A few observations to add context (partially stolen from PPRuNe):
- Pilot Flying (PF) was the Captain, 55 yo (presumably) more experienced pilot, who only got certified to fly that type (B767) in May
- Pilot Monitoring (PM) was a 38 yo first officer, also not very experienced on B767
- PF made a number of mistakes, going too high, too fast (partially because he was descending too fast), not catching the glidescope on time
- PM was concerned that the approach/descent was abnormal but kept his mouth shut as the more experienced captain was at the controls (Edit: apparently he did speak up but PF did not acknowledge)
- PM lowered the flaps much later than required (PF orders flaps lowered and PM executes, but flaps can only be lowered when aircraft goes below certain speed) and the flaps were lowered all the way as the plane crossed the runway threshold, which likely caused plane to "float" and overshoot even further
- Plane touched down too late, and left wheel even later, which likely precluded some braking mechanisms from activating (or the PF forgot to since was busy trying to put the thing down)
- PM finally said "too fast, go around" but PF ignored him (or likely did not hear)
- In these situations PM has the right (and obligation) to take over the controls and start go around by themselves, but he didn't, presumably because the Cap was driving
- PF finally panicked and started the go around procedure, bit realized it was too late almost as the front wheel exited the runway, idled the engines and reapplied the brakes.
This is the spitting image of old pre-CRM thinking:
If I try to force the captain to go around, (or follow procedures or whatever), then i am exceeding my authority and will probably be fired. Some cultures have this sort of mentality a lot stronger than others, and it has zero place in the modern cockpit.
While a captain can pull rank, they really should only ever do it with respect to the first officer if: an inexperienced first officer is trying to insist on something dangerous or forbidden by law or policy, or if the captain fully understands an FO's concerns, is fully accounting for them, and as the person ultimately responsible for safety, has determined from experience and training that the current action is safer than alternatives, and would explain but cannot explain right now for workload/emergency status reasons.
Having pilots fighting over the controls is not a situation anyone wants. The pilot monitoring saying go around should have caused an immediate reaction, the human factors behind why it didn't will probably feature prominently in the post-accident actions.
The details of course matter; but the overarching principle put on stark display here is that if you don’t meet stabilized approach criteria (on-speed, on-glidepath, minimal necessary flight control deflections) at the 1000 ft AGL gate, go around. Yes grey areas exist but this approach never became stabilized. The whole approach was a missed opportunity to go around.
I am a pilot; and although I don’t fly large transport category aircraft, this sort of procedural discipline makes all the difference no matter what you fly.
>A pilot called for flaps to be set to 20 degrees, and the other pilot cautioned they were too fast. The other pilot made additional comments regarding the aircraft’s excessive speed throughout the remainder of the recording. There was not a consistent verbal response to the comments about speed.
Wow, The Rehearsal season 2 flashbacks. Although the show was mostly pure absurdity, the central claim of crisis in cockpit communications / lack of adequate FAA mandated training around interpersonal dynamics was spot on.
When you try to land with too much energy the airplane refuses. When you get within a wingspan or two of the ground then ground effect starts giving you more and more lift. That plus excess speed means the airplane simply will not come down.
To force it down you lower the nose but that can end up castering on the nose wheel, starting a PIO event (pilot-induced oscillation), or as in this case the left wing just refused to stop flying. The "quartering tailwind" is a red herring. The jet was well within its tailwind limits - most of the wind was crosswind at that point and the tailwind contribution wasn't anywhere near enough to explain what happened. When you get above glide slope things get worse as you now need to lose altitude but that increases your speed. Even if you get the speed under control if you come at the runway with a 1700-2500fpm descent rate inertia can slam you into the runway.
They were coming in with way too much speed. They leveled off and got above glide slope because they were trying to bleed off enough speed to get within flap speed - flaps give you more drag which they desperately needed.
I made the transition this year into a much higher performance airplane and even going from a Cessna 172 to an A36 TN Bonanza the difference is stark. You must be way further ahead of the airplane in the Bonanza or you will find yourself screaming into the airport at 170kts when your landing speed is more like 80kts. And discover you are above flap and gear extension speed with all power taken out - thus without a good way to slow down.
Transport category jets are that times 100. You absolutely cannot get behind the aircraft. You plan your descents. You begin them much earlier. You pull power earlier. You add drag before speed runs away.
Above all else when you're barreling in 40kts above landing speed you call a go-around and try it again. It is way too late to fix it.
This accident started 30 minutes before they touched the tarmac. A complete failure of planning, of execution, and of ADM (to admit the problem and go-around).
Did fly jets, although not transport-class ones. Just to hammer home that everything here is correct, and the common thread through all aircraft types is disciplined execution.
You fly an approach on airspeed and/or angle of attack, and on glideslope. Period. You're either there or you're correcting to get there, and you're correcting at a point that you don't need huge oh-my-God corrections in close. If you can't do that, sucks to be you, take your waveoff like a real man or woman, and next time suck less.
Do companies punish pilots for go arounds for costing them fuel and delays? If not outright punished, does it cost them in potential promotion/raises? Do they look into a go around enough to determine cause or are all go arounds assumed pilot error by the company?
This has all the hallmarks of a "gethomeitis" disaster, where the urge to push on overrides better judgment about going around and doing things properly.
>> FDR: 00:15 Brakes were released at a groundspeed of 120 knots and throttles were increased to a value consistent with go-around thrust.
>> FDR: 00:11 The throttles were reduced to idle power and the brakes were re-applied. The groundspeed was 117 knots. The throttles remained at idle, and brakes remained applied until the end of the recording.
So they decided to go-around (i.e. do not land and climb immediately, going full thrust), then 4 seconds later changed their mind and went back to power idle and brakes (unclear how speed didn't increase).
While they were still late in calling a go-around (they should have done it before being anywhere close to touching down due to their unstable approach), guessing those 4 seconds contributed to the disaster by a lot.
How can you comment as if you are knowledgeable enough about aviation to speak on this with authority, but you aren't aware that turbofan engines don't have instant throttle response and need time (up to 8 seconds) to spool up? I think a little more restraint is warranted in something like this if you don't know something that basic.
You can actually do the math to work backwards and approximate how much thrust the engines were producing during that time, which was about 15,000 lbf (vs ~120,000 lbf max thrust for a 767-300er) which reduced how quickly they were decelerating by... Maybe a few % or so. But they didn't start accelerating yet. They would have in another second or two, however.
I'll agree that they should have gone around far earlier; getting non-spurious GPWS callouts on final because you're trying to dive and find the glideslope is... Crazy, and configuring landing flaps over the numbers is also crazy, and so is landing 10-20kts faster than the highest possible Vref value for the type, and everything else. But that's fairly obvious...
> How can you comment as if you are knowledgeable enough about aviation to speak on this with authority, but you aren't aware that ...
This is par for the course for HN; smart people applying first-principle thinking on unfamiliar domains for about a minute, which confirms the biases of other outsiders who vote the plausible, but not-quite-right comments to the top.
> How can you comment as if you are knowledgeable enough about aviation to speak on this with authority, but you aren't aware that turbofan engines don't have instant throttle response and need time (up to 8 seconds) to spool up? I think a little more restraint is warranted in something like this if you don't know something that basic.
I'm a pilot, and I don't fly turbofans/jets. Not claiming any "authority", but qualified to comment... It's not "something that basic" unless you fly in that category, there's a lot more to aviation experience than knowing a fact about an engine you don't use. (But hey, congrats to you that you know it!)
> I think a little more restraint is warranted in something like this..
More restraint than saying "unclear <i.e. to me> why ...", an exact statement about what I didn't know, which harms no one and led to several informative explanations by people who know (most of them in good spirit)?
This is what good conversation is about.
...
Anyway, the point I was making holds and is this:
Orthogonal to whether they could/should have gone around at that point, and given that they stayed on the ground after all, it may turn out that that 4 seconds of indecision (instead of pure deceleration) may have directly contributed to the fatalities at the end of the crash.
> While they were still late in calling a go-around (they should have done it before being anywhere close to touching down due to their unstable approach)
Barring a massive tailwind, they had enough groundspeed to go around at touchdown (158 kts).
I think we'll find throttling to G-A and then aborting the G-A caused the crash. If they'd committed to landing they at least wouldn't have overshot with that much energy. If they'd decided to G-A even at 00:15, they may have been well within margin to take back off.
They didn't have much runway left at 00:15 and were far slower than 158 at that point. They came in far too fast, descending too rapidly; first touch was >50% down the runway, and they didn't get the left gear down, so the spoilers and brakes didn't apply until even later.
Should have had a better approach; should have gone around before they even touched the ground; conditional on the bad approach and first touch, they should have gone around after the initial touch 50% down the runway. But they made the wrong choices at all of those points.
Large high-bypass turbofan engines take several seconds to spool up from idle (as they would be on landing) to full thrust. The 4 seconds that the thrust levers spent in the full thrust position in this accident was not long enough.
The go-around decision was far too late. Remember the engines need significant time to spool up. The decision to cancel the go-around was correct (conditional on the preceding series of terrible decisions).
They were over takeoff velocity at that point and could have bounced up in the air and waited for the thrust to come. Would have been sketchy but better than what did happen.
mind you those numbers are seconds until the cvr stopped recording. they were a few hundred feet from the end of the runway when they initiated the go around and like the other poster said the turbines do take time to spool up from idle. they were so far out of normal spec for landing that it was absolutely pilot fault but not at the far end of the runway. they were not stabilized on approach way further back about 5 min or so. (if you're not stabilized on approach you are required to go around). they even called for flaps 30 halfway down the runway which is also not allowed for a stabilized approach.
Spool up time is 8-10s on high-bypass turbofan engines. They tried to go around maybe 1000ft from the end of the runway? It was far far too late to even try it at that point.
Sadly if they had made the call earlier they were going so fast they were basically at rotation speed when they touched down so could have just pulled back and gotten into the air.
They landed flat (and the left wing refused to come down) because they tried to force the plane onto the runway. That just doesn't work. The wings are creating too much lift when you're that fast.
Isn’t there a regulation for idle to full go-around thrust in a maximum of 8 seconds?
If so, it’s tight… but i feel like they should have made it if they had stuck to that plan. They commanded full power 15 seconds before the crash, and were pretty close to (if not slightly above) their stall speed (depends on load). I suspect they just needed another 10-20 knots and enough energy to climb.
Looking at it from the glass-half-full perspective, I'm impressed that pilots declare go-around as often as they do. As someone who sometimes can't decide whether I should declare a production incident (even if it's not my change), I wonder if it's possible to learn that decisiveness.
> I wonder if it's possible to learn that decisiveness.
If the culture allows for it, yes.
On final my instructor was talking about the next approach. I heard the words 'go around' and immediately executed one. He realized that (1) that conversation was unnecessary at that phase of the flight and (2) to not use those words unless he wants me to immediately go around :)
After soloing, I sometimes report that I had to go around because I didn't like how the approach or landing was looking like. I got praised for it every time.
That's why there are standards that define when to go around. If you aren't stable, on glide slope, at proper airspeed, and the before-landing checklist complete at 1000 feet, a go-around is mandatory. There's no choice at that point (or should not be).
Way better to abort and try again, than commit and run the risk of something going wrong. What harm is there in doing a go around if you can? They have plenty of fuel to try multiple times, and have clearance to do so if required.
> There was no indication in the recorded data that speed brakes or thrust reversers were deployed.
I don't know anything about flying. Is this normal? Doesn't sound like it, but I don't know why the pilots would not have used these things that sound useful.
The lack of contact of the left wheels on the ground, which the Weight of Wheel sensor deployment depends on, as in both wheels being grounded, which the auto-speed brakes/thrust reversers depend on, worsened the whole situation as the crew seems to be unaware why they weren't losing speed after they'd 'landed'.
Every single thing they could do wrong at, they did.
> Every single thing they could do wrong at, they did.
There are just too many ways to screw up for that ever to be the case.
For instance, they could also have been lined up to land on something other than the runway they were cleared to land on -- see Air Canada Flight 759, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Canada_Flight_759, which came within 14 feet of colliding with an aircraft on the taxiway they mistook for the runway..
Take this with all the salt that random third-party guesses about a still-in-investigation event should be taken with -- think fully salt-cured ham -- but it looks like the landing was with a quartering tail wind, and the upwind (left) gear never really got weight on it; the wheel bogie needs to be straightened by weight against both the front and back wheels to register weight-on-wheel, and the auto-brake systems need positive weight-on-wheels from at least one redundant sensor on each of the three gear to engage. Came down hot, and basically skimmed with one wheel partially off the ground for some, most, or all of the way down the runway, preventing the braking systems from kicking in.
Nothing prevented the pilots from applying speedbrakes. Nothing prevented the pilots from deploying spoilers. However the pilots were busy doing other things and, this is where your comment comes in, relied on automatic systems which require weight on the wheels
Really that's all that needs to be said at the moment. They had way too much energy[1], which anyone with flight sim or RC experience will recognize as a routine mistake when hand-flying.
The question is why all (all!) the layers of checklists and warnings and process and ATC direction somehow failed in combination to prevent. Yeah, they should have aborted for sure, but they didn't, and we won't know why for a good while yet.
[1] Which can just as easily mean "too high" as "too fast", c.f. the sink rate warnings in the logs which would be consistent with trying to squeeze the airplane down onto the runway. But again we won't know without more data.
Someone who flew this exact airframe wrote that this plane "likes to float when empty, so if you’re not firm with putting it down, especially with those winds, it’ll just keep floating in ground effect."
I'm not a pilot but from my understanding there's a lot of failsafes to ensure things that slow the plane down only trigger when the plane is actually on the ground. Considering that the left gear touched down at 0:19 and pilot called for TOGA at 0:15 they didn't stand a chance.
The prevailing opinion on PPRuNe is that the approach was totally botched from many miles out and the touchdown should never have been attempted (many participants there are professional pilots). There might have been a gust of wing as they were about to touch down, but they were also way too fast and lowered the flaps very late, literally as they crossed the runway threshold, causing extra float due to ground effect.
The pilot flying appears to have been dead set on landing on the first try no matter the cost and the first officer did not intervene as he should have.
They got incredibly lucky and both survived, however likely will never be behind the controls ever again.
> I don't know anything about flying. Is this normal?
Not deploying thrust reversers is normal, not all situations require them. But brakes are terrible when the wings are still flying, so spoilers (if armed as they should) automatically deploy when all wheel sensors report the aircraft is on the ground, so that there will be more weight on the wheels and the brakes can work properly.
The Boeing 767 does not have a Flaps 40 setting. The "Forty" callout was an automated annunciation of the radar-altimeter measured altitude above the runway.
Captain Steeeve’s latest video on this tragedy is shocking, complete disregard for the aviation rules. I think he cited 11 separate instances of __mandatory__ go around, the first of which was before they were anywhere near the runway at 1000ft elevation.
He may or may not be right here, but captain steeeve has a bad track record of baseless claims and/or bad speculation and is not a good reference due to his past failings.
I don't know the specific items that were called out here but I can tell you, as a flight instructor, that the failure to capture the glideslope was already enough to require a go-around. The late flap settings were too. So was the high airspeed. At no point did they have a stabilized approach. There were multiple unequivocal mandatory go-around conditions before they got to the runway.
So sad. Multiple humans may make more serious mistakes as a group than individually could. FAR/AIM is written with blood. There could be an automated safeguard to block such landing attempts - with the capability of explicit emergency override - based on the profile of the approach or even just based on the intercom.
tldw, per Blancolirio: unstable approach, crew should have done a go around at 1000 agl but did not attempt one until it was too late, then aborted the go around.
I think the real question is why didn't the pilots do a go around. I bet there are underlying pressures from the airlines and/or amazon to not do a go around to avoid schedule delays or fuel costs.
Airlines in the US do not pressure pilots to avoid go arounds. Pilots in the US do not delegate life or death decisions to ops, especially since the FAA legally holds them accountable for that. All pilots are aware that they are responsible for the decision to go around or not.
Any airline found to be pressuring pilots to avoid go arounds would be in a world of pain with the FAA.
On cargo flights in particular timing and fuel usage are less critical than passenger flights, and a go around doesn't affect either much.
Pressure to avoid go arounds would also be incredibly counter productive since go arounds exist to preserve life and property. Pilots do go arounds to avoid costly incidents.
You are correct that the question is why they didn't do a go around, but I would bet a large sum of money that airline pressure to avoid go arounds was not a factor.
This is based on my understanding from several pilots who have weighted in.
The cockpit voice recorder transcript has the copilot repeatedly saying "we're coming in too fast" but the pilot never clearly acknolwedges.
The copilot ought to have been more assertive and said "We need to go around. NOW."
The pilot shouldn't have needed that. He should have made the call himself, but even if he was unsure, once his copilot called that he should have done the right thing.
Neither of them will ever fly again. The only question now is if either of them will go to prison. There's already a civil wrongful death lawsuit against them.
In one of the videos you can see dark clouds behind the plane. I suspect the pilots knew they'd have to divert to a different airport if they couldn't land and put pressure on themselves to not have to do that.
Normalization of deviance. While there may have been some pressure from corporate or whatever, my guess is that the pilot flying was the one who only got his type rating a few months ago and that he'd done this at least a few times before in another type and gotten away with it. Now in a bigger, less nimble craft, he didn't.
I suspect the pilots knew it wasn't a great approach but it just didn't click how bad it was. They just felt committed to the approach and thought they could 'fix it' without realizing how bad things really were. Having good enough situational awareness that you wave off when you are supposed to generally means that you also aren't wildly off speed/other parameters. They clearly had lost situational awareness.
The thing that amazes me about this is the timeline here:
00:30 The nose and right main gear touched down at a groundspeed of 158 knots.
...
00:19 The left main gear touched down at a groundspeed of 134 knots.
00:15 A pilot called for a go-around.
11 seconds and 24 knots after the nose touched down and then the left main finally also touched down? Wow. Then 4 seconds after all that the go-around. It is one thing to hold the nose off for that long, but a main mount?!
Yep, its also the most intuitive way to reason about it when you look at the data. Unfortunately, a bad call. I'm sure many of us would have made the same mistake.
> I'm sure many of us would have made the same mistake.
From the reporting and commenting on this incident, that is not the impression I'm getting. This wasn't one bad call after getting half way down the runway, this was a continuous stream of bad decision making for the entire approach, with the copilot suggesting the pilot go around too.
Also: this kind of incident is very rare, so obviously, the vast majority of pilots don't make this mistake.
Private pilot here. No, I'm quite sure very few of you here would have made the same mistake as evidenced by the fact that literally hundreds of thousands of aircraft land successfully every day, many of them under much more adverse conditions. This is not a oh-it-could-have-happened-to-anyone kind of screwup, this is a did-this-guy-really-go-through-basic-pilot-training kind of screwup.
Not enough info yet. Clearly they landed too fast, but why? Was there some problem on approach which caused a fast landing? NTSB hasn't gotten to that part yet.
From the timeline, one pilot knew they were too fast 90 seconds before touchdown.
> [01:42] A pilot called for flaps to be set to 20 degrees, and the other pilot cautioned they were too fast. The other pilot made additional comments regarding the aircraft’s excessive speed throughout the remainder of the recording. There was not a consistent verbal response to the comments about speed
The interaction here is eerily similar to the pilot interactions preceding the 1997 Korean Air Flight 801 (B747) disaster in Guam [1]. It's not clear based on the NTSB update if the Captain was ignoring the First Officer or the other way around.
I know that it's not a luxury that all metro areas can implement, but if you look at airports like Denver or Kansas City, there is a very, very good reason that those airports are out in the middle of nowhere. Lots of accidents happen close to the runway, either on takeoff or landing. It's better that it be in a field than a road or building filled with people.
I've been watching the Flying for Money videos on this. He has interesting insight. It's a bit disappointing he just threw the data into an LLM for processing since it doesn't seem that hard to process, but otherwise he's been pretty good at bringing up likely possibilities based on Occam's razor. Mostly around negligence and most recently about junior vs senior pilot shyness vs ego.
What I don't understand from his analysis though was early on he said the tail wind increased a minute before landing which is too quick to have communicated. If that's true, we need to get better about this. A minute to send a message is ages. It should be automatic between the airport and the aircraft.
The NTSB confirmed that while the pilot applied the physical wheel brakes, the Flight Data Recorder (FDR) showed zero evidence that the speed brakes/spoilers ever extended. They also overshot the runway; I think those were the key mistakes that caused the accident.
No, the left main was not on the ground after touchdown for some time. The aircraft will not auto-deploy the spoilers nor autobrake until it senses weight on weels. It also locks out the thrust reversers. All for obvious reasons.
The left wing was lifting because they came in way too fast. 30-40 knots above final approach speed. That's why they landed so flat - if they had assumed correct flare AoA the airplane would have flown away from the runway.
This is the definition of trying to "horse it onto the runway".
Disclosure: Pilot on small GA aircraft but not ATP and not jet rated so YMMV. FWIW small airplanes are the same: if you're too fast they don't want to land. Bad things happen when you try to force them.
Watched the video and one of the main set of wheels was off the ground a good amount time. Applying brakes then would have gone bad, they would have skidded sideways. They also landed almost flat, front wheel touched the ground almost the same time as one of the back set of wheels, that just looked ... bad.
The key mistakes were that they had 11 mandatory go-around situations between 1000ft before touchdown and overshooting the runway and they didn't go around.
A few observations to add context (partially stolen from PPRuNe):
- Pilot Flying (PF) was the Captain, 55 yo (presumably) more experienced pilot, who only got certified to fly that type (B767) in May
- Pilot Monitoring (PM) was a 38 yo first officer, also not very experienced on B767
- PF made a number of mistakes, going too high, too fast (partially because he was descending too fast), not catching the glidescope on time
- PM was concerned that the approach/descent was abnormal but kept his mouth shut as the more experienced captain was at the controls (Edit: apparently he did speak up but PF did not acknowledge)
- PM lowered the flaps much later than required (PF orders flaps lowered and PM executes, but flaps can only be lowered when aircraft goes below certain speed) and the flaps were lowered all the way as the plane crossed the runway threshold, which likely caused plane to "float" and overshoot even further
- Plane touched down too late, and left wheel even later, which likely precluded some braking mechanisms from activating (or the PF forgot to since was busy trying to put the thing down)
- PM finally said "too fast, go around" but PF ignored him (or likely did not hear)
- In these situations PM has the right (and obligation) to take over the controls and start go around by themselves, but he didn't, presumably because the Cap was driving
- PF finally panicked and started the go around procedure, bit realized it was too late almost as the front wheel exited the runway, idled the engines and reapplied the brakes.
So, yeah...
This is the spitting image of old pre-CRM thinking:
If I try to force the captain to go around, (or follow procedures or whatever), then i am exceeding my authority and will probably be fired. Some cultures have this sort of mentality a lot stronger than others, and it has zero place in the modern cockpit.
While a captain can pull rank, they really should only ever do it with respect to the first officer if: an inexperienced first officer is trying to insist on something dangerous or forbidden by law or policy, or if the captain fully understands an FO's concerns, is fully accounting for them, and as the person ultimately responsible for safety, has determined from experience and training that the current action is safer than alternatives, and would explain but cannot explain right now for workload/emergency status reasons.
That's it, the only two reasons.
Exactly the situation The Rehearsal season 2 was about.
I wonder: would PM have taken control if they had more experience on the 767?
Having pilots fighting over the controls is not a situation anyone wants. The pilot monitoring saying go around should have caused an immediate reaction, the human factors behind why it didn't will probably feature prominently in the post-accident actions.
1 reply →
The details of course matter; but the overarching principle put on stark display here is that if you don’t meet stabilized approach criteria (on-speed, on-glidepath, minimal necessary flight control deflections) at the 1000 ft AGL gate, go around. Yes grey areas exist but this approach never became stabilized. The whole approach was a missed opportunity to go around.
I am a pilot; and although I don’t fly large transport category aircraft, this sort of procedural discipline makes all the difference no matter what you fly.
>A pilot called for flaps to be set to 20 degrees, and the other pilot cautioned they were too fast. The other pilot made additional comments regarding the aircraft’s excessive speed throughout the remainder of the recording. There was not a consistent verbal response to the comments about speed.
Wow, The Rehearsal season 2 flashbacks. Although the show was mostly pure absurdity, the central claim of crisis in cockpit communications / lack of adequate FAA mandated training around interpersonal dynamics was spot on.
> lack of adequate FAA mandated training around interpersonal dynamics
Generally, that's under the 'crew resource management' umbrella.
It was an overrun accident of an Amazon cargo plane that killed 5 people: https://www.cnn.com/2026/09/06/us/boeing-miami-plane-overrun...
Pilot here but not ATP or Jet rated.
When you try to land with too much energy the airplane refuses. When you get within a wingspan or two of the ground then ground effect starts giving you more and more lift. That plus excess speed means the airplane simply will not come down.
To force it down you lower the nose but that can end up castering on the nose wheel, starting a PIO event (pilot-induced oscillation), or as in this case the left wing just refused to stop flying. The "quartering tailwind" is a red herring. The jet was well within its tailwind limits - most of the wind was crosswind at that point and the tailwind contribution wasn't anywhere near enough to explain what happened. When you get above glide slope things get worse as you now need to lose altitude but that increases your speed. Even if you get the speed under control if you come at the runway with a 1700-2500fpm descent rate inertia can slam you into the runway.
They were coming in with way too much speed. They leveled off and got above glide slope because they were trying to bleed off enough speed to get within flap speed - flaps give you more drag which they desperately needed.
I made the transition this year into a much higher performance airplane and even going from a Cessna 172 to an A36 TN Bonanza the difference is stark. You must be way further ahead of the airplane in the Bonanza or you will find yourself screaming into the airport at 170kts when your landing speed is more like 80kts. And discover you are above flap and gear extension speed with all power taken out - thus without a good way to slow down.
Transport category jets are that times 100. You absolutely cannot get behind the aircraft. You plan your descents. You begin them much earlier. You pull power earlier. You add drag before speed runs away.
Above all else when you're barreling in 40kts above landing speed you call a go-around and try it again. It is way too late to fix it.
This accident started 30 minutes before they touched the tarmac. A complete failure of planning, of execution, and of ADM (to admit the problem and go-around).
Did fly jets, although not transport-class ones. Just to hammer home that everything here is correct, and the common thread through all aircraft types is disciplined execution.
You fly an approach on airspeed and/or angle of attack, and on glideslope. Period. You're either there or you're correcting to get there, and you're correcting at a point that you don't need huge oh-my-God corrections in close. If you can't do that, sucks to be you, take your waveoff like a real man or woman, and next time suck less.
Do companies punish pilots for go arounds for costing them fuel and delays? If not outright punished, does it cost them in potential promotion/raises? Do they look into a go around enough to determine cause or are all go arounds assumed pilot error by the company?
2 replies →
This has all the hallmarks of a "gethomeitis" disaster, where the urge to push on overrides better judgment about going around and doing things properly.
A bad driver never misses an exit.
So many mistakes. A notable part is this:
>> CVR: 00:15 A pilot called for a go-around.
>> FDR: 00:15 Brakes were released at a groundspeed of 120 knots and throttles were increased to a value consistent with go-around thrust.
>> FDR: 00:11 The throttles were reduced to idle power and the brakes were re-applied. The groundspeed was 117 knots. The throttles remained at idle, and brakes remained applied until the end of the recording.
So they decided to go-around (i.e. do not land and climb immediately, going full thrust), then 4 seconds later changed their mind and went back to power idle and brakes (unclear how speed didn't increase).
While they were still late in calling a go-around (they should have done it before being anywhere close to touching down due to their unstable approach), guessing those 4 seconds contributed to the disaster by a lot.
> unclear how speed didn't increase
How can you comment as if you are knowledgeable enough about aviation to speak on this with authority, but you aren't aware that turbofan engines don't have instant throttle response and need time (up to 8 seconds) to spool up? I think a little more restraint is warranted in something like this if you don't know something that basic.
You can actually do the math to work backwards and approximate how much thrust the engines were producing during that time, which was about 15,000 lbf (vs ~120,000 lbf max thrust for a 767-300er) which reduced how quickly they were decelerating by... Maybe a few % or so. But they didn't start accelerating yet. They would have in another second or two, however.
I'll agree that they should have gone around far earlier; getting non-spurious GPWS callouts on final because you're trying to dive and find the glideslope is... Crazy, and configuring landing flaps over the numbers is also crazy, and so is landing 10-20kts faster than the highest possible Vref value for the type, and everything else. But that's fairly obvious...
> How can you comment as if you are knowledgeable enough about aviation to speak on this with authority, but you aren't aware that ...
This is par for the course for HN; smart people applying first-principle thinking on unfamiliar domains for about a minute, which confirms the biases of other outsiders who vote the plausible, but not-quite-right comments to the top.
10 replies →
Not having handles where they should be at 1000 callout should have been an instant toga party.
4 replies →
> How can you comment as if you are knowledgeable enough about aviation to speak on this with authority, but you aren't aware that turbofan engines don't have instant throttle response and need time (up to 8 seconds) to spool up? I think a little more restraint is warranted in something like this if you don't know something that basic.
I'm a pilot, and I don't fly turbofans/jets. Not claiming any "authority", but qualified to comment... It's not "something that basic" unless you fly in that category, there's a lot more to aviation experience than knowing a fact about an engine you don't use. (But hey, congrats to you that you know it!)
> I think a little more restraint is warranted in something like this..
More restraint than saying "unclear <i.e. to me> why ...", an exact statement about what I didn't know, which harms no one and led to several informative explanations by people who know (most of them in good spirit)?
This is what good conversation is about.
...
Anyway, the point I was making holds and is this:
Orthogonal to whether they could/should have gone around at that point, and given that they stayed on the ground after all, it may turn out that that 4 seconds of indecision (instead of pure deceleration) may have directly contributed to the fatalities at the end of the crash.
> While they were still late in calling a go-around (they should have done it before being anywhere close to touching down due to their unstable approach)
Barring a massive tailwind, they had enough groundspeed to go around at touchdown (158 kts).
I think we'll find throttling to G-A and then aborting the G-A caused the crash. If they'd committed to landing they at least wouldn't have overshot with that much energy. If they'd decided to G-A even at 00:15, they may have been well within margin to take back off.
They didn't have much runway left at 00:15 and were far slower than 158 at that point. They came in far too fast, descending too rapidly; first touch was >50% down the runway, and they didn't get the left gear down, so the spoilers and brakes didn't apply until even later.
Should have had a better approach; should have gone around before they even touched the ground; conditional on the bad approach and first touch, they should have gone around after the initial touch 50% down the runway. But they made the wrong choices at all of those points.
6 replies →
> I think we'll find throttling to G-A and then aborting the G-A caused the crash.
Not even a chance.
> (unclear how speed didn't increase)
Large high-bypass turbofan engines take several seconds to spool up from idle (as they would be on landing) to full thrust. The 4 seconds that the thrust levers spent in the full thrust position in this accident was not long enough.
The go-around decision was far too late. Remember the engines need significant time to spool up. The decision to cancel the go-around was correct (conditional on the preceding series of terrible decisions).
They were over takeoff velocity at that point and could have bounced up in the air and waited for the thrust to come. Would have been sketchy but better than what did happen.
1 reply →
mind you those numbers are seconds until the cvr stopped recording. they were a few hundred feet from the end of the runway when they initiated the go around and like the other poster said the turbines do take time to spool up from idle. they were so far out of normal spec for landing that it was absolutely pilot fault but not at the far end of the runway. they were not stabilized on approach way further back about 5 min or so. (if you're not stabilized on approach you are required to go around). they even called for flaps 30 halfway down the runway which is also not allowed for a stabilized approach.
Spool up time is 8-10s on high-bypass turbofan engines. They tried to go around maybe 1000ft from the end of the runway? It was far far too late to even try it at that point.
Sadly if they had made the call earlier they were going so fast they were basically at rotation speed when they touched down so could have just pulled back and gotten into the air.
They landed flat (and the left wing refused to come down) because they tried to force the plane onto the runway. That just doesn't work. The wings are creating too much lift when you're that fast.
Disclosure: Pilot but not ATP or Jet rated.
Isn’t there a regulation for idle to full go-around thrust in a maximum of 8 seconds?
If so, it’s tight… but i feel like they should have made it if they had stuck to that plan. They commanded full power 15 seconds before the crash, and were pretty close to (if not slightly above) their stall speed (depends on load). I suspect they just needed another 10-20 knots and enough energy to climb.
8 replies →
Looking at it from the glass-half-full perspective, I'm impressed that pilots declare go-around as often as they do. As someone who sometimes can't decide whether I should declare a production incident (even if it's not my change), I wonder if it's possible to learn that decisiveness.
> I wonder if it's possible to learn that decisiveness.
If the culture allows for it, yes.
On final my instructor was talking about the next approach. I heard the words 'go around' and immediately executed one. He realized that (1) that conversation was unnecessary at that phase of the flight and (2) to not use those words unless he wants me to immediately go around :)
After soloing, I sometimes report that I had to go around because I didn't like how the approach or landing was looking like. I got praised for it every time.
So yes, it's all culture.
> can't decide whether I should declare a production incident
A supportive culture encourages you to declare early at the first sign you feel something isn't right.
The fact you're struggling to decide means it should be declared but you feel some negative force if ends up not as serious as you think.
A supportive culture will work with you and if necessary down grade the priority if it can wait until a regular release cycle.
It's the same rot that set into Telstra https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49534127
That's why there are standards that define when to go around. If you aren't stable, on glide slope, at proper airspeed, and the before-landing checklist complete at 1000 feet, a go-around is mandatory. There's no choice at that point (or should not be).
Way better to abort and try again, than commit and run the risk of something going wrong. What harm is there in doing a go around if you can? They have plenty of fuel to try multiple times, and have clearance to do so if required.
> There was no indication in the recorded data that speed brakes or thrust reversers were deployed.
I don't know anything about flying. Is this normal? Doesn't sound like it, but I don't know why the pilots would not have used these things that sound useful.
The lack of contact of the left wheels on the ground, which the Weight of Wheel sensor deployment depends on, as in both wheels being grounded, which the auto-speed brakes/thrust reversers depend on, worsened the whole situation as the crew seems to be unaware why they weren't losing speed after they'd 'landed'.
Every single thing they could do wrong at, they did.
After applying the brakes for 8 seconds, they then went to full throttle to try get back in the air for four more seconds. That's bonkers.
> Every single thing they could do wrong at, they did.
There are just too many ways to screw up for that ever to be the case.
For instance, they could also have been lined up to land on something other than the runway they were cleared to land on -- see Air Canada Flight 759, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Canada_Flight_759, which came within 14 feet of colliding with an aircraft on the taxiway they mistook for the runway..
Take this with all the salt that random third-party guesses about a still-in-investigation event should be taken with -- think fully salt-cured ham -- but it looks like the landing was with a quartering tail wind, and the upwind (left) gear never really got weight on it; the wheel bogie needs to be straightened by weight against both the front and back wheels to register weight-on-wheel, and the auto-brake systems need positive weight-on-wheels from at least one redundant sensor on each of the three gear to engage. Came down hot, and basically skimmed with one wheel partially off the ground for some, most, or all of the way down the runway, preventing the braking systems from kicking in.
> think fully salt-cured ham
I recently learned that you wash/soak the salt off before consuming it. So, are you talking pre or post wash? ;)
Here's a neat video of an accurate reproduction, including a taste test after sitting "in a ship hold" for 7 months! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tWQpJ8kR5U
AIUI, they should never have gotten that far. They should have gone around at 1000 feet.
4 replies →
Nothing prevented the pilots from applying speedbrakes. Nothing prevented the pilots from deploying spoilers. However the pilots were busy doing other things and, this is where your comment comes in, relied on automatic systems which require weight on the wheels
1 reply →
> Came down hot
Really that's all that needs to be said at the moment. They had way too much energy[1], which anyone with flight sim or RC experience will recognize as a routine mistake when hand-flying.
The question is why all (all!) the layers of checklists and warnings and process and ATC direction somehow failed in combination to prevent. Yeah, they should have aborted for sure, but they didn't, and we won't know why for a good while yet.
[1] Which can just as easily mean "too high" as "too fast", c.f. the sink rate warnings in the logs which would be consistent with trying to squeeze the airplane down onto the runway. But again we won't know without more data.
Someone who flew this exact airframe wrote that this plane "likes to float when empty, so if you’re not firm with putting it down, especially with those winds, it’ll just keep floating in ground effect."
https://www.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/1w9jsrb/put_toget...
I'm not a pilot but from my understanding there's a lot of failsafes to ensure things that slow the plane down only trigger when the plane is actually on the ground. Considering that the left gear touched down at 0:19 and pilot called for TOGA at 0:15 they didn't stand a chance.
The prevailing opinion on PPRuNe is that the approach was totally botched from many miles out and the touchdown should never have been attempted (many participants there are professional pilots). There might have been a gust of wing as they were about to touch down, but they were also way too fast and lowered the flaps very late, literally as they crossed the runway threshold, causing extra float due to ground effect.
The pilot flying appears to have been dead set on landing on the first try no matter the cost and the first officer did not intervene as he should have.
They got incredibly lucky and both survived, however likely will never be behind the controls ever again.
> I don't know anything about flying. Is this normal?
Not deploying thrust reversers is normal, not all situations require them. But brakes are terrible when the wings are still flying, so spoilers (if armed as they should) automatically deploy when all wheel sensors report the aircraft is on the ground, so that there will be more weight on the wheels and the brakes can work properly.
Depending on the plane they need the wheels to have sufficient weight on them first. Also strangely the flaps 30 and flaps 40 call outs do not match.
The Boeing 767 does not have a Flaps 40 setting. The "Forty" callout was an automated annunciation of the radar-altimeter measured altitude above the runway.
Captain Steeeve’s latest video on this tragedy is shocking, complete disregard for the aviation rules. I think he cited 11 separate instances of __mandatory__ go around, the first of which was before they were anywhere near the runway at 1000ft elevation.
He may or may not be right here, but captain steeeve has a bad track record of baseless claims and/or bad speculation and is not a good reference due to his past failings.
I would not be referencing him as a good source.
I don't know the specific items that were called out here but I can tell you, as a flight instructor, that the failure to capture the glideslope was already enough to require a go-around. The late flap settings were too. So was the high airspeed. At no point did they have a stabilized approach. There were multiple unequivocal mandatory go-around conditions before they got to the runway.
So sad. Multiple humans may make more serious mistakes as a group than individually could. FAR/AIM is written with blood. There could be an automated safeguard to block such landing attempts - with the capability of explicit emergency override - based on the profile of the approach or even just based on the intercom.
tldw, per Blancolirio: unstable approach, crew should have done a go around at 1000 agl but did not attempt one until it was too late, then aborted the go around.
I think the real question is why didn't the pilots do a go around. I bet there are underlying pressures from the airlines and/or amazon to not do a go around to avoid schedule delays or fuel costs.
I've never heard of anything even close to this.
Airlines in the US do not pressure pilots to avoid go arounds. Pilots in the US do not delegate life or death decisions to ops, especially since the FAA legally holds them accountable for that. All pilots are aware that they are responsible for the decision to go around or not.
Any airline found to be pressuring pilots to avoid go arounds would be in a world of pain with the FAA.
On cargo flights in particular timing and fuel usage are less critical than passenger flights, and a go around doesn't affect either much.
Pressure to avoid go arounds would also be incredibly counter productive since go arounds exist to preserve life and property. Pilots do go arounds to avoid costly incidents.
You are correct that the question is why they didn't do a go around, but I would bet a large sum of money that airline pressure to avoid go arounds was not a factor.
31 replies →
This is based on my understanding from several pilots who have weighted in.
The cockpit voice recorder transcript has the copilot repeatedly saying "we're coming in too fast" but the pilot never clearly acknolwedges.
The copilot ought to have been more assertive and said "We need to go around. NOW."
The pilot shouldn't have needed that. He should have made the call himself, but even if he was unsure, once his copilot called that he should have done the right thing.
Neither of them will ever fly again. The only question now is if either of them will go to prison. There's already a civil wrongful death lawsuit against them.
1 reply →
In one of the videos you can see dark clouds behind the plane. I suspect the pilots knew they'd have to divert to a different airport if they couldn't land and put pressure on themselves to not have to do that.
1 reply →
Normalization of deviance. While there may have been some pressure from corporate or whatever, my guess is that the pilot flying was the one who only got his type rating a few months ago and that he'd done this at least a few times before in another type and gotten away with it. Now in a bigger, less nimble craft, he didn't.
I suspect the pilots knew it wasn't a great approach but it just didn't click how bad it was. They just felt committed to the approach and thought they could 'fix it' without realizing how bad things really were. Having good enough situational awareness that you wave off when you are supposed to generally means that you also aren't wildly off speed/other parameters. They clearly had lost situational awareness.
The thing that amazes me about this is the timeline here:
00:30 The nose and right main gear touched down at a groundspeed of 158 knots.
...
00:19 The left main gear touched down at a groundspeed of 134 knots.
00:15 A pilot called for a go-around.
11 seconds and 24 knots after the nose touched down and then the left main finally also touched down? Wow. Then 4 seconds after all that the go-around. It is one thing to hold the nose off for that long, but a main mount?!
1 reply →
Bingo.
[flagged]
2 replies →
Could a company that won't let delivery drivers stop to pee possibly be pushing their pilots that hard? Yes. Yes, they could.
Pilot B kept warning pilot A(who was at the controls) that the airspeed was too high and no adjustments were made https://www.npr.org/2026/09/10/g-s1-142664/cargo-plane-miami...
Yeah, but it's also Pilot B's job to take over if Pilot A isn't flying safely. He didn't.
The "hazardous attitudes" study in this report will be gold.
"Capitalism caused this crash"
1 reply →
Obligatory Blancolirio link: https://youtu.be/dcf7n0T3D9c
Yep, its also the most intuitive way to reason about it when you look at the data. Unfortunately, a bad call. I'm sure many of us would have made the same mistake.
> I'm sure many of us would have made the same mistake.
From the reporting and commenting on this incident, that is not the impression I'm getting. This wasn't one bad call after getting half way down the runway, this was a continuous stream of bad decision making for the entire approach, with the copilot suggesting the pilot go around too.
Also: this kind of incident is very rare, so obviously, the vast majority of pilots don't make this mistake.
Private pilot here. No, I'm quite sure very few of you here would have made the same mistake as evidenced by the fact that literally hundreds of thousands of aircraft land successfully every day, many of them under much more adverse conditions. This is not a oh-it-could-have-happened-to-anyone kind of screwup, this is a did-this-guy-really-go-through-basic-pilot-training kind of screwup.
20 replies →
Not enough info yet. Clearly they landed too fast, but why? Was there some problem on approach which caused a fast landing? NTSB hasn't gotten to that part yet.
From the timeline, one pilot knew they were too fast 90 seconds before touchdown.
From the videos there was some serious weather in the area. Also the aircraft was very light.
> [01:42] A pilot called for flaps to be set to 20 degrees, and the other pilot cautioned they were too fast. The other pilot made additional comments regarding the aircraft’s excessive speed throughout the remainder of the recording. There was not a consistent verbal response to the comments about speed
The interaction here is eerily similar to the pilot interactions preceding the 1997 Korean Air Flight 801 (B747) disaster in Guam [1]. It's not clear based on the NTSB update if the Captain was ignoring the First Officer or the other way around.
[1]: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Flight_801_-_Aircr...
Related:
Prime Air crash: 10+ mandatory go-around triggers were ignored [video] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xm6G7EOP5Qc
apparently they weren't even properly configured until almost touching down.
I know that it's not a luxury that all metro areas can implement, but if you look at airports like Denver or Kansas City, there is a very, very good reason that those airports are out in the middle of nowhere. Lots of accidents happen close to the runway, either on takeoff or landing. It's better that it be in a field than a road or building filled with people.
They made a whole song about this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ccq30minme8
Prediction: this incident will eventually lead to the mandating of AI pilot assistance on large aircraft. AI doesn't defer to old guys.
[dead]
I've been watching the Flying for Money videos on this. He has interesting insight. It's a bit disappointing he just threw the data into an LLM for processing since it doesn't seem that hard to process, but otherwise he's been pretty good at bringing up likely possibilities based on Occam's razor. Mostly around negligence and most recently about junior vs senior pilot shyness vs ego.
What I don't understand from his analysis though was early on he said the tail wind increased a minute before landing which is too quick to have communicated. If that's true, we need to get better about this. A minute to send a message is ages. It should be automatic between the airport and the aircraft.
The NTSB confirmed that while the pilot applied the physical wheel brakes, the Flight Data Recorder (FDR) showed zero evidence that the speed brakes/spoilers ever extended. They also overshot the runway; I think those were the key mistakes that caused the accident.
https://www.wisn.com/article/amazon-cargo-plane-black-box-mi...
No, the left main was not on the ground after touchdown for some time. The aircraft will not auto-deploy the spoilers nor autobrake until it senses weight on weels. It also locks out the thrust reversers. All for obvious reasons.
The left wing was lifting because they came in way too fast. 30-40 knots above final approach speed. That's why they landed so flat - if they had assumed correct flare AoA the airplane would have flown away from the runway.
This is the definition of trying to "horse it onto the runway".
Disclosure: Pilot on small GA aircraft but not ATP and not jet rated so YMMV. FWIW small airplanes are the same: if you're too fast they don't want to land. Bad things happen when you try to force them.
Seeing a 767 wheelbarrow down a runway is so surreal. Brings back fond memories of scaring CFIs in a 172.
Watched the video and one of the main set of wheels was off the ground a good amount time. Applying brakes then would have gone bad, they would have skidded sideways. They also landed almost flat, front wheel touched the ground almost the same time as one of the back set of wheels, that just looked ... bad.
The key mistakes were that they had 11 mandatory go-around situations between 1000ft before touchdown and overshooting the runway and they didn't go around.
No, this stuff is all downstream of their terrible earlier decisions.