Quid,
I found this one very interesting, both from a legal and a philosophical perspective. I have not researched FAR 121 as I am far from home and can only get limited access.
For your interest, the Australian rule for equivalent operations specifically requires that normal landings be conducted on runways with buffers intact, ie 1.67 for destination and 1.43 for alternates. The only time the pilot of an Australian registered aircraft can land without buffers is in an emergency.
Although the original Australian rules were based on the then CAR 4 (I think) rules, there are a number of differences documented where the Australian regulators did not agree that safety was preserved. I am not sure if this particular rule was one of those differences, but I could fully understand that it would have been.
My philosophical interest was aroused simply because I cannot understand why anyone would either permit or wish to land a perfectly serviceable aircraft during normal operations on a runway that matches the demonstrated landing distance only, ie without buffers.
My understanding is that the 1.67/1.43 buffers are there to ensure an acceptable level of safety for normal commercial operations, ie recognising that we avoid crashing the aeroplane on and using autobrake 10 so that some of the people who pay our wages might want to come back and do it again. The unfactored distances are achieved by test pilots whose motivation is to minimise the landing distance in order to maximise the commercial value of the aircraft - any consideration to the comfort of the occupants being mere lipservice. I would have thought that reducing the normal buffers would have been well recognised as a risk-increasing philosophy that would be unwise to leave solely to the discretion of the operator.
Given some of the chest beating that goes on in these fora from some of our colleagues, particularly in regard to "if you can't do this or that, you should hand in your licence", despite some of the poor handling one observes in simulators and aircraft alike, I can only presume that your interest was an academic one in protecting your licence against the Feds.
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Stay Alive,
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