Cal Goat
Prestige Worldwide™
Going into SFO this morning, we were the victims of a runway swap right as we started the arrival. This was after sitting for 90 minutes on the ground at 6am for flow control.
Initially, we were giving holding instructions at PYE, but it never materialized and we were given about 45 minutes worth of delay vectors. It created an annoying problem in that we were considering a diversion for fuel, but we had no clear picture of where we would be when we hit bingo fuel nor how much longer we could expect to wait at any given time.
Why can't ATC hold incoming airliners in a stack at a fix outside of the FAF so that 1, crews can make educated guesses about how long it will take them to divert and 2, we can be confident that we are being served in the order in which we arrive?
This was especially maddening today as SFO was VFR by a wide margin (broke out above 3000' and saw the runway from 15+miles with no clouds in between) and they were only landing on 1 runway. I don't pretend to know what controllers are dealing with on their end, but as a pilot, I'd wager to say that this ambiguous delay vectoring is actually a threat to safe decision making since it leaves crews more in the dark about their place in the sequence.
Initially, we were giving holding instructions at PYE, but it never materialized and we were given about 45 minutes worth of delay vectors. It created an annoying problem in that we were considering a diversion for fuel, but we had no clear picture of where we would be when we hit bingo fuel nor how much longer we could expect to wait at any given time.
Why can't ATC hold incoming airliners in a stack at a fix outside of the FAF so that 1, crews can make educated guesses about how long it will take them to divert and 2, we can be confident that we are being served in the order in which we arrive?
This was especially maddening today as SFO was VFR by a wide margin (broke out above 3000' and saw the runway from 15+miles with no clouds in between) and they were only landing on 1 runway. I don't pretend to know what controllers are dealing with on their end, but as a pilot, I'd wager to say that this ambiguous delay vectoring is actually a threat to safe decision making since it leaves crews more in the dark about their place in the sequence.