PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - So WestJet almost puts one of their 737 in the water while landing at St-Maarten...
Old 6th Jun 2018, 13:54
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wiedehopf
 
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Checking the plates:
VOR Z Rwy 10 has a MDA of 500'
RNAV (GNSS) Rwy 10 has a MDA of 700'

Both have only LNAV minima.

The VOR is 2x the runway width to the right of the runway 10 threshold.
Both approaches are on track 96 degrees like the runway.

When GPS works properly you could basically use it to much lower minimums and be fine. But the integrity without augmentation system is not guaranteed and therefore the minimums are quite high (that's how i understand it).

So choosing or not choosing the RNAV is irrelevant here as they would've been required to fly visually even sooner. I doubt that lateral guidance would have helped much either. In the youtube video on avherald you can see they are more or less aligned with the runway but that didn't help.
If they kept the appropriate descent rate or somehow programmed themselves VNAV guidance maybe they would've even made the landing. Would still have been illegal to continue as far past the missed approach point as they did.
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