Comment by addaon
14 hours ago
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.
> They should have gone around at 1000 feet
They hit the ground at 158 knots. 767-300ER rotates at 130 to 160 knots. Given it had burned through its fuel, at the moment they touched down they could have immediately taken back off and gone around.
Given the pilots braked at 146 kts, released at 120 kts to throttle up for G-A, then four seconds later ditched the G-A and re-applied brakes, this sounds like they got stuck between going around and committing to the landing and never quite did either.
They were in a bad situation long before they touched the ground and should have gone around even earlier.
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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
The problem occurred way behind that, when they refused to take a botched approach around. Everything else was just them doubling down on a bad decision over and over.
> 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.