Yeah, that seems to be what happened, from listening to the tower archive: aircraft reports hitting a coyote about 3 mins prior. Tower contacts #1 to ask them if they want to go missed. I think Encore was #2 at this point. A minute later Tower tries to contact Encore, but they don't respond.mbav8r wrote: ↑Sun Jan 07, 2018 8:32 am Just an assumption, but perhaps the previous aircraft hit or reported the dead coyote, tower made several attempts to contact the aircraft, likely to initiate a go around or maybe offer a sidestep to the other runway.
I doubt very much it was closed when they first joined the approach.
I tried listening to the arrival archives, but they're a bit crap. It seems liveatc merges arrival and departure (it's two different voices), and the arrival is very faint. I didn't hear any calls to Encore 3130 on it.
One possibility is ATC forgot to hand them over, or Encore missed the handover and ATC just didn't notice. ATC aren't immune to mistakes. A while ago I was on completely the wrong altimeter setting with Vancouver Terminal...I didn't hear the setting they gave me, and asked to confirm if it was xxxx, but they didn't hear me or ignored my call, so I was about 400ft too low for a few minutes until they queried my altitude. (This was VFR).