All true. BTW, the handoff on the video is between Center and Approach. Center
told the pilot that he was going to request 17C from Approach and that's what he
did. Apparently without mentioning the emergency.

On 2/23/2007 7:25 PM, Robert Chambers wrote the following:
He declared an emergency, but somewhere along the line the ball got
dropped. The pilot shouldn't have to plead his case and hope for the
best, he's got an emergent condition to deal with and the life of his
crew and passengers to worry about.

When he got stick from the local controller he should have repeated his
emergency declaration and done whatever he needed to do to meet that
situation. A tower controller can clear the airspace of aircraft fairly
expediently if they want to.

If he had flamed out on a wide downwind and not made it back to the
runway he'd have been crucified for "not doing everything in his power
to deal with the emergency"

If I were the pilot, and AA, I'd be plenty ****ed at the controller, and
from what else is coming out, the FAA supervisor who makes the decisions
that the local controller is not allowed to.

Hopefully this won't happen again eh?



Mitty wrote:
On 2/23/2007 6:21 PM, Roy Smith wrote the following:

If you've already told the controller you have an emergency,
squawking 7700 doesn't add anything to the situation. The 7700 stuff
is for when you're out of radio contact.


Au contraire. With a 7700 squawk then if the emergency situation
wasn't mentioned in the handoff (which it possibly wasn't) then the
next controller would still have known something was seriously wrong.

(Now possibly if AA had squawked 7700 he would have been asked to
switch off that code at some point, but we don't even know from the
video whether he tried it.)