TabTraveller

The above flight appears to have attempted a landing at SPU and then diverted to Zagreb - does anyone have any idea what the issue is?

florens

Weather looks fine!

LDSP 311430Z 23016KT CAVOK 34/18 Q1014 NOSIG

rapidex

I seem to remember Split wasn't the easiest place if the weather was bad.

TabTraveller

Weather is fine, perhaps a little breezy.

They only made one attempt at landing so if it was weather related (wind?) I'd assume the flight crew would have made another attempt.

All other traffic operating normally at SPU so assume it's a technical problem?

florens

Wind is the same direction as the runway, so I doubt it is an issue unless there is severe windshear or so.

corporate-wage-slave

SPU is quite an interesting and beautiful airport to land at, DBV is more interesting still. There's a sea approach but the airport itself sits on a fairly narrow flat plain, right by the sea (so windy), but with some fairly hefty hills right alongside, forming something of an amphitheatre. It's not quite a cliff face, but it's a quite severe slope. Now I long ago learnt not to play pilots on a bulletin board, but my guess is that windshear at SPU is a non trivial matter, since the aircraft could be slammed into the hills quite easily.

ComputerCommuter

My guess for what it's worth it's possibly technical. One pass and off to a larger airport, where they've been for a couple of hours. Or pilot problems. Like CWS I'm not a pilot so defer to those who are but Easyjet and Croatian have been in and out all day, so I'm guessing weather is not the issue or they would have tried again and again. The approach of FR24 looks "short" (We have and apartment 15mins drive away to the west so know the area well).

Appreciate it can be a tricky airport, mountains to on side cause a wind shear or disturbance but this is usually in winter

Saltire74

This flight is operated by G-EUXD and the return is about to land at LHR as I type this with just over a three hour delay.

My interest in this? The aircraft is operating the 1498 to GLA and we're delayed by approximately 40 minutes so far.

In fact it's just about to touchdown. Can see the lights

S

paulaf

Do you know the reason for the diversion yet? We had an extremely hard landing at Split a few weeks ago and our return flight had a go around when it arrived into Split, so yes have experience of it being an interesting airport to land at!

LBA_flyer

It was weather related according to basource.

TabTraveller

By way of update, the original issue was wind shear at around 400ft which caused them to have to do a standard missed approach. On climbing out to go around they realised they wouldn't have sufficient fuel to try the approach again and divert to ZAG if it was unsuccessful. The skipper made the decision to divert to ZAG to take on more fuel rather than trying the approach again.

Arrived around 3h15 late to the gate. Lots of very unhappy campers on board as they'd largely run out of BoB and SPU isn't overwhelmed with quality eating establishments.

I'm contemplating whether this is an EC261 compensation issue as whilst weather delays are excluded, wind shear is a known issue at the airport and not loading sufficient fuel for two attempts at landing follow by a diversion is entirely within BA's control.

Swampz64

Wind is weather, can't argue that one.

Saltire74

Don't know if it was the same flightdeck crew that also operated my flight to GLA but the captain said our flight had been delayed because of weather earlier at Split.

S

LTN Phobia

Extra contingency fuel may have been burned up due to enroute issues (lower flight level, dodging around the weather etc.), or that nearer alternates (DBV, ZAD) were initially available on departure but became unavailable for whatever reason.

Still, we could start creating a silly situation where all EU airlines end up flying around with tons more fuel than is needed in case people successfully claim compensations and burn extra fuel to carry the extra fuel and then environmental lobby gets more upset and force and introduction of extra taxes for whatever, airlines start putting the fares up to cover the extra cost of fuel to carry the fuel, and end up in a silly vicious circle. Not much good will come from that - about as much good as having to carry contingency this and that in case a Martian decides to crash on a runway and blocks it.

rapidex

Windshear is neither visible nor predictable,so it would not be appropriate to carry extra fuel on the off chance of a windshear warning.I presume the other aircraft landing had slightly different conditions at the time.