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Old 28th Jul 2011, 01:44
  #7 (permalink)  
Tarq57
 
Join Date: Dec 2005
Location: Wellington,NZ
Age: 66
Posts: 1,678
Received 10 Likes on 4 Posts
Many years ago one of these beasts came into Auckland.
I was working in Wellington, and saw the incident report on the AFTN.
It read as though the crew had decided to perform a beat-up of Auckland and a low level circuit over the city to come back and land. Communication difficulties were mentioned.

Found out later these guys were simply overshooting. They hadn't received a landing clearance at four mile final - which unbeknown to the tower staff was the cut-off point for them, so invoked the lengthy and complicated procedure to overshoot. This involved the crew reconfiguring the aircraft for minimum drag at whatever airspeed they were able to attain while the FE gradually coaxed the engines up, a tiny bit at a time. By the time they got to the runway they had enough thrust to level out, after the "low pass"- which was apparently about 50' - they had almost enough thrust to climb, after a fashion.

Apparently they crossed the city at about 500', in a rather shallow climb. Much noise and smoke. Makes you wonder how they'd cope with a windshear on final.
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