PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - So WestJet almost puts one of their 737 in the water while landing at St-Maarten...
Old 30th Mar 2017, 21:32
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underfire
 
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Agree Bloggs, don't think there would be a lot of warnings at all.
Certainly no "glideslope" warning, there is no glideslope (ILS) in St Maarten!
Also no "terrain" warning (terrain closure); within a defined area around the airport (not sure how big that exactly is, but I guess they were to close) you don't get those; otherwise you could never land
For a "sink rate" you would need around 1000FPM at low altitude, doesn't look like it on the video..
And a "windshear" warning would warrant an aggressive maneuver; the go around looks very gentle too me. Doen's look like this one either..
The "minimums" call is at 500' (or 700'), that awareness call had already passed..

They should have had the 100' Radio alt call though. Perhaps that was the trigger for them. At about 100' you should see the threshold disappearing under the nose; I guess they had a lot of water instead.. Suddenly that creepy feeling comes up...
I did not say they had all of these, but depending on what was going on, these are the warnings.

ADSB usually broadcasts both baro and geometric altitude. Because of all of the issues with baro, many automated ATC systems use geometric.

There were claims early on from WJ about a rapid descent, hence a possible windshear warning, and we dont see videos as to how far out they were that low, hence the other warning that may have occurred for terrain closure....

the question was how many warnings could there be, and that is a list of possible ones.

This ac should be EGPWS, which does use the terrain clearance floor and terrain awareness, based on the information of terrain and obstacles in the database.The EGPWS uses a geometric altitude that blends improved pressure altitude calculations, GPS altitude, radio altimeter, and terrain and runway information to eliminate the reliance on human data input. The look ahead feature uses a 60 second timeframe, so being that far out and that low, the 60 second look ahead would have picked that up.
They were pretty far out when the videos and images were taken, so it is likley that obstacle clearance protection was not met.

Last edited by underfire; 30th Mar 2017 at 21:59.
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