Hey GF,
I was with ya right up to last paragraph. (see below) I agree with most of what you, John and others are saying with regard to to the proper attitude to take towards stopping beyond V1. DO otherwise at your own, your pax and any innocent bystanders peril. I adopted this attitude early, even before I understood enough to really know why.
But the corners of the statistical bell curve are there and exceptions to the rule do exist. Whether any of us as individuals will recognize that in real time during a real event is the more compelling question. Perhaps it's as postulated by JT and it just wasn't your day to go flying. But it's also possible that people sometimes make correct decisions contrary to policy without a satisfactory explanation as to why. I've seen it and you probably have too. We often call that luck. When good pilots follow procedure to the scene of the crash, we often call it fate. Or a bad day. Bad luck. Seen that too.
So about that last paragraph GF:
The guy sentenced to the pokey in the Challenger overrun at TEB was locked up for falsifying W&B and other records. There's some CFR other than 49 which covers that. I don't think the flight crew faced any criminal charges for being dumb, though I don't know what if any administrative action was taken against the crew by the FAA. They rejected because the nose failed to lift in spite of full up elevator being applied. Had the takeoff been continued, it would have either become airborne or hit the building at V1 plus whatever speed was gained since passing Vr. I don't know which would have happened and neither does anyone else. Obviously there are cases where a 60 kt overrun yields less disastrous results than a 150 kt plus overrun. But maybe anyone careless enough to get themselves into that situation by grossly misloading the aircraft to begin with has problems enough. I wonder if running the pitch trim NU might have helped? I'm glad the crooks at that company got convicted.
Sometime earlier, the exact same thing happened in another Challenger at TEB. They were lighter and had more runway beyond the BFL and so stopped successfully. Lucky dogs!
A very similar thing happened to a Falcon 900 in SBA, but it was loaded properly and the stab trim set within the takeoff range, though not in the ideal position for the CG. They ended up in a grass field with a damaged airplane and no casualties. DA-50/900 pilots have told me they would have run the trim up if that happened to them. I wonder.
SWA BUR: Nothing to do with V1, just an incredibly ill advised approach, poorly executed and completely lacking in airmanship. 182 kts at the threshold. The FO did everything but bust him in face and take the airplane. Maybe he should have.
SWA MDW. Again a landing accident. But not one which was cavalier or off the cuff by any means. The data indicated it was tight, depending on which runway friction value was used. we all know (or should) how well (not!) runway condition or friction reports correlate with actual performance. In any case the performance study indicated they might have stopped had the reversers been deployed in a timely manner. Autobrake was a new procedure and he'd never done it before, so his (the PIC and PF) performance probably suffered as part of executing in an unfamiliar procedure for the first time while facing "the real thing". SWA subsequently added a fair weather familiarization period to get used to A/B landings. Read the full report, it's very interesting.
So other than picking these three examples to fortify your point, I like your post! Sorry to pick on your post like this because I respect your contributions. But I just couldn't let it slide.
My experience is with smaller jets, but it's the same process using smaller numbers.
Hey it's time for Formula one. See ya!
Best regards,