You Can't Believe Everything You See On The Internet

By Ron Blehm (26 February 2013)

Here's the deal, you may have seen this video link on YouTube?

It reports to show the mid-day arrivals into San Diego's Lindbergh Field - the second-busiest, single-runway airport in the world! At first I was skeptical that it was faked! I've spent some time in San Diego and I wanted the motel closest to the runway! Sitting at the side of the pool, just off Pacific Avenue, I would have sworn that the aircraft pretty much flew over the same palm tree at the same altitude and speed. There just seemed to be too much variety in the video.

I thought of the famously faked photo from Hannover Germany (above):

• Why is the Thompson 737 sitting there ALL DAY and why have the ground vehicles not moved?
• Why does the Lufthansa Regional RJ have his reversers deployed if this is departures?
• Does JAL really fly two 747s out of Hannover each day?
• Then there are observations like:
  1. VIA no longer uses Tu-154s; how old is this photo?
  2. jetBlue A320? It's a US airline
  3. Midwest CRJ? It's a US airline
  4. Northwest DC-9? It's an old US airline
  5. Southwest 737? It's a US airline
  6. And my favorite, the Air New Zealand Dash-8!

This is quite obviously a sham.

Anyway, I went back to YouTube and studied the video again, frame-by-frame, and a couple of things get me even still:

• There are a lot of 737-700s but it's plausible because:
  • Southwest is the world's largest 737 operator and two-thirds of the fleet are -700 models!
• I'm not sure about the consistent lighting on the bridge.
• The clouds don't move but if you extract the aircraft/bridge images only, the background-overlay seems like a pretty easy trick for media types to pull off.
• What of the speed variations even among similar aircraft types?
• Is there too much GA traffic? (The producer certainly could have pulled the videos he wanted out of the raw coverage to give a spread of aircraft but in that case, where are the heavies? (San Diego does get some wide-body traffic)

All-in-all it is a pretty decent job (certainly better than the faked Hannover photo!) and I guess there really wasn't as much variation as I might have initially thought. I got to thinking about these variances given the fact that San Diego's approach is tricky:

• 30% steeper than most
• Right over highly-populated areas
• Near to downtown - the clearance over the last parking structure on Pacific Avenue is 109 feet in real life. It's not St Maarten but it's as close as I'll ever come! (One of our test pilots (who flew real-world heavies for his career) noted that it's not really a HARD approach, it's just that you are relatively low, over populated areas, longer than at other airports as you follow the terrain down to the runway)
• Into a busy runway with lots of arrivals and departures vying for a slot
• The approach has to be precise!

The video got me to thinking: "I wonder how much variation is "normal" and how a bunch of simmers would do on this approach?" So to find out, I sent out a hundred or so e-mails asking YOU to fly the KSAN runway 27 approach. Sure, I could have done this myself but I've frequented San Diego over the years (including a past feature). From a research standpoint, I wanted to see how consistent other sim pilots would be at flying this approach.

Thanks

I need to, at this point, send out a giant THANK YOU to my test pilots:

• Ken Moffin
• Tony Vallillo
• Peter Stark
• Jan Visser
• Javier Hernandez
• Daniel Kigera
• Bill Smith
• Jose Octavio

Our test aircraft (chosen by the pilots) included:

• 734
• 735
• 738
• 744
• 788
• A319
• CV990
• EMB190
• 762
• DC-10
• DC-4
• XB-70
• Jetstream-41
• Jetstream-31
• Dash-8
• King Air

The Test

What I asked pilots to do was to simply fly the KSAN runway 27 approach in clear weather. Then they were to take a screen shot from TOWER VIEW, just 15 seconds before touchdown. I've selected just a few of the screen shots to share with you.

The Results

Then, I took the 20+ approaches we had and graphed out the aircraft's COG, compiling all that data into an AVERAGE APPROACH FIX which is the red "X" in the picture below. Logically the bigger and heavier planes were higher and faster at 15 seconds than those that are lighter and slower. But even so, only half of our approaches were near to that average spot. I queried the pilots and all of the landings were successful with a nice rollout and no casualties (the XB-70 and one of the EMB-190s had a higher rate of descent and actually landed just before the piano keys at the end of the displaced threshold).

Conclusions

According to our sim-pilot research, some variation is quite the norm, even into some place as "tight" as Lindbergh Field. Given the variety of approaches demonstrated by experienced sim pilots in calm weather, I am even more inclined to believe that the video is authentically demonstrating variations in real-world approaches to San Diego.**

Feedback

So, what do you think? Please use the comments box below to give your opinion(s) about the validity of this demonstration.

**The author's belief about this video may NOT reflect the opinion of ANY of our test pilots!

Ron Blehm
pretendpilot@yahoo.com