← Back to context

Comment by Ancapistani

14 hours ago

I’m not a manned pilot, but have my part 107 and have spent a few thousand hours flying combat flight sims - ~150kts in a cargo aircraft, four seconds from departing the runway, seems like the worst possible time to abort a touch-and-go. Then consider the numerous automated audio warnings and the copilot suggesting a go-around, and it seems pretty ridiculous to me.

Don’t get me wrong - if I had to land that plane, I’d likely have overrun the runway too. I’m not saying it’s easy, only that it appears to me that they were operating well outside the documented parameters that are the pilot’s responsibility to know.

I just looked it up, and a 767’s Vref is 122-165kts, with Vref at max weight at 144kts. They touched down at 158kts, nose down. The approach was ~35kts over speed, they were above the glide slope, and not bleeding speed fast enough to sink - so they dropped the nose.

From what I can see, they were screwed the moment they touched down - the last moment they had a reasonable opportunity to abort was when they decided to drop the nose and commit instead.

They could have “aborted” at almost any time prior to when they did. And even that may have been fine if they had stuck with it.

A decent rule of thumb in aviation (and life…) is that you’re allowed to change your mind once. Waffling kills more people than switching to a bad decision does.