Correction to my above post: It was a World Airways DC10 not CAL (under CAL mtc) that overran the runway at LAX doing everything right on the reject. It was the Captains last flight before retirement!
Good points everybody. All things considered, I'm inclined to still agree with the conventional wisdom of not reversing your decision after V1 in 99 percent of cases. Guppy actually does (on the tech thread), and others do make good arguments about the severe consequences to the validity of runway data not being linear and therefore not being valid for any kind of interpolation past V1. I agree with him. But V1 reject decisions
are actually rocket science. There's a lot you don't know about what's going on downstairs. Fuse pins are getting older. Machines are still crashing. Airport Runway Data Analysis has been shown to be wrong in the past. The 2% runway slope data at one field for us was backwards for over five years and nobody questioned it. It was quietly revised one day. Was a new runway put in? No. Engineering just f***ed up, that's all.
These airframes have gone decades past their intended service life. Although Boeing used to say that there's no time or cycle limit if it's maintained, all one has to do is visit Mojave to see that that's not true. At some point, cold lapp metal bonding issues risk the Aloha experience of structural failure and the machine is scrapped. Sometimes, it's not scrapped soon enough. As I was telling Guppy, we had a structural failure that could have been real bad after V1 since it took about five seconds for the reverser lights to activate in the cockpit. (We don't know why it took so long, but hey, it wasn't a book engine any more.) After the Chinese Gong when off, and five seconds of confusion, at higher airspeed the sleeve just left, so the yaw was not that noticeable... but a little while after V1 it might have been ugly.
Nobody's suggesting panic, but that shouldn't condition the PIC into a mindless robot who can't deal with a non-book situation when it shows up once in a while. It certainly shouldn't make the discussion taboo. The O'hare AAL DC10 accident (another big tri-jet of the period that was probably in the TWA captain's mind) had airspeed on the big round steam-gauge, had proper power and body attitude but was still unflyable at V2 because of unsymmetrical slat retraction. He would have lived at V2+10. But prior to that, we were all trained and forced to yank the machine into the sky (because "it wasn't rocket science") hanging at V2 no matter how high the rate of climb. Most of us didn't wait for the procedures to change. When the relevent facts came out in Chicago, we began putting more wind in the wires on climbout. I commuted across the country and many airline crews were doing this.
Agree with Stilton the 727jock in Mexico City. If the stall warning vane (a big paddle) is working properly, and it goes off steady, I would venture to say, that it's a valid warning (regardless of IAS,) since the "vane always knows" the temp and density altitude based on it's deflection against the relative wind. IIRC, the B727 stall system doesn't need a fdc correction, but needs a led/flp config input. It is going to report the actual AOA, (assuming no gusts or sideslip) which is why it went off. Does this happen when the amigos have overloaded the baggage holds and everybody is coming to America with all the hand held luggage they can drag on board?
I think you were quite possibly overweight.
We had this happen once with mac flights on t/o. We wound up adding about 10kts to all our speeds!
To ignore a steady stick shaker on takeoff past V1 is just not realistic. Personally, I think almost all pilots today will revert to wind shear training (not known then) firewall power and tried to fly out of it at intermittent shaker. (and then it would be obvious on TWA 843 that it was false ind.) ALPA's position was back then, however, that with all that remaining runway and the F/O assertively saying abort, the captain did not err in what he did.
But I'm old school from scumbag outfits, and I flew with a lot of guys who walked away from crashes. They gave me a lot to think about.
Makes for stimulating bar talk anyway, don't you think?
pac