Air France high speed RTO due to missing baggage
 

Incident: France A343 at Fort de France on Apr 16th 2017, rejected takeoff due to ATC instruction

Quite a strange story. 130 kt RTO, 25 hours delay, a two days long AOG and an extra B-777 run because the company called ATC to instruct them to wait for some baggage. Why not cancelling their flight plan and/or sending them an ACARS message instead?

It is indeed a strange story - what would ATC request a takeoff abort for missing luggages ?

Also from the quoted article

Does AirFrance fly direct from Martinique to Moscow ?! Maybe a some charter operation ?

Could it possibly be for luggage that was about to depart without an owner and they needed to offload it?

Although not mentioned in the Avherald report, the flight number involved (AF4001) is not a scheduled service but is used for ad-hoc charters.

I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out not to have been bound for Moscow at all.

And V1 speed was?

131 or higher, one assumes.

Pretty darn fast.

Could an engineer or knowledgeable person please inform us: Was there any damage to wheels or brakes? What would render the a/c non-flyable for >20hrs? I would expect an engineering inspection is required, and that one was available.

Is it possible that there was a loading error resulting in an incorrect (and possibly dangerous) C of G detected by the company after pushback?


:ooh:

The flight was a charter Orly-Martinique-Cayenne and v.v. according to this article:

Un avion d'Air France freine brutalement juste avant le décollage

which seems much more likely than the suggested destination of Moscow.

The article reports a landing gear issue detected during the takeoff run, with the resulting RTO necessitating multiple wheel changes (hence presumably the delay at FDF).

Makes much more sense than the luggage argument! Much better to stop if you still can

Stop on the runway at (M?)TOW or continue the flight and land at destination at a much lower weight? Most airlines and FCTM's recommend the crew to continue the take-off with a landing gear issue (chimmy, tire failure) rather than reject, because of a) possible reduced braking effectiveness because of that very landing gear issue, and b) virtually no time to trouble shoot during the take-off run.

Better to continue the take-off and then have 9-10 hours to trouble shoot, ask the tower for example if they found debris on the runway, and burn off the trip fuel in order to arrive at the destination at 1) a significantly lower weight and 2) have possible the emergency services standing by.

The whole "landing gear issue" (very hot brakes, possibly warped brakes due to the fire brigade spraying cold water on them, and perhaps some melted fuse plugs) was probably as a result of the RTO and not the reason why they rejected, and that story sounds like either a cover-up, bad journalism or both. http://cdn.pprune.org/images/smilies/yeees.gif

And what about the total loss where a wheel fire caused the main spar to fail?...bet they wished they had aborted.

20/20 hindsight. One can come up with 100's of "what-if" scenarios where it would be better to reject, and one could come up with 100's of "what-if" scenarios where it would be better to continue.

However, during the split second one generally has available during a take-off run >100 kts and close to V1, as far as I remember most airplane manufacturers recommend to; continue the take-off run, get airborne, assess the gear problem, burn off (i.e. continue to DEST) or dump fuel, and then land.

Nobody is disputing that things get very hot when you RTO at approaching V1.

But that fact doesn't have any bearing on whether or not there was a landing gear issue that necessitated the RTO in the first place.

That's not a high speed rejected takeoff compared to Air France's RTO in Lagos in 2010. In the Lagos one the V1 was 138 knots and the speed on the runway during the rejection reached 155 knots indicated due to being unable to rotate. This was because they had inadvertently engaged the autopilot instead of the autothrottle on the takeoff roll and thought the flight controls had jammed (Same size square button for autothrottle and autopilot.I do miss the old Boeing autopilot paddles!)


Incident: Air France B773 at Lagos on Jan 12th 2010, rejected takeoff

Whilst I accepted the odd guy being go minded with a eng failure before V1 when the take off calculation included a clearway ( meaning we were going cross country) tyre failure was a bigger worry as the three hydraulic lines were routed in both gear bays on the DC10 ..as they were around eng2..hence Souix city.

Suninmyeys, pretty sure AirNZ did the exact same thing when they first got 777's .
Japan somewhere I think.

on the 777 you would set the trim from the load sheet, and on the aircraft theres some fancy gizmos that detect the loading on the nose wheel to cross check, damn clever.

I don't think the most important question has been answered here.


How many of you would perform a high speed reject if requested by ATC
without a really good reason ?


And why on earth did the controller make that request at that moment
even if requested by company operations ?


I doubt i'd be stopping even if before V1.

Another article, this time from the local Martinique press:

Cayenne-Paris : les passagers sont repartis hier soir - Toute l'actualité de la Martinique sur Internet - FranceAntilles.fr

Again, no mention of an instruction from ATC, but a reference to a problem with the gear "a few seconds before takeoff".