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Old 13th Jan 2014, 13:00
  #37 (permalink)  
abdunbar
 
Join Date: May 2008
Location: El Paso, Texas
Age: 73
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I flew the 767 for two different airlines and the procedures were similar.

The flight plan was loaded by datalink into the fms and then checked against the paper flight plan before start.

In the terminal area the correct approach was loaded pre approach checklist and checked against the approach chart. the approaches were from the data base and applied to the destination airport that had been checked prestart.

In the case of the visual, the runway centerline was extended for SA. this was not an optional technique.

finally, the egpws would issue a warning if you were more that a few miles from the programmed destination airport and below a minimum altitude agl, like 500 feet or so. I heard this warning going into San Juan PR once when a couple of VOR's were notamed out and we had some map shift over water.

Minimum runway width for normal ops was 50M/150ft. 100 feet would require a lot of special considerations and is possible for 737 but would be a restricted operation and special qual.

KPLK runway thresholds are marked with 8 bars not 12 like KBBG 150 foot runway.

KPLK has mirl and KBBG hirl so probably wouldn't look much different except since both are instrument runways they would turn to amber for last 2000' or 1/2 of runway so looking at KPLK, 1/2 of the runway edge lights would have been amber. depending on ambient light and light intensity, this may not have been obvious.

KPLK has about 300 feet of displaced thresholds and KBBG has overruns.

Don't know what the visibility was but KPLK has terminal and hangars close to the runway and south while KBBG the terminal is detached and north.

I know very well how easy it is to become complacent with repeated familiar operations.

definitely not saying this couldn't have happened to me but thinking about how it could have happened allows us a nice review of how important it is to study and get a picture of what the runway and airport envoironment are supposed to look like once we get there.
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