ATC Handling of Low-Fuel American Flight

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.)