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Old 15th Jun 2013, 10:34
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Depone
 
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Air France does a 'Memmingen'.

The report was posted on Aviation Herald today. Report: Air France A319 at Tunis on Mar 24th 2012, extreme rate of descent on glideslope intercept, GPWS alerts and descent below safe altitude

Having done a search, I cannot find a discussion on Pprune about an event which is just as serious as Ryanair's Memmingen incident; more serious in my opinion because it displays a long period of reckless indifference to the obvious fact that the approach was never going to work.

A few quotes from the article:

"At FL207, 33nm to touch down"

"The aircraft descended through FL100 13.5nm before touchdown"

"Doing 250 KIAS the aircraft intercepted the localizer 8nm before touchdown at 6000 feet, 3400 feet above 3 degrees glideslope"

"Descending through 3550 feet, 1700 feet above glide, about 5nm from touchdown, flaps still at position 0, vertical speed -4400 fpm, speed brakes and landing gear extended"

"8 seconds after the landing clearance the first officer advised they were "a little high""

No kidding!

"a GPWS warning "Sink Rate!" sounds at 836 feet AGL, 220 KIAS, 2500 fpm rate of descent 2.5nm before the runway threshold. The GPWS calls "Pull Up! Pull Up!" and "Too low! Terrain!""

They then performed a GA and landed safely.

As for the 1700 hr co-pilot who was PM:

"He realised they were above profile and made the captain aware of this fact twice, but having been commander on other aircraft types before he did not want to encroach the captain's decisions. Due to the unusual request to do an orbit on final approach his work load got so high, that he did not think of calling for a go-around".

My bold. Is this a problem in Air France: Co-pilots too scared or incompetent to speak up?

And as for the PF:

"The captain said in his interviews, that he realised at FL100 the approach was compromised. Given the excellent weather he wanted to descend the aircraft onto the profile however".

Oh, that's ok then.
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