Originally Posted by
Kulverstukas
Originally Posted by
Sam Asama
Kulverstukas: Thanks (as usual) for your contributions already to this thread.
Yes, thanks once again for your insight in this area. The vertical yagi antenna next to the striped building looks to me like a 75 MHz marker beacon antenna which would normally be on the extended runway centerline.
Looks like the FR24 data is accurate, they were indeed lined up on the runway 26 and went past the end sometime after the last data point was transmitted.
Originally Posted by
dfstrottersfan
Very often FR24 lands you on a parallel non existent runway or hundreds of meters after or before
Originally Posted by
DaveReidUK
Only for a small minority of aircraft that don't have GPS-powered ADS-B.
Not relevant here.
I agree with Dave. This data doesn't seem to be MLAT or interpolated in the minutes prior to the mishap. FR24 and FlightAware use separate networks although some folks (don't ask me how I know
) simultaneously feed data to both.
Originally Posted by
jackcarls0n
747-400 is quite a capable aircraft. Something must have gone horribly wrong for a crash to happen. They would have most probably planned on an auto land for the weather condition at the time. And if autoland wasn't working, then the minimums would be for a CAT 1 approach, the weather is well below CAT 1. But that depends on the company's SOP. I wonder if icing had a role to play. The runway is pretty long to land without speed brakes working. Something didn't go well and they performed a go-around?
Originally Posted by
Magplug
There is another possibility - The NGFMC in the 744 generates the characteristic speeds when VNAV selected on the GA... It is also unbelievably unreliable being prone to failures giving inappropriate speed generation and/or complete loss of Autothrottle/VNAV/LNAV functions. Not at all what a tired crew needs going round from a Cat II approach with ****ty weather on minimums.
With that weather, I would expect a fully coupled approach and an automated go around which is normally not a difficult maneuver. However, I've had the automation kick off just as the power came up on a coupled go around and there are definitely a few seconds of recognition time, especially if other warnings are present at the same time.
Widebody freighters do seem to crash much more often than widebody airliners in the past couple of decades. Whether the standards for pax and cargo flying should be the same has long been hotly debated here and elsewhere.
The high groundspeed rapidly bleeding off on final in the ADS-B data may indicate a decreasing tailwind or perhaps a late configuration with the power back trying to slow down. We will know more in a year or two when the report comes out.