Originally Posted by
Easy Street
2) Any captain of a commercial passenger flight who intentionally violates rules in the absence of extenuating circumstances is, by any reasonable definition, incompetent in their role. So I don't think any consideration of intent is necessary.
Do you respect the entirety of your tens of thousands of pages of OM A-B-C-.. ? I doubt it. Or, your manuals are much smaller than they could be.
Your claim is way too broad.
You should restrict it to rules which have a direct impact on safety.
Furthermore, the approach is to be stabilized by 500ft (VMC).
Hence, it's perfectly by the book to fly a high energy approach where you descend at an angle of negative 10° of flight path angle, then join the glide path and configure for landing and lift your thrust levers at 540ft AGL and reach VAPP+13kt (my airline allows +15) with some thrust by 500ft AGL. Sometimes it's even part of recurrent training to do this sort of thing.
The PIA8303 was, give or take, close to this sort of profile.
The moment where landing became less likely was when the F/O pulled the gear up.
Had he not done that, the landing would have been nominal. I can't guarantee the approach would have been stabilized (Vapp+15 could have been reached below 500ft, so unstable), but it's 99% sure the captain would have landed and stopped without any passenger noticing anything wrong. Like he did all the time before.
It's easy to notice and compensate for one's own mistakes. It's much more difficult when someone like this guy does completely unexpected things.
Yes I am sure they do, whenever they land after a test flight if the landing is not part of the evaluation.
If you lived in Toulouse, you would regularly see, during weekdays, white and blue jetliners turning to final lower than 500ft AGL.
I didn't have to look for very long to find a sidestep performed below 500ft and finished at 300ft AGL, on flightradar.
For example when they need to gather data about braking or flaring, they will make very short circuits.