Complaint: In-flight Issue Plane Misses Airport, Almost Crashes
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  #6  
Old Jun 14, 2010, 4:02 AM
Jetliner Jetliner is offline
Former Airline Employee (NOT OFFICIAL REP)
 
Join Date: May 2008
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Hold on a minute before you go accusing the pilot.

Take a look at this: Flight track log

This is the flight tracking log for your flight. When you took off, you ascended at about 2,000 +/- feet per minute. This looks to be a pretty normal take off. Keep in mind that the rate of ascent is dictated to the pilots by air traffic control. They tell them to climb to a certain altitude and either hold or keep ascending.

The landing approach was not normal, however it's consistent with being too close to another aircraft. At 11:58 and 11:59 he pulled up, then dropped about 9,000 feet. That is pretty sharp. But keep in mind that being too close to another aircraft does not always mean the plane is somewhere next to you, but rather above or below. The two planes may have been on a potential collision course, which is the fault of air traffic control. When this happens there is a system on the plane called TCAS, which means Traffic Collision Avoidance System. When two planes are headed for the same point in space the systems on both planes talk to each other, then the pilots. On one plane it will tell the pilots to pull up, and how much they need to pull up. On the other aircraft (in this case yours) it tells the pilots to descend.

What looks like happened is at 11:58 air traffic control might have seen the potential collision course and had your flight climb to avoid the collision, but TCAS had other plans, and told your flight to descend. Pilots are trained to follow TCAS over the air traffic controller. If they don't do this, it will lead to disaster. If you don't think so, then read this: DHL crash

The short version of what happened there was a DHL cargo plane and a russian passenger plane flying on a collision course. The traffic controller told the russian plane to descend, TCAS told him to climb. He chose to listen to the controller, and the two planes collided since both were descending (DHL did follow his TCAS)

In your case, your plane continued down to 1500 feet, then did the go around. Depending on where all of this occurred, you may have been close enough to the airport that you had to still fly the pattern, then pull up and overfly the airport and circle around due to other traffic in the area. It's also possible that the pilot might have decided to give it a try, but just wasn't able to line it up properly due to the 9,000 foot drop earlier.

What you have to understand is that go around happen very commonly, and just because you haven't experienced this type of descent doesn't mean it's unsafe or that the pilot put you in danger. In fact, there's actually a better chance that you are alive right now to have posted this thread because of the actions of that pilot. I can't say 100% because I wasn't on the flight deck, but #1 neither were you, and #2 the track logs tends to suggest that the pilot was giving you correct information. It may not have been complete info, but that's not uncommon either, since that would take way to long to explain.