OK465, these types of accident are far from straight forward. In our highly reliable and safe industry, accidents usually have many contributing factors. There is no psychobabble, just another point of view; attempting to understand the crew’s view at that time and to consider ‘what if’.
What if you were confronted with these factors; not just to conclude that you wouldn’t make the same judgement, but to consider why you would not and how this might help others.
Read through the report, how long did it take; how long to read (and understand) just the relevant sections of operators documents, then consider how a crew might do this in real conditions; remembering rule 1, first fly the aircraft.
Some of the safety shortfalls are appalling; the problems of landing distance calculation have been under discussion for many years.
Has the Boeing advisory data been updated to more realistic values representative of what a crew might achieve, like that of the Airbus OLD/FOLD data? The operator could have done this independently.
Why hasn’t the FAA mandated a prelanding performance check similar to EU-OPS? The operator could have done this independently.
How could the hazards of an increased tailwind landings be so overlooked by both the FAA and operator’s safety checks?
There is an option; either to ask these questions and try to learn, or just blame the crew and conclude that ‘it won’t happen to me’; perhaps deferring your learning until the time that ‘it’ does happen to you.
Al shuff, the ‘stupidity’ could be with our hindsight of believing that the crew knew the runway was soaked at that time, and that they considered it to be different from a wet runway – for which there was scant or confusing advice.
The flap oversight was more the airline’s problem – flap 30 was not an issue at 10kts tail (hidden in the assumptions of ‘Advanced Analysis’), but with a change to 15 kts flap 30 was an issue; flap 40 was required by the small print, but not clearly identified or taught.
How can crews identify a long landing – a tailwind gives a higher GS, the relative times of flare might be similar, but distance is not; - night, weak lighting, heavy rain … distance gone?
What part did the HUD play; the display can provide more readily accessible information, but tends to channel the attention to the lateral and vertical aspects of landing, not to the ideal point of touch down point on the runway (in the mode used).
‘The industry as a whole has helped create a psychological channel that causes these sorts of overruns’, The industry has placed great emphasis on timely use of all retarding devices, and your observations and intervention to overcome shortfalls in training are something for everyone to learn from; but why were such techniques taught or interpreted as such, was there sufficient explanation and understanding or why prompt use of reverse was important during training?