Watched KOSH arrivals – was even crazier earlier:
Brian
A commercial jet doesn’t hit a B-52
Several loosely connected thoughts not forming an essay …
Minot’s civilian field is right in town. The AFB is a few miles north of town. The runways are parallel to each other.
This raises the possibility that the B-52 was mistakenly maneuvering visually to approach the civil field when they meant to be approaching their base. Picking out the wrong airport by eyeball and then approaching or even landing there has a long history in aviation.
Separately, I don’t know the typical traffic pattern used at the base, but one very plausible path towards an approach to the base would take them over or just south of the town and hence near the approach path(s) to the civil field. I find that a bit unlikely for noise abatement reasons, but not impossible. As well, since the distance to the two runways would be quite different from that area, you’d expect the two jets to maybe be near each other horizontally, but well separated vertically. Unless the B-52 was unusually low and the E190 was unusually high.
Those two were probably the only airplanes in the sky within 50 miles of Minot. And they still found a way to interact. Sigh.
Or possibly because of this:
“We can confirm that a B-52 aircraft assigned to Minot AFB conducted a flyover of the North Dakota State Fair Friday evening," an Air Force spokesperson said to ABC News Sunday evening.
B-52s have rather unusual landing gear, and I don’t think they flare in the traditional sense before touchdown. Is it possible that they would require a long, straight, stable approach, more so than most other aircraft?
Not really. The instrument approaches to bomber bases look just like any others.
Do military planes have TCAS? If I remember correctly there was some outcry decades ago over the fact that they didn’t, and some lobbying to get them to adopt it, but I do not recall if they ever actually did it.
Here’s CNN’s coverage:
Training jet does hit a school.
In General Aviation (GA) news, a Cessna 177 Cardinal made a forced landing in the water off of Mukilteo, WA. All three people survived.
Trying to glide to Paine Field, perhaps. Plenty of runway there, if they’d been able to make it
I don’t recall an intercontinental passenger flight having to return to origin because they couldn’t get landing clearance at their intended destination.
Airline veterans, what’s your take on this?
Under the current circumstances, maybe they just didn’t want to deal with Immigration.
Landing clearance in this case isn’t ATC. But rather ICE / TSA / DoJ / random Calvinball nonsense from the criminal in chief.
Every sovereign country has the right to say No to a proposed entry by any ship or plane from another country.
The central question is why did the USA make this decision and was it sound, or just more governmental vandalism?
A couple years ago we would not have needed to include that last joker in our possibility deck. Nowadays it often seems like the goverment is the Joker, not mere jokers.
Looks that way:
Mukilteo police say the plane lost power with the pilot communicating with the tower at Paine Field that they needed to make an emergency landing.
I took the Ferry from (and to) Mukilteo as part of self supported bicycle tour of Whidbey island.
Brian
Per a different article:
Communicating with air traffic control at Paine Field, the pilot said they wouldn’t be able to make it to the airport and had to make an emergency landing.
According to people on another board, this was due to a bureaucratic SNAFU in which Air France forgot to add this particular plane to their US operating certificate or something like that. I don’t know if that would normally constitute a reason to deny them entry, or if this was the current administration being nitpicky and denying them entry due to what seems to me to amount to a minor paperwork error.
Ahh.
I used to carry in my issue iPad a whole book of those letters from each country we served listing the entire roster of tail#s the host country regulators had approved.
Lots of pettifogging detail, but the opposite is chaos.
I would have expected that in normal times upon the discrepancy coming to light, the US would notify Air France HQ who’d immediately ask for dispensation which would be immediately granted without question.
Now? Between crazy bureaucrats and scared bureaucrats, dispensations are probably hard to find.
In an arbitrary authoritarian regime, common sense and trust are two very early casualties.
Worth pointing out the F-7 is a Chinese variant / knock-off / license built adaptation of the ancient Soviet MiG-21. F-7s were made from 1965 to the early 2010s.
The Bangaldeshi ones were towards the end of the production run, delivered in the 1990s and later. But still it’s an ancient design.
Newer than the B-52, though.