly understood that under emergency authority, he could do what he needed to and seemed to inform the surprised sounding controller of his maneuvering plan. He told ATC—he didn't ask, he told ATC—to clear the runway. American Flight 2 was landing on it. This is about as compelling an example of execution of command authority as you are likely to hear.

Listen to the tape to the end and you can clearly hear the controller's response when the flight clears the runway and asks for taxi instruction. He sounds irritated to me. So let the second guessing begin.

Over on PPRuNe opinions are divided. Some think the Captain should have slipped into the flow and let the controller work out an approach for 31R that would minimize chaos for everyone else. If the flight was so low on fuel as to require unconditional maneuvering, why didn't the crew declare this sooner? And if the crew couldn't handle a 34-knot crosswind as just a day at the office, what are they doing flying into Kennedy? Others cheered the Captain, believing he determined that an unsafe condition existed and acted to correct it. End of story.

I don't have enough experience in this realm to offer an opinion on the righteousness of the Captain's call. Even if I did, I'm not sure I would, because I wasn't in the seat. Nonetheless, I offer a tip of the hat to any skipper who pulls the plug in a situation where system-think has forced go-along-get-along behavior to a point beyond safe limits. Right or wrong, he made a clear, unambiguous decision and acted upon it. It sometimes takes that kind of decisiveness to cut through the fence between pilot/crew/passenger priorities and air traffic control priorities. The two are sometimes at cross purposes.

When they are, someone has to say as much. This Captain did and that's what defines command.

I would like to hear your opinion

[EHM-1465 Dominic]

As ever, it's very difficult to make an informed judgement on this without more information...

What was their fuel state? How long had they been holding prior to approach? Had they already declared their low fuel state? What consideration was given to the crosswind by ATC?

At the end of the day, the man or woman in the cockpit is responsible for the safety of the aircraft and we've seen too many times what happens when people in the air and on the ground forget that planes aren't just big busses - if you get it wrong, people die.

[EHM-1749 Hector]

As per the report, they never declared low fuel because apparentely it was not the problem. It seems that the pilot refused to land with a 24 with gusts to 31 crosswind so he declared the emergency just to land in RWY 31R. I might had done the same thing. But....
I agree 100% that the PIC has the ultimate decision but I think that the way he did it was not the best one. He could have request 31R and go to a holding pattern not to disturb the traffic. Unless he were low on fuel and didn't want to declare it to avoid further investigations on why we didn't have enough fuel.
With the ongoing problem in KJFK due to the closing of its longest runway situations like these should be taken into consideration by the airlines.

[EHM-1465 Dominic]

As per the report, they never declared low fuel because apparentely it was not the problem.

That's what I mean Hector - I looked this up on another site and that one said the plane was low on fuel. The media are often inaccurate about these incidents so it's difficult to know whether all the facts are correct...

[EHM-2097 Andrei]

Indeed it depends a lot on whether the aircraft was low on fuel (or having any safety issue OTHER than the runway to land on) or not. And here indeed we can only guess - unfortunately, guessing may get more accurate than media reports nowadays.

If the only issue was the runway, then technically there was no more emergency reason once the pilot decided to land on 31R no matter what. In this case I think there was a procedurewise correct way to terminate the emergency and have the aircraft land on 31R under ATC control, the kind of "gentlemen's emergency" as named above. True enough, the pilot in command has a tough job, but ATC (especially in places like KJFK) is not a walk in the park either; both men had problems to get solved and generally this is done better by working together instead of against each other.

The risk in such occasion is that people get personally involved in what looks like a conflict, as suggested by the ATC being "irritated" at the aftermath of the event. It's very likely that the initial conversation, with the pilot requesting 31R and the ATC denying it, was the key to the whole sequence. Maybe one of the two didn't like the other's attitude; many (generally bad) things start like this.

But as I sit here guessing things, I can think of another scenario too. Are you sure the ATC really wished for a smooth going, "gentlemen emergency"? There were certainly a lot of aircraft on arrival, under the same crosswind, and I doubt he wished every pilot declare an emergency to get on 31R. Thus he may have been tempted to be, let's say, unfriendly with the first pilot declaring such an emergency.

In other words, instead of passing a message like "but of course Sir, thanks for declaring an emergency here, let me help by providing some nice little vectors, and welcome to anyone else planning the same", what was heard on the frequency was more like "so, Mr. Wiseguy, you wanna play emergencies here, then you should go all the way, mess everything by refusing ATC control, and have A LOT of explanations to provide to the authorities afterwards; anyone else around who wants the same?"

I may get too evil here, but remember I am just guessing, and as part of my guess both the pilot and the ATC are humans...

Andrei