Touchdown Short Of Runway
 

Accident: Windjet A319 at Palermo on Sep 24th 2010, touched down short of runway


Risk Management taken too far.
At minimums without rwy in sight but still " Continue, Continue."

Was this a blatant disregard of minima or was there more to this? fuel?

Hmm. Maybe the captain came from the same school as the skipper of the Costa Concordia ...

So how'd that work out....

I'm not defending the captain for the final result, but you don't keep doing 250 at 15nm in cr@p weather trying to dive off a bit of altitude.

Send the crew up here for some practice on keeping the mind on the task at hand. ;)

Let's all be honest for a moment.

Not visual at minima-go around. There can be no good argument for anything other than that- BUT.....

How many here have worked for companies where there WAS a culture of "Pushing it"?

I've worked for 6 different airlines, and in two of them, there WAS a pervasive attitude of "I know we can get away with this".

How many times had this Captain, or maybe MANY Captains from this Airline done the same and gotten away with it?

The fact he would do so with another pilot in the jumpseat seems to indicate it wasn't anything he thought he needed to hide.

The FO obviously spent his whole career with this airline, was this what his experience told him was "Normal" and "OK"?

When I realised I was working for companies that "Pushed It", what I longed for was for the regulatory authorities to get stuck into them. Admittedly, I could have done the "Whistle Blower" bit and started the action, but, put honestly, didn't have the balls as I needed the job.

There needs to be proactive oversight of standards, and the message needs to be put across to companies that allow a culture of non-complience in a way that hits them where it hurts- the hip pocket!!

The airline ceased operations in August

The Captain should have had his licence removed. As for the FO, a great advertisement for P2F with shady operators who exert zero airmanship or discipline.

Hmm. Maybe the captain came from the same school as the skipper of the Costa Concordia ... I agreeee

-which one was that?

@BOAC, I think he refers to this: Accident: Royal Air Maroc B734 at Amsterdam on Jun 6th 2010, flock of birds, engine fire

Excuse me?
MDH = 677', that is over 2NM before the runway.
2NM = 3600m, but the vis = 4000m, heavy rain, windshear, there are apparently no approach lights,

and the captain deems it "not challenging"?

You can sort of understand (but not condone it, obviously) when people push it a bit below minima on an ILS but off an unstable NPA in mountainous terrain with thunderstorms? I'd love to know what made him continue without any real visual references... :confused:

Most likely did not want to go missed, that would mean flying back up into bad (thunderstorms) weather. Sorta reminds me of Air France in CYYZ.
Looking at the METAR, I cant help but think that these guys should not have been there in the first place.

Very good point. Too often we've seen pilots continue approaches with nasty weather sitting off the far end of the runway, seemingly unconcerned about what could happen should they need to go around for some reason. Much like flying into a box canyon.

With what SEIFR suggested, would in fact not being able to go "missed" also not equate to not making an approach in the first place? Just interested.

HT, in my book, yes. Always have an exit strategy. As JO says, a bit like flying into a box canyon. No exit strategy; don't go there.

Too many pilots just assume they are going to get where they are going. Its easy just to look at ceilings and vis and think it should be no problem landing. Tstorms have a bad habit of changing things in a hurry.

Everything in that accident is all about culture. There was a comment earlier that said, 'You can sort of understand (but not condone it, obviously) when people push it a bit below minima on an ILS...' That comment says everything about culture. If you are in companies like BA, easyJet, Virgin etc there is simply no culture of pushing any limit. I cannot say it has never happened in these companies, but it is the quickest way out of a job you can find. There is an expectation among all FOs that the Captains will stick to the limits and there is no expectation of 'getting the job done' before obeying the rules. If you work for some of the other companies around (and I have done so), there is an expectation of breaking rules 'when it is sensible to do so'. That is again culture - it is either there or it is not. I know that at easyJet, we have sacked people for these 'cultural' breaches - and will continue to do so as and when they occur.

As an aside, to give you a measure of what passed for normality at WindJet, I spoke to one of their former pilots recently, who said that they were always under weight restrictions on their Moscow flights. Apparently it was common to just falsify nominal baggage weights to make the performance fit. Also, when a strike was looming at one stage, during a phone call between the pilot representative and a very senior company Executive, it was mentioned that the pilot representative had a beautiful little daughter who attended such and such a school and would it not be a shame if something terrible happened to her? That folks is the other end of the airline industry and it always ends up with a smoking hole somewhere - a culture of corruption and graft from top to bottom that permeates into the operational practices of the company. You can see from this whole scene that this captain was just doing his normal thing and thereby brought ruin upon his career and nearly killed everyone he was responsible for. Our northern European companies are not great, but in my experience this type of thing is largely absent - long may it continue to be so.

Meerkat,

You seem well informed and I have heard the same stories about threatening the crew or their family members, very soon after the accident took place. Although nothing can EVER justify such threats or blackmailing, I don't think the threat was related to the possibility of making a go-around.

Not stabilized, no visual contact, go-around.

The pushing culture is indeed an unfortunate reality in many places, but I have yet to see anyone being fired because they went around (less than 3 times in a row...:} )

The ego of some captains is such that overconfidence overrides common logic, regardless of how many hours they have.

From a human resources perspective, I don't think the FO was too inexperienced -although not much time either- but very probably the combination of a very high timer on the left seat and baby pilot on the right may not always make sense, the authority gradient could be naturally steep, left aside the possible contributing factors of italian displays of their testosterone level, thus preventing direct bi-directional inputs when deviations occur.