ECON cruise, LR cruise...
Join Date: Apr 2002
Location: MIRSI hold - give or take...
Age: 52
Posts: 568
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alf5071h,
Sorry if I did not make myself clear enough - I advocate following yours and JTs advice and going with the numbers, and definitively not doing any second-guessing or double-thinking. In line with that, I take the liberty of questioning those who want to portrait a near-V1-reject as an unsafe manoeuvre which - although demanding - it clearly is not.
My protestations are against those who'd "take the chance, since said chance is so small" that the aircraft is still in the take-off configuration rather than aborting the take-off near V1. If your AFM says that high-speed T/O config warnings should be considered invalid, by all means, that is what we do. If your AFM hasn't got any such statements in it (and your SOP is not specific either), in my view there can be only one call - and that's "stop". You'd end up looking rather silly (and possibly looking slightly dead) having a config warning at V1-10 and then continuing only to find out that the aircraft is unflyable at Vr+10 and then trying to stop from that speed, right?
On the other hand - even if you bungle the reject and run over at 20 kts. - will you be better or worse off than if you continued with the slats retracted, or the stab out of trim? It might just be me, but I find the answer to this question fairly obvious. If you consider only "damage to aircraft", I recognise that the "continue"-crowd have statistics on their side. If you however consider "survivability", I know that the "stop"-mentality puts us in a much safer place. I have not done the maths, but it would be interesting to compare the numbers of fatalities on "mishandled rejects prior to V1" vs. "should not have attempted to leave the ground".
If people feel that a V1-reject is of questionable outcome, that alone is in my view and indication that these people are mentally aligned with the "call-V1-early-crowd" (debated at length elswhere). I suggest you might be better off not derating to the maximum but rather select a lower derate and/or V1 to keep the V1/Vr/V2 relationship intact. So to sum up my view: Fly the numbers, know your AFM, FCTM & SOP - and make your decisions accordingly. Don't make assumptions about the flyability of your aircraft.
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