Wingrider

I've made this flight more times than I can count. Wednesday AM was certainly different.

On final, gear down, ~ 300 ft. or lower , pilot throttles up gradually and we pass over the runway and take a long wide right hander back around into the pattern. It was interesting to see what it BUR would look like taking off in that direction over Hollywood Way...

2nd time in the grove the captain doesn't make it to the same lower altitude but has started to descend as usual but at some point throttles back up again and banks into a left hander away from the airport. Again works his way around into the grove except from the left.

Third time into the slot all is like usual- regular landing, no fuss. we do roll a little long down to about gate 5/6 and then hang the u-turn to the right to come back up to our gate (1). During all this not a peep out of the crew in any way. The FA's were silent and not chatting while seated and on departure it was like nothing happened. The cockpit door remained unusually closed while all deplaned.

Nothing on the ground looked unusual and nothing was out of the ordinary about the flight that I could feel. If it was a suck plane at a gate you'd think they would park us.

Ideas/suggestions/answers to what the heck happened?

I'd sure like to know.


-Wingrider

ursine1

Odd. When aborted landings such as you describe have happened to flights I've been on, it's usually due to crosswinds being above limits at the airport, and the pilots usually address the situation over the PA after the first aborted landing.

OPNLguy

Before I can attempt an answer I'd need to know if you really meant the 14th (which was Wedenesday) or Thursday which was the 15th.

Edit:

Looks like it was the 14th, Wednesday, not Thursday...

http://flightaware.com/live/flight/S...330Z/KSJC/KBUR

I can't go back any further than 36 hours to look at hourly weather observations (METARs) to answer your question with absolute certainty, but given that the decision altitude (DA) for the ILS 08 approach is 250 feet (MSL, 200' AGL), I can only assume your flight went around due to not seeing the runway or runway environment from that minimum altitude. You don't say whether there was any fog, haze, or other restrictions present that morning, but the minimun visibility is 1 mile or 5000' RVR. Also, even if the visibility underneath the cloud ceiling was unrestricted, it's not at all unusual for early morning ceilings along the coast be be ragged and otherwise variable until the ceilings start burning off and breaking up. If such a variation was either side of what was the minimum ceiling was (i.e. fluctuating above or below the minimum from one approach to the next), a couple of missed approaches sounds quite plausable before getting in. Sometimes, timing is everything..

Again, without being able to look at the METARs for Wednesday morning, the above is my best guess. Someone mentioned possible windshear and/or turbulence, and while a possibility, your mentioning the estimated 300' or lower item suggests to me that it was a ceiling-related reason moreso than one related to turbulence or windshear..

http://155.178.201.160/d-tpp/1203/00067ILZ8.PDF

Wingrider

You're absolutely right. I have since corrected the day in the text. It was indeed Wednesday.

I flew SJC->BUR , LAX->SJC Wednesday and LAX<->SJC the next day Thursday so I was a bit tangled up.

It was absolutely Wednesday AM 3/14.

tusphotog

Check out this site. You can pull full METARs for any US airport. They go back a long, long time, too.

Anyway, here's the link for Wednesday's METAR. Just looks like some scattered low clouds...nothing unusual.

It wouldn't surprise me to not hear anything from the pilots either, especially at an airport like BUR where there's a ton of traffic and some mountains to avoid. Here's a good look at what goes on during a go around.

OPNLguy

Thanks for the links... I use Wunderground for mainly radars (one of the few sites that has TDWR in addition to the regular WSR-88D Dopplers), but haven't explored much else. Looks like I need to.

Looking at the weather from the 14th, indeed, it doesn't look too bad at all. That said, I notice that all the observations times are at :53 past the hour, i.e. the normal "scheduled" observations. The site doesn't look like it captures any "SPECIs" (SPECIal observations) for conditions that may occur between the sceheduled observation times. The only thing I can guess is that the ceilings came down very briefly at the flight's actual arrival time, and then popped up after a little bit.

joshua362

I can only add as a C172 pilot that you are trained to abort anytime something just doesn't look right, from uncleared traffic on the runway, unexpected gusts of crosswind to the decent rate / touch down point doesn't look right. If you don't expect to touch down on the first 1/3 of the runway, abort. I think this buffer would differ for a 737. I don't know at what point these guys hand fly the landing. And if you abort, its full throttle. But its a rare event in my many years of commercial flying.

I was on a WN flight into TPA one morning where I was monitoring the landing to 36L on a GPS and within a a minute of touch down (1000' maybe) the pilot swerved right and landed on 36R instead. The cockpit door remained uncharacteristically closed after landing too. I guessed perhaps he was cleared to land 36R and mixed them up. They are human after all...

OPNLguy

Maybe a "side-step" manuever to the other runway to accomodate an ATC situation? Seems more likely than confusing the two runways...

joshua362

Very, very probable and rightly so. The closed door after landing was the only thing that suggested the other unlikely outcome. Radar would have probably noticed this during the 5+ mile final. Just odd to see the closed door, could have been for many other reasons...

Wingrider

Thank you to all for the feedback. It was partly cloudy about 3/4ths the way down but as we dropped below maybe 8k it was clear/partly sunny. Visibility excellent. I recall because I was soaking in the view as we took the 2 laps around the valley with views I had never seen before.

OPNLguy

Any time..