November 17, 2017, 06:43 PM
thumperfbcAirliner question
So just now I’m driving along and see a very large airliner pretty low and doing some turns. I never see commercial planes anywhere near that low. Usually they are very high and headed to the Bay Area, which is about 100 miles west of here depending on what airport.
I pulled up the phone and it looks like it’s Southwest 5258 headed to Sacramento, about 90 miles away... but like I said, I’ve never seen one so low. What’s it doing? The tracking website indicates 8500 feet up and 8.5 miles from me but it seemed far lower than that. I could see the paint scheme/colors enough to think it was a Southwest but I wasn’t sure.
November 17, 2017, 06:54 PM
RHINOWSOIt's easy to misjudge altitudes, especially with large planes.
November 17, 2017, 06:56 PM
JALLENSouthwest doesn’t fly very large airliners, only 737s.
I don’t know approach parameters for those carriers, but I recall traffic many times at 9-10,000’ inbound to Lindbergh Field at ~75-80 miles out over the mountains as I was eastbound. Below 10,000’ the speed limit is 250 knots. Maybe the plane had to do some turns for spacing or something, although I think that is not commonly done with carrier planes. This is speculation on my part.
You can look at the flight log on Flightaware. It shows the flight passing east of Modesto about 10-12 minutes from landing, at which point it was descending at the rate of 900-1000 feet per minutes out of about 9,000’. So maybe we’re not far off.