Aer Lingus tonight – how close to a crash?
The 20.00 hours Aer Lingus out of Cork to London Heathrow this evening had to execute an emergency procedure when it turned out there was an airplane on the runway as the plane – my plane – neared completion of its descent and prepared to land.
Just prior to touchdown, I mean as we were thinking about putting our mobiles back on, the plane suddenly veered upwards and climbed rapidly into the clouds. The plane was full and I’m sure, like me, people were thinking what the f***. Did we lose the landing gear? Is there something wrong with the plane?
We leveled off and the engines went quiet…. I was actually thinking – well if we couldn’t land then, how will we land at all? We DO have to go back down sooner or later.
After a few minutes the pilot announced that air traffic control had brought the flight down too close to the plane in front which had not yet cleared the runway.
Our plane circled for a further ten minutes and then came in to land safely. How close was that? I don’t suppose we’ll find out. Perhaps the most amazing thing was how we all filed off the plane without mentioning it – like it happens every day! Or maybe we were so relieved that the pilot was telling us we will be able to land anyway.
It was a couple of hours – when I got to my hotel – that I started to think, well that was a plane and there were probably 180 people on it, and we came all the way down and suddenly started climbing all the way back up again…..Quick apology from the pilot and down we went again.
Is there going to be an inquiry? Was an air traffic controller tired? Too tired? Was the pilot too eager to get down? Is it an officical incident? Nobody so far seems to have said anything about it. It wasn’t mentioned on the news this evening. I dunno does it constitute an emergency?
Happens all the time at busy airports like Heathrow, it’s called a “go around” and quite a normal procedure. YouTube has a few go around videos. A go around can be declared for a number of reasons such as a runway obstruction or bad weather, in your case it was a runway obstruction in the form of another aircraft. The aircraft in front was probably nowhere near your own flight, it was likely to be a good few thousand feet down the runway but was taking too long to vacate at the next taxiway so the pilots of your flight had no choice but to go around and rejoin the queue for landing.
I was in a go around a few year’s ago, there was bad weather on approach and as we crossed over the airport barriers a strong crosswind pushed the aircraft sideways so the pilots applied power to the engines, the nose pointed up, the aircraft climbed and we turned around to try again. The second time we landed safely and everyone walked off normally, as if it never happened.
Happy flying!