Jet aborts S.F. landing after failure of airport wind gauge
American Eagle flight returns to Dallas; similar diversion occurred last year
Passengers on a 70-seat American Eagle jet traveling from Dallas to Santa Fe late Tuesday night actually ended up making the flight twice.
The pilots, before beginning their descent to the municipal airport here around 11 p.m., turned around and flew back to Dallas-Fort Worth for the night because of a problem with weather equipment on the ground.
The flight, carrying 38 passengers, successfully landed in Santa Fe on Wednesday morning.
It was the second time in a little over a year that a Dallas-to-Santa Fe flight has diverted back to its origin, a miserable inconvenience for passengers and an unfortunate mishap at an airport with its sights set on expansion as local business and tourism groups hope to steal traffic away from the Albuquerque International Sunport with a “Fly Santa Fe” campaign.
And there’s not a whole lot the
Santa Fe Municipal Airport itself can do to remedy the problem, said Cameron Humphres, who manages the small airport on the city’s far southwest side.
In fact, the problem was outside the airport’s ability to address at all, he said, because the issue was a faulty windspeed sensor maintained by the National Weather Service.
“This particular [monitoring] system isn’t owned, managed, operated, maintained by the airport or city of Santa Fe,” Humphres said.
“It’s really unfortunate for the passengers; I feel for them,” he added.
“But at the end of the day, safety is paramount, and it is against the regulatory requirements for pilots to land without current wind data,” said Humphres, a pilot himself.
It was not immediately clear what caused the National Weather Service wind sensor to fail.
“Most of the time, it’s a pretty well-oiled machine and it doesn’t need any supplementation or intervention, but last night was the exception,” Todd Shoemake, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service office in Albuquerque, said Wednesday. He said technicians were able to fix the sensor early Wednesday morning.
Third-party contracted personnel in the Santa Fe air traffic control tower, funded by the Federal Aviation Administration, had already gone home for the night, their regular hours concluding at 9 p.m., Humphres said. Closing control towers before all flights have arrived is common practice at small airports, Humphres said.
An FAA spokesman, Lynn Lunsford, said that if tower personnel go home, it leaves pilots reliant on the automated weather system data.
But if the RVA Inc. tower workers had been there Tuesday night, Humphres said, they might have been able to supplement the wind data.
Without the automated minute-by-minute weather updates that help guide late-night pilots, the flight could not safely land, said Bobbie Battista, spokeswoman for ExpressJet, which operated the American Eagle flight under an arrangement with American Airlines.
Battista said the flight was not able to go to a nearer airport, such as the Sunport, because, as the turnaround was unexpected, the Albuquerque airport was “unable to handle a diversion at that hour.” She said the company apologized for the inconvenience.
Battista referred a question about accommodations for passengers to Ross Feinstein, a spokesman for American Airlines. Feinstein said the company does not provide overnight accommodations to passengers when flight cancellations are “outside of our control,” referencing weather as one example.
Jon Bevill, husband of a passenger on the diverted flight, said in an email Wednesday that his daughter had to drive down to Santa Fe from Taos twice in order to pick up his wife. “This to me is crazy bad for tourism and Santa Fe image,” Bevill wrote.
The sensor problem is “an extremely rare event,” Humphres said. A similar weather information failure caused a diversion from Santa Fe back to Dallas-Fort Worth in August 2016. Humphres, who began managing the Santa Fe airport in March 2016, said that at his previous post, directing the Rapid City Regional Airport in South Dakota, a weather data sensor problem occurred three or four times.
The diversion comes as the Santa Fe Municipal Airport master plan, a road map for two decades’ worth of improvements, is set to go before the City Council next week.
Humphres said the master plan does not address the federally managed weather data system or the possibility of expanded hours at the tower but rather focuses on the city property’s infrastructural needs.
Contact Tripp Stelnicki at 505-4287626 or tstelnicki@sfnewmexican. com.