I was on American Airline flight #4 from LAX (Los Angeles) to JFK (New York Kennedy) on 10/05. That was roughly my 30th time flying that route, way over 50th times landing onto JFK airport. And I have watched hundreds of actual approaches in Flightaware. But I have never seen that sort of landing approach.
AA4 was cleared for landing onto runway 22L, southwest-bound. Typical approach pattern when flying in from the west, or particularly north-west, is right along the Hudson river southward (to avoid interference with nearby EWR on the west and LGA on the east), turn southeast into Atlantic Ocean, then make a great counter-clockwise circle centered around JFK, finally lining up along 22L for landing. 31R (northwest-bound landing) approach is quite similar except at the very last step. I know this annoying pattern very well since this detour adds 15~20 minutes of extra airborne time right near the destination airport (compare it with westbound straight approach / landing into LAX). There are lucky days where the flight takes southern route (along KY-WV-MD-NJ) and lands along 4R, or takes more common northern route (along IA-Chicago-Lake Erie-NY/PA border) but are allowed to go straight to north of JFK through Bronx and lands along 22L. Latter case can save 10+ minutes. However, they are both relatively rare. These three are all patterns I've known so far for landing along heading 4 / 22 / 31. Until the above AA4. Which flies toward JFK along heading 13, turn NE, making 180 deg turn to land right away. While the heading was along 13, the airplane was flying quite high. It disproves the possibility that the landing direction suddenly changed from 13 to 22. In fact 13 landing requires steep right turn at the very last minute, very different from the type above.
I just wonder what happened on that day.
