Post by Said1 on Nov 17, 2005 16:55:50 GMT -5
Hmmmm. C'est interesting.
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Rain blinded Air France pilots, report suggests
By PAUL KORING
Thursday, November 17, 2005 Posted at 4:51 AM EST
From Thursday's Globe and Mail
Blinded by a sudden downpour, Air France pilots may not have realized they landed their Airbus A340 jet so far down a drenched runway at Toronto's Pearson International Airport that there was not enough room left to stop, an accident investigation update released yesterday suggests.
"These guys were doing 150 [knots] and visibility was severely reduced," said lead investigator Réal Levasseur, who compared the conditions at the time of the Aug. 2 incident with driving a car down a highway during a massive rainstorm.
But the Air France pilots made no effort to abort the landing, which is standard operating procedure when there is insufficient runway on which to land.
"Without any doubt there is no indication from the flight data recorder or from the crew that" they considered "initiating a go-around," Mr. Levasseur said in an interview.
Although two crew members and nine passengers were seriously injured in the incident, all 309 people on board the flight from Paris survived, scrambling into a rain-soaked ravine just before a spreading fire engulfed the plane. Evacuating the jet took less than two minutes, despite four of eight exits being blocked or unavailable and the fact that many passengers disobeyed instructions and took their hand baggage with them.
The Transportation Safety Board interim investigation update amounted to an exoneration of the aircraft, saying there was nothing wrong with its brakes or other key systems as the plane landed just after 4 p.m. on a day marred by heavy thunderstorms and shifting wind gusts.
"No significant anomalies of the aircraft system have been found to date," the interim report said. "No problems were detected with the flight controls, spoilers, tires and brakes, or the thrust reversers."
The report also made clear that air traffic control had properly and fully warned the Air France pilots of the wet runway and poor braking conditions and that the plane had plenty of fuel to either abort the landing and try again in Toronto or to divert to its designated alternative, Ottawa.
Without pointing to pilot error -- and the investigation isn't intended to assign blame -- the report makes clear that the pilots knew they were too high and too fast as they crossed the beginning of the runway, and that they should have known the big, four-engine A340, weighing 185 tonnes, would need about two kilometres to stop.
The pilots disconnected the autopilot about 100 metres above the ground and the co-pilot landed the aircraft manually.
"The aircraft then went slightly above the glide slope" -- the ideal path that put the aircraft down in the first few hundred metres of the runway -- "and arrived over the runway threshold at an estimated height of 100 feet," or twice the normal height expected at that point, the report said.
Not only was the plane too high, it was going too fast. "Indicated airspeed increased from 139 knots to 154 knots."
Instead of landing the aircraft at 260 kilometres an hour in the first few hundred metres of runway, the crew touched down at about 285 km-h and almost halfway down a 2.7-km runway.
Air traffic control had informed the crew of AF358 that aircraft landing on the same runway just ahead of it had reported poor braking conditions and shifting winds.
Mr. Levasseur declined to provide any information about conversations between the pilots as they hurtled toward the end of the runway. "No doubt someone must have realized that things weren't going very well," he said.
Airbus welcomed the interim report.
"It is very thorough and speaks for itself," said company spokeswoman Mary Anne Greczyn. "It holds no surprises."
Despite repeated efforts to contact its media office in Paris, Air France was unavailable for comment.
Link
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Rain blinded Air France pilots, report suggests
By PAUL KORING
Thursday, November 17, 2005 Posted at 4:51 AM EST
From Thursday's Globe and Mail
Blinded by a sudden downpour, Air France pilots may not have realized they landed their Airbus A340 jet so far down a drenched runway at Toronto's Pearson International Airport that there was not enough room left to stop, an accident investigation update released yesterday suggests.
"These guys were doing 150 [knots] and visibility was severely reduced," said lead investigator Réal Levasseur, who compared the conditions at the time of the Aug. 2 incident with driving a car down a highway during a massive rainstorm.
But the Air France pilots made no effort to abort the landing, which is standard operating procedure when there is insufficient runway on which to land.
"Without any doubt there is no indication from the flight data recorder or from the crew that" they considered "initiating a go-around," Mr. Levasseur said in an interview.
Although two crew members and nine passengers were seriously injured in the incident, all 309 people on board the flight from Paris survived, scrambling into a rain-soaked ravine just before a spreading fire engulfed the plane. Evacuating the jet took less than two minutes, despite four of eight exits being blocked or unavailable and the fact that many passengers disobeyed instructions and took their hand baggage with them.
The Transportation Safety Board interim investigation update amounted to an exoneration of the aircraft, saying there was nothing wrong with its brakes or other key systems as the plane landed just after 4 p.m. on a day marred by heavy thunderstorms and shifting wind gusts.
"No significant anomalies of the aircraft system have been found to date," the interim report said. "No problems were detected with the flight controls, spoilers, tires and brakes, or the thrust reversers."
The report also made clear that air traffic control had properly and fully warned the Air France pilots of the wet runway and poor braking conditions and that the plane had plenty of fuel to either abort the landing and try again in Toronto or to divert to its designated alternative, Ottawa.
Without pointing to pilot error -- and the investigation isn't intended to assign blame -- the report makes clear that the pilots knew they were too high and too fast as they crossed the beginning of the runway, and that they should have known the big, four-engine A340, weighing 185 tonnes, would need about two kilometres to stop.
The pilots disconnected the autopilot about 100 metres above the ground and the co-pilot landed the aircraft manually.
"The aircraft then went slightly above the glide slope" -- the ideal path that put the aircraft down in the first few hundred metres of the runway -- "and arrived over the runway threshold at an estimated height of 100 feet," or twice the normal height expected at that point, the report said.
Not only was the plane too high, it was going too fast. "Indicated airspeed increased from 139 knots to 154 knots."
Instead of landing the aircraft at 260 kilometres an hour in the first few hundred metres of runway, the crew touched down at about 285 km-h and almost halfway down a 2.7-km runway.
Air traffic control had informed the crew of AF358 that aircraft landing on the same runway just ahead of it had reported poor braking conditions and shifting winds.
Mr. Levasseur declined to provide any information about conversations between the pilots as they hurtled toward the end of the runway. "No doubt someone must have realized that things weren't going very well," he said.
Airbus welcomed the interim report.
"It is very thorough and speaks for itself," said company spokeswoman Mary Anne Greczyn. "It holds no surprises."
Despite repeated efforts to contact its media office in Paris, Air France was unavailable for comment.
Link