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Old 9th Aug 2020, 13:47
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Rednerib
 
Join Date: Mar 2019
Location: Delhi
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I use the term 'PILOT TRAP' to describe the situation where the crew landed up. The weather was bad but well within the minima. So diversion would not have been the first choice. Approach is made in heavy rain vis. 2km (within minima). As the glide slope was US it was a non precision approach with higher MDA. AT MDA RW is not sighted hence a GA is made. Nothing seriously wrong till now. The decision is taken here to do a tear drop and land on R10 may be due to higher MDA for R10 or on the spot judgement that approach path to R10 could have been better. Here it must have been ascertained that there are no wind shear and no excessively turbulence (as far as control of ac is concerned). Second approach is made in vis 2000mts (within minima) with tail winds close to 10kts (within minima). With these two things and RW picked up close to MDA things are not all that bad especially since the RW is fairly long (9000feet) and it is at seal level temp too are not very high. Here things start converging . Landing in heavy rain with wind shield wipers at top gear and added noise and night time it would have been fairy easy to have a few knots extra speed. Depth perception is poor could result in long float and TD with excess speed and touch down at 3200 feet (about 1000 feet ahead of the designated touch down zone). Still about 6000 feet of RW is there. Situation is not all that good but not really out of hand. Only thing wrong is here that now the crew just can not afford any mistake which appears happened. Bounce, aquaplaning or any malfunction in brakes, reversers, spoilers would convert this into an accident. We will have to wait for CVR FDR to know for sure what happened. The various scenarios that could have happened (I write this knowing fully well that it might be countered by the findings, but my aim is to learn from this) are as follows 1. Aquaplaning or bounce eats up lot of RW and its an overrun. 2. Something wrong with brakes / reversers/spoilers resulting in overrun. 3. Pilots notices that they are running short of RW decides to go round which is a late call but since the call was made the crew must have assessed that it was possible to escape out. During the GA things have gone wrong may be normal delayed spool up or in such cases the engine (one or two) surges. To summarise there were many difficulties and issues in this very difficult approach which the pilots made. Singularly or even up to 3/4 issues would have resulted in no incident. Unfortunately all things just combined (all holes in the cheese aligned). And mind you I have not even touched on the fatigue factor and pressures that comes with such rescue flights which are in the glare of all top notch people. Combination of bad weather, ILS (wo glide slope), poor vis, heavy rain, water logging, tail winds, RW friction anomaly,long landing, excess speed and many other factors turned it into a lethal cocktail. RIP to the crew who did their best.
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