Strange behaviour by Air NZ flight landing at Rarotonga yesterday.

Forums › Travel (planes, train, cruise) › Strange behaviour by Air NZ flight landing at Rarotonga yesterday.

eracode

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#250667 21-May-2019 03:18

Yesterday I was watching Air NZ flight NZ46 on Flightradar24 on iPad as it approached its landing at Rarotonga International just after midday (NZ time). It was about ten minutes ahead of its scheduled arrival time.

It approached from the south-west and was down to a few hundred feet and less than 200 knots almost over to the end of the runway when it appeared to abort the landing. It accelerated, turned sharply and climbed to do a circuit to the north of the airport, came back and flew over the airport. Then flew out to the east, turned back, flew over the airport again, went out to the west - then turned to settle into its original approach path - and landed.

All this circuit-flying was done at about 3,000 ft and took about 30-40 minutes. A screenshot of the whole thing is below - sorry the green track is a bit hard to see against the blue.

Really puzzled by this. Have tried looking to see whether there are any news reports on it but haven’t found anything. Keen to hear if anyone can shed some light on what might have been going on.

Sometimes I just sit and think. Other times I just sit.

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#2241970 21-May-2019 03:18

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#2241975 21-May-2019 05:37

maybe they saw something on the runway?

empacher48

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#2241978 21-May-2019 05:50

Looks to me like the standard missed approach. Nothing unusual in the routing and is done for many reasons.

eracode

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#2242011 21-May-2019 07:50

empacher48: Looks to me like the standard missed approach. Nothing unusual in the routing and is done for many reasons.

Thanks - very insightful and helpful.

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#2242082 21-May-2019 09:35

Those hard turns east and north of the runway aren't real... there's a couple of minutes worth of data missing there.

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#2242088 21-May-2019 09:44

frankv:

Those hard turns east and north of the runway aren't real... there's a couple of minutes worth of data missing there.

Agreed - it almost looks like they were going to be changed to a westerly approach then went back to the original easterly. Maybe the wind was being changeable

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#2242102 21-May-2019 10:02

Rarotonga in a Southerly. Normal operations.

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#2242112 21-May-2019 10:20

Pilot realised his GoPro wasn't set properly...

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#2242229 21-May-2019 11:42

UFO

Plesse igmore amd axxept applogies in adbance fir anu typos

sittingduckz

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#2242276 21-May-2019 12:13

I had a very similar situation in 2017 I think. On approach with still a reasonble distance to go the plane was turning, kept changing it heading left & right. Then just before touchdown (like ants were already ducking) they aborted the landing. almost craped my pants because it was so sudden. Then circled around and landed fine. After talking to a pilot he thought it sounded like an instrument only practice landing, were someone training has to land without looking outside... yikes

The captain obviously wasn't 100% happy about the approach line.

Heads down approach I think he said? I'm not a pilot or an expert haha :)

Edit: Same airport too. And almost no wind

I'm not a complete idiot, I still have some parts missing.

eracode

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#2242290 21-May-2019 12:29

I have heard from someone who knows the details of that specific flight. It was raining very heavily and the go-round was a result of the weather incident. They didn't say more than that but I'm guessing excess water on the runway and/or visibility issues.

What I have learned from this is that what happened here is not as strange as I thought it was - particularly at RAR.

Sometimes I just sit and think. Other times I just sit.

ben28

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#2242298 21-May-2019 12:41

Around the same time a flight couldn't land at Rarotonga due to weather conditions so flew on to Tahiti. 1 1/2 hours there, then back, plus refuelling. That pushed the pilots and maybe the cabin crew over their allowed hours so couldn't return to Auckland as scheduled