PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - Final Report: April 2018 737 high speed aborted TO
Old 26th Jan 2021, 18:29
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FullWings
 
Join Date: Dec 2003
Location: Tring, UK
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It’s an interesting one. Although a config warning >80kts is not specifically included in the list of RTO triggers, there is the catch-all of “...if the airplane is unsafe or unable to fly”. As there are quite a few things that can cause a config warning, some of them pretty serious, it’s not completely cut-and-dried. If flaps and/or LEDs decided to retract themselves (has happened), flying becomes much more difficult and may not even be possible in the remaining distance - you might have the choice of going off the end at low speed or high speed. A suspicion that the speed brakes may have been deployed likely didn’t help, either.

These kind of scenarios are worth thinking a little bit about ahead of time as what condition(s) would you regard as “unsafe or unable to fly”? It’s not something much trained/practiced as the result could well be an overrun/crash, which could lead to negative training outcome, even though the exercise was successful. For the avoidance of doubt, I firmly support the take-it-into-the-air-and-deal-with-it logic when close to or above V1, just that there is always an exception to a rule somewhere.

What appears at first reading to have contributed to the overrun once the RTO was initiated was manual braking. Autobrake, according to the graphs, would have stopped the aircraft on the paved surface...

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