QF842 Data entry error and tailstrike
 

Looks like the Captain was ex 767 or 330? He/she only had 1800 on type?

A lot of similarities with this incident except the treatment of the crew afterward was quite different.

https://www.atsb.gov.au/media/3543522/ao2010081.pdf

Apart from them independently coming up with the same wrong figures....

Yeah the two crew independently coming up with the exact same wrong figure, having made two completely different types of mistake, and that figure that they wrongly comes up with is a reasonable figure, and then both having the same misinterpretation of the Vref40 rule..........
I think the above scenario would make winning lotto look easy from a probability perspective.
"Hey Archie what weight did you use?" is much more likely. Happens all the time.
We'll handled by the crew by the looks of.

Well framer I suggest you stop doing it.

My thoughts exactly. It's a bit strange that the crew made the exact same error for the exact same calculation.

I think there was something that was a little twisted in what the investigators were told.

morno

I have OzSync.
After reading a few reports like this over the years I am now very disciplined with my process :)
I am just lucky that I didn't end up as a subject of a similar report.

Framer... what's the Vref 40 rule?

Suspected tail strike and they did not return to Sydney.

Doesn't make sense to me.

What exactly are you insinuating here?

Cmon be clear about it, dont skirt around it. Man up and say what you mean.

Why would they fabricate BS when qf, like most mature airlines, has a no blame culture and there is zero to gain from a shortcut of only one crew doing the numbers; never happened once in my decade in that operation. And now with ipads its a breeze.

Gee, I remember when QF said that only employ 'The creme de la creme' of pilots. What happened, creme gone off? The sort of procedures that they have now included in their manual have been in practice by other airlines for years and are a normal sort of personal error check by professional pilots. You can't teach 'horse sense ' via a manual annotation but, I suppose you can appease CASA, if you are Qantas.
You also can't say that the pilots were inexperienced and I suspect that they would have been under QF 's watchful eye for almost all of their 10,000 hours.

My rotation rate was such that the jet flew off the runway rather than being yanked off.

Almost always a critique item I would get from a few, clueless, LCA's.

Load planners occasionally send numbers that are in no way representative of the actual aircraft's gross weight and/or CG.

The FAA should randomly conduct load audits of individual flights to confirm that the dispatch paperwork reflects the actual aircraft weight and cg.

JMHO

Wow, made it to 12 posts before the bitter and twisted came out!! Surprised it lasted this long....

Vref 40 is calculated and displayed by the OPT on the iPad based on the weight entered. ( in this case 66400kg).
At the same time, Vref 40 is calculated by the FMC based on the weight of ZFW entered + the actual fuel being sensed.
A check of the OPT v's the FMC Vref 40 is required after the independently calculated figures to ensure that they are within one knot of each other.
Basically it means that the info you have generated on the iPad is using the same gross weight that the FMC is using.
The weakness in this check is that if the wrong ZFW is entered in the FMC they can agree. That is why the FMC ZFW and gross weight is verified by both pilots from the final load sheet.
If rushing is avoided, the system works well and it is common to catch errors. I would guess that every few months I find that the system catches an error, it is usually a very small error. And always in my experience only one pilot has made that error.

Geez settle down. Maybe instead of getting cranky, you should work out what the odds are of two independent calculations coming up with the exact same incorrect figure?

Is exactly what I was on about.

It may be that it did just by pure coincidence that it did occur, but it's quite a big coincidence.

morno

Indeed it is a big coincidence. Gee with all the flying Qantas do you'd expect something like that to happen only once in many years. Now tell me again how often this particular sequence of events is claimed to have happened? Winning the lottery is very unlikely and yet it happens, regularly.

Every QF 737 I've watched takeoff is not yanked off. From what I have seen, the fact that they only just scratched it is testament to a very good rotation technique. Perhaps if you took off 15% overweight in your 777(?) and you tried to "fly it off" you too might find you'd be pulling a little more than normal to get it off the ground... and scratch it! ;)

If the events unfolded as described, it never ceases to amaze me what somebody will do next (might be me!). Another great incident to learn from...

Not implying the pilot involved "yanked" his 737 off the ground but just saying there can be some interesting rotation techniques among different pilots in general.

Because of the increased length of the 737-900 and the A321 over previous models, I've heard that pilots who fly these aircraft types along with the shorter 737's and Airbuses have had to make a conscious effort to slow their rotation rate a bit to avoid tickling the tail.

We used to get an occasional tail strike on the 727-200 at the intersection of runway 13/31 when departing on runway 4 at LGA. Back then, no one really thought it was such a big deal. After all that's what a tail skid is meant for. Right?:)

What is BS in this article is that Qf pilots routinely only look at the last figure of the Vref 40 for comparison .

Often the last figure is out by 1 due overfuelling

You compare the entire figure. Everyone does