Like Jack Schidt, I have been trying to not poke my retired nose in here, but I do believe I can offer a couple of points not yet fully explored.
The first is a bit of local knowledge. 16/34 is long, but a cow of a R/W. 16 slopes down 0.9%. The threshold area of 34 has a localised slope of about 1.15% before it rolls over and aligns itself with the 0.9% up-slope. This means that it requires a very deep flare to not slam it on, and that necessarily higher flare point at night is always very hard to pick. It’s almost like a crop duster’s strip. On the 727-200 I carried a min of +15 to have extra energy on hand for the flare, and with any wind around, at least +20. So an overweight landing was almost certain to be heavy unless the PF grew up at YMML.
The downhill T/O on 16 can be & has been neutralised by the wind shifts along it. I’ve raised dust myself once, to everyone’s surprise definitely including mine. We rolled into a quartering headwind, but down the other end the sock was showing a stiff tail wind. Acceleration was slow, then seemed to stop, but by that point there was no way we would have been able to stop in what distance remained. You should have heard me go on about V & Distance checks after that! A wooded hill sits in the NE corner of the field, and it (the A/p) is surrounded by deep river gullies, producing marked local wind variations. Swirling winds don't always show at the sock or the anemometers. I can recall two occasions when microbursts out of a clear sky put one 727 down out of site in a gully off 27, and another 727 was held low off 16, rattling a lot of tiles quite a few miles out on the extended centreline. They got away, but both times by dint of being US aircraft which have always philosophically allowed beyond-limit-power to be set, and the engine's reduced life accepted.
I was involved years back in an AFAP tech reassessment of Boeing's wet runway stopping distances, and after a lot of work we were able to prove they were grossly in error. Oz T/o charts are now realistic for Acc/Stop in the wet, but it taught me that what is put out by a manufacturer can be determined by the sales team as often as by the performance wizzes, and I didn’t blindly accept all numbers. I worked through every new endorsement’s charts to produce a summary of rules of thumb, one mid-range speed for every approach, fail, & landing configuration, with a kts variation per coarse weight adjustment. It was soon easy to be within +/- 1 kt of the actual chart, and 3 or 4 times caught a gross error.
Back in the early 60's down at East Sale I watched a USAF C-124 Globemaster heading home to Hawaii. Loaded to the gills and hoping to overfly Fiji, they aborted 6 (yup, six) times before finally raising dust at the far end and disappearing over the curvature of the earth (it seemed). That led me into deep discussions with two other USAF crews, and I have been a convert of their system ever since. Their achieved_speed_Vs_distance check was (& still is as far as I can find on-line) set so that zero wheel braking was used for the abort. Mind you, the tyres must have been jolly hot towards the end, but the check can easily provide a completely low stress abort speed. Speed x time is a coarser check, but 80 kts by 1,800’ was a good catch all. Still is by the sound of it. A friend who has more hours up down the back than I ever got up the front mentally prepares to adopt the crash position on any T/O if the nose isn’t starting to lift by 37 seconds, FWIW.
Personally I think that the most valuable comment in this series was that of Dairyground - what an eye-opener. We aren’t the only safety obsessed people, and it sounds as if the aviator sector may need to think more widely. What >is< ISO9000, and why don’t I know about it? Dairyground?
Thanks all for bringing me up to speed.
This report is going to be an interesting read.