Originally Posted by wmuflyuy
The rule doesn't cause the over runs. Poor decision making does.
To repeat two mantras which most of us who analyse accidents have been trying to promulgate for decades:
1. Accidents generally don't have one cause. They have many causal factors.
2. Putting the responsibility on the people in the pointy end does not necessarily lead to effective countermeasures.
Amongst causal factors which have arisen more than once in noteworthy overrun accidents have been
* misleading weather reports, in particular wind (for example, pilots are expecting a headwind on the runway and they encounter instead a tail wind)
* state of the runway surface (particularly low coefficient of friction; presence of a disadvantageous amount of standing water)
* misleading reports, or lack of reports, to flight crew of runway friction characteristics
* airline SOPs (for example, how many extra knots to be carried/may be carried on approach, under what conditions and under what expectations)
* inappropriate assumptions by procedure designers about how pilots behave upon experiencing a lack of expected braking performance
* inappropriate decisions made by flight crew
There have been overrun accidents in which, I would argue, the flight crew's decisions were appropriate in light of the information they were given, the operating procedures of their airline and the understood characteristics of the aircraft they were flying. (But, of course, not appropriate according to the reality!)
PBL