The Jamaican CAA has published its report on the December 2009 American Airlines AA331 (Boeing 737-800) runway overrun on landing. I haven't read the report in full yet and I will - you can download it at http://bit.ly/1ji2K6B - but 3 factors have been highlighted as contributory. The runway was wet: this features in many runway excursions due to reduced braking and directional stability on the runway. A tailwind (in this case probably greater than the certified maximum); another old favourite, increasing landing groundspeed and the kinetic energy that must be dissipated after touchdown. And potentially a symptom of the tailwind, landing long; quite simply leaving less runway to stop in.
There were other factors at play for sure but a combination of these three has had star billing in so many overrun and veer-off runway excursions that it should ring alarm bells for us all. Surely the potential for this condition could be identified before or at least during the flight in a basic tactical risk analysis process? I don't just mean the pilots here - there are plenty of people on the ground with access to the data as well.
There has been so much work done on runway excursion risk reduction by IATA (Runway Excursion Risk Reduction Toolkit http://bit.ly/1m105in ), EASA/Eurocontrol (European Action Plan for Prevention of Runway Excursion EAPPRE http://bit.ly/1uErkmE ) and others that we know what to do. Gates Aviation can provide useful training and advice on how to implement these safeguards if you need some support - I have developed a useful 4 step tool for runway excursion risk evaluation and mitigation that can be adapted to individual operations.
There were other factors at play for sure but a combination of these three has had star billing in so many overrun and veer-off runway excursions that it should ring alarm bells for us all. Surely the potential for this condition could be identified before or at least during the flight in a basic tactical risk analysis process? I don't just mean the pilots here - there are plenty of people on the ground with access to the data as well.
There has been so much work done on runway excursion risk reduction by IATA (Runway Excursion Risk Reduction Toolkit http://bit.ly/1m105in ), EASA/Eurocontrol (European Action Plan for Prevention of Runway Excursion EAPPRE http://bit.ly/1uErkmE ) and others that we know what to do. Gates Aviation can provide useful training and advice on how to implement these safeguards if you need some support - I have developed a useful 4 step tool for runway excursion risk evaluation and mitigation that can be adapted to individual operations.
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