Late night Mel - Syd flight diversions - Thu 28/2

[Kim F]

I saw a Jetstar flight land in Canberra last night - much earlier though

[Steve S... 2]

I also saw a Jetstar flight VH-VQN a couple weeks ago decending into Sydney a couple of minutes before curfew, which would have had it on the ground at 11.01pm - it turned back to Melbourne.

The numerous people who have their lives in termoil for the night for the sake of 1 minute.

It is stupid political moments like this that make you embarrassed to be Australian.

Melbourne and Brisbane deserve to take the crown away from Sydney as the gateway to Australia.

[Paul S.]

I see there are plenty more delays today. virgin have on the web page its due to weather in SYD and an upgrade of the ILS at Syd. They have already cax their one and only flight to BNK

[Raymond Z]

I live right under the flightpath where planes are around 600 ft above me. Even if planes land at 11.10pm I honestly wouldn't care. Politicians and Sydney Airport....get real. For the sake of a few minutes of breaking curfew you send many passengers back to their original destination when it isn't their fault that they are only going to land a few minutes after 11pm. The loudest aircraft last night would've been the Emirates 777 and that's already quiet.

[Adam P.]

With all the tracking etc available to ATC these days wouldn't it have been more appropriate to advise the crew it wasn't going to be possible to get them into SYD pre-curfew so that the diversion could've been enacted earlier (perhaps even early enough to get back into OOL so that OOL residents could return to their own homes)?

Assuming there are no sequencing considerations that might require a further delay of the arriving aircraft (and that's unlikely at that time of night unless there are lots of other aircraft all in the same boat), it's not a decision for ATC to make. The crew probably have a better idea of when they'll get there anyway - TAAATS estimates from so far out can be quite different from actuals if the forecast winds differ markedly from reality, for example.
I have seen ATC give direct tracking etc where available to try and facilitate a 'fastest possible' flight time, even from a very long way out (like a flight from Perth requesting - and getting - a severe short cut from somewhere well west of Adelaide, for example).
But when it comes down to literally seconds between making it in time or not, given all the variation in the system - winds at different levels or locations etc - no technology is going to be accurate enough to be definitive from so far out.

[Rowan McKeever]

I understand nothing's accurate at the Qld end of that flight, or perhaps even up around CFS way. What I was suggesting is that, given VA540 last night arrived at 2313L in BNE & had at least 2 enroute holds on the way down to SYD, someone should've made the decision even 10-15 mins earlier that SYD was out of reach so that a return to OOL would've been an option. Maybe that person should've been ATC, maybe the Captain, maybe VA Ops, but given ATC has the most information about the overall traffic situation at each airport they ought to have some kind of trigger point.

As Raymond says the only people who really suffered last night were those on the plane.