So WestJet almost puts one of their 737 in the water while landing at St-Maarten...
 

WestJet is trying to deny the aircraft ever came close to the water. Well I don't believe them and I will take this photographers word on this. Hope Transport Canada investigates this one.

http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b7...pstcjz6lls.jpg


More on this story here...

WestJet Denies Close Call Caught on Camera at St. Maarten

Obviously!

If this is a real photo, how do you explain where the disturbance on the surface of the water starts with respect to where the thrust is coming out of the engines? Sure looks like Photoshop in action.

Maybe it is the downwash from the wing and flap profile. If true and not photoshopped.

Well, the photos are unconvincing to me. Maybe the larger versions of the files have more detail. I find it odd that the picture of the second approach doesn't seem to have any of the shoreline elements of the first picture. Is the yellow buoy the same or is it another one further from the runway? There are several buoys in that area as I recall. Were both pictures taken from the same vantage point? That doesn't look like a 'jet blast trail in the water' to me in this compressed online image. But then, I've never flown a 737. :)

Maybe FlightAware doesn't cover down to the runway at SXM but FR24 does:

https://www.flightradar24.com/data/f...ws2652#caa236c

Looks like they were holding for something, weather over the field perhaps?

The aircraft's nose is pretty high, so perhaps the power had already been added and they were just starting their missed approach.

Why would a pro photographer lie about her pictures? She is apparently known in the aviation world for her pictures.

One thing is for sure depending on the type of approach they were conducting (either a plain VOR 09 or VOR/DME 09) the MDA is abut 600' AGL or 960' AGL and the MAP is about at 2 nm from the runway threshold so if this picture is legit then they are way below MDA and way too far out.

One of the passengers said they came out of a rain shower and were very, very low, close to the water when the power came on and an aggressive pull up maneuver was initiated.

The FR24 data shows no discernable difference between the profiles for the first and second approach.

Nice find...
Looks low long enough to make image real
Look closely a the duration at end of flight when descending after holding, prolonged flight at approach speed at low level

What evidence do you have that she's a pro photographer? Can you find any of her work published professionally by anyone other than her buddy Christine Negroni?

Not saying that her work isn't nice, but as Christine Negroni describes her:

Airplane Images that Inspire Flights of Fancy

Surely you're not trying to ruin a good airline hit piece with actual data. ;)

Really?

The final 3000' of descent was made at an angle of 3.15°.

It wouldn't be difficult to pull up the flight data monitoring system and find out what really happened.

The trouble with telephoto lenses is they compress distance making objects appear closer to each other than they actually are.

Two observations regarding the photo differences between first and second approaches. The aircraft position relatively to horizon and the differences in horizon visibility. It's pretty clear to me that 45 minutes between the go around and the second attempt was for "what the hell just happened" debriefing and for a better VFR approach, with 0 margin of error.

One of the things that makes me a little skeptical is the lousy image quality of the photo in the first post on this thread. It looks like something taken with a cellphone that my teen niece would post on Facebook. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it doesn't look like the work of a professional photographer to me.

However, Christine Negroni responds to a claim of image manipulation with the information that she did a Picasa edit on the photos to make a montage for publication on her blog. From the comment section of the WestJet post:

I've certainly had the experience of posting an online album of sharp edited photos of a family event only to have someone mix them with blurry, grainy cellphone pictures and have them downsampled to 20K thumbnails by Instagram and then resized back to original size with hideous results. :uhoh:

Again, about the only other published photography from Christine Garner that I can find online is in this article:

Under the Big Jets | Flight Today | Air & Space Magazine

From Christine G.'s online albums, it looks to me like she probably edits in Lightroom but I haven't found anything to confirm this.

Her son vouches for her integrity:

There is a comment from another poster who says he also witnessed the event:

It does look like the airport was indeed closed for a while, INC 522 (Dominican Wings) and KLM 729 went into holding as well. KLM landed just before WJA 2652 and INC apparently diverted somewhere else.

@Airbubba
I should think clearly not. The first photograph was taken from a high angle, looking down on the sea, so the horizon is towards the top of the picture. The second photograph seems to be taken from a significantly lower angle. Of course, level of horizon is controlled by camera angle, but if you tilt the camera from a low angle, you get a lot of foreground.

I couldn't begin to work out the aircraft height in these two photographs, but they're certainly not directly comparable.

First approach 1200fpm at 300ft, bottoming out at 0ft, second approach "almost normal"... no discernible difference there, obviously...

If you're implying that it was an all smooth and dandy 3.15° approach, FR24 tells a completely different story.

Rider: I'm not implying anything about the accuracy of FR24, merely pointing out what appears to me to be poor/misleading interpretation of the FR24 info.

I've been there several times in the last month.

Approach plates are here:

http://www.eddk.info/Download/PDF/TNCM.pdf

SID's and STAR's are here:

https://yinlei.org/x-plane10/jep/TNCM.pdf

Lowest MDA with DME is 500

http://i68.photobucket.com/albums/i3.../VORZRWY10.png

Thanks B2N2. Interesting.

When are the approach designers of the world going to pull their fingers out and put Altitude/Distance profiles on their charts?!

3 degree descent angle equals 700fpm at 140kts.
Possibly had it in VS mode with the Missed Approach altitude set after passing the FAF.
That's how we did it as the company I worked for was not approved for VNAV use in their Opspecs.

Those approach plates might not be the ones WestJet was using, they are from 2003. :eek: Then again, maybe they were. ;)

Real or not it's just a matter of time before there's an accident here, the number of
approaches significantly below a normal glidepath in order for a few idiots to 'show off'
makes it inevitable.

No, it doesn't

(apologies, mods, for the size of the image, which shows each of the two approaches, from roughly 2500' Mode C at the extreme left)

http://www.avgen.com/WS2652.jpg

If there's more than 50-75' difference in the heights at any given point along the respective approaches, then that's not supported by the data.

Yours is the poor/misleading interpretation - neither you nor I can deduce absolute heights AMSL from the data without knowing whether or not it has been corrected for QNH.

All you can do with the data is compare the values for the two approaches (see above).

I'd be very careful trying to infer any height from a picture.

Many years ago I took some air to air shots of our aircraft. With the telephoto lens foreshortening perspective and the light it looked like the aircraft was skimming the surface. we actually thought twice about publishing the image to avoid awkward regulators questions.

Yes it does. Drag the aeroplane symbol along and you'll see that that approach was nothing like 3.15° from 3000ft as you stated in your earlier post with the implication there was nothing wrong with it. It is clear that the first approach was above and then ducked down below the path of the second approach. Perhaps you are not a pilot. Gyrations in sink rate including 1200fpm at 300ft is not normal. If you discredit that info, then your claim of 3.15° from 3000ft is also discredited.

As for
That's why I stated "Rider...". :cool:

pilotmike
Have another look at the article.There is a second picture of the same 737 aircraft with a caption which says the picture is of the second approach.It's the 3rd picture from the top.

Yellow line (rh pic) crosses extended centerline at 0.33 nm, both yellow lines follow the line of sight of the telelens.
I'm pretty sure about that, based on 2 landmarks that match both on telelens & on sat picture.
I guess the picture was taken from the Sonesta Maho Beach resort, from around 8-10th floor.
I leave it to the brighter spirits to draw any conclusions (or not if they are really bright).

Here, for the geometrically-challenged, is the FR24 data plotted relative to a nominal 3.15° approach.

http://www.avgen.com/WS2652(2).jpg

The blue diamonds represent the first approach and the magenta squares the second one. Clearly an unquantified offset (based on the unknown QNH) needs to be applied to the two sets of data, otherwise both aircraft are in the sea short of the runway.

Yes, the first approach was lower than the second one by around 150' at about a mile from the threshold (so I stand corrected on my earlier 50-75' estimate), but the claim that the first approach was "nothing like 3.15° from 3000ft" is nonsense.

Are you even aware of the significance of a difference of 150ft at 1nm final??

Yes, the words "too low" spring to mind. What's your point ?

Elaborating at bit further on DaveReidUK's hard work (without the author's permission :O)

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yNhAYKM-7LQ&feature=youtu.be

I guess at SXM there's always more than one camera 👍🏻

@ Climb360...

Well that takes care of that... So much for those that accused the photographer of manipulating her picture...

Yes I'd say that was a close call!

Speechless.

Someone's in trouble.

That YouTube video helpfully includes the TCNM METAR at the end.

A QNH of 1019 would indicate that actual heights AMSL will have been approximately 150' greater than the Mode C values.

Hmmm. The YouTube video shows, toward the end, a couple of stills and offers them as "proof" that the sky was about to fall in etc. The snag with this is the aircraft was further out when showing the second approach. Just look at the comparative sizes of the aircraft in the 2 stills. The second shot (missed approach) was taken when the aircraft was closer to the camera.

To me it looks like he is within a half wing span (~ 113') from the water, so about 60 feet?

Those were the first decent Google search results.
In any case, good enough to prove a point.
Why people insist on using unverified data from a flighttracking website and present it as the gospel is beyond me.

Perhaps there was some windshear involved? Othewise it's quite hard to explain why the plane descended so low while supposedly being visual with the RWY. But then again, so was the Asiana 777 in SFO...

OK, so they were a tad low (for reasons unknown to us). They did the right thing and went around for another go. They were never close to crashing. Just a lot of hype by people looking for a story to pep up a boring day. I have spent time watching approaches at SXM and seen Cessna C208 Caravans of FDX just as low....and continue to land.

@ Hotel Tango...

Won't argue with you about the missed approach part, they did the right thing but they were more than "a tad low" IMHO... The question we are asking is why?

There is nothing wrong in trying to find out why they got in that position where the aircraft was in an unstable condition at such a low altitude and I hope TC gets involved to get to the bottom of this.