Received this by email ..
Air France's flight 358 landed beyond the normal touchdown zone on runway 24L at Toronto's Pearson international airport before it skidded into a creek bed and exploded into flames, lead investigator Réal Levasseur confirmed at a press conference Friday.
“The information that I have is that the aircraft landed longer than normally or longer than usual for this type of aircraft. How long, exactly, or how far more than usual is what we're trying to determine right now,” Mr. Levasseur said.
He also said there is no indication that the plane was hit by lightning and that the cockpit and engines are fairly well intact.
All 309 passengers and crew escaped the wreckage with little more than scrapes, bruises and strains. Forty three people were taken to seven Toronto-area hospitals where some were treated for broken bones.
Although flight procedures vary from airline to airline, standard practice is to abort a landing and initiate a “go-around” – meaning adding power, climbing away and returning to the landing pattern for a second attempt – if the aircraft is not going to hit the “landing zone” at the right speed.
A runway's landing zone varies but is generally considered to be from about 275 metres to 450 metres from the threshold. Pearson's runway 24L is 2,740 metres long.
Some passengers have said they thought the plane was flying faster than usual before a landing. Aviation sources have confirmed that the co-pilot, a 43-year-old Air France veteran with more than 10,000 flying hours, was flying manually.
That is common among airliner pilots, even though modern, automatic landing systems governed by sophisticated computers and following radio beams can consistently land aircraft even in the worst visibility and foulest weather conditions with greater precision and reliability than highly trained pilots.
Automatic landing systems are usually used in relatively calm, foggy conditions, however, and the systems that can take an aircraft right down require runways with radio and directional beams more sophisticated than those at Pearson's 24L.
A touchdown so far along the runway suggests a difficult and unstable few seconds before touchdown, precisely the sort of situation that can eat up significant chunks of runway length.
“If you are carrying some extra speed and suddenly get a tailwind [a possibility in the gusty conditions that existed when Flight 358 was landing at 4 p.m. on Tuesday] it can carry you down the runway,” one experienced pilot said.
"If that happens, you go-around,” he said.
Another veteran pilot with experience dealing with human factors in aviation mishaps noted that “it's human nature to try and complete what you have started.” Pilots are trained to resist that impulse because aborting a landing is safer.
Praise has been heaped on the co-pilot for his bravery in making a last check of the evacuated and burning wreck of the Airbus A-340, but his handling of the landing will come under intense scrutiny.
Air France chief executive officer Jean-Cyril Spinetta said the “crew, naturally, decided to land” at Toronto when it reopened after being closed because of bad weather. He also confirmed, however, that the flight had enough fuel to reach Montreal and the pilots were “not therefore obliged to touch down.”
The decision to land in difficult weather conditions ultimately rests with the pilots as long as the airport is open.
Mr. Spinetta said that after landing, the crew “activated the thrust reversers normally, which operated as expected.”
Given the interconnections of brakes, spoilers – the flat panels that rise from the wings to destroy lift and keep the aircraft on the runway -and the thrust reversers, all three systems should have been working.
However, if the rain-drenched runway was sufficiently wet and the aircraft was travelling sufficiently fast, it could have aquaplaned – in effect slid on a film of water.
From the photos that were attached to the email which were taken from outside the aircraft during the evacuation, it appears the flames are more noticable at the wing root of the starboard wing.
It was difficult to see if 1L side was deployed, if it was it was not normally inflated at the time of the photos, slide 2L was not deployed.
Photos show captains cockpit window open, no sign of escape rope.