Almost 30 years ago I was in the right hand seat of a BAC 1-11 narrow-body twin, on approach to Aberdeen. It was around 10 at night, dark, windy and raining - pretty standard stuff. We were on the last of 3 rotations to Heathrow and quite keen to get back to the hotel for a beer and some rest. And the captain had brought his wife along for the week detachment so she was waiting for him...
He was flying down the non-precision approach, with the landing lights glaring onto the clouds in front of the windscreen and the anti-collision beacon intermittently looming orange. At around 500 feet from touchdown I called 'minimum' as dictated by the SOP and there was certainly nothing like a runway in sight. The captain replied - I forget what he said but we continued descending as before and about a hundred feet later the runway lights appeared through the rain and we touched down uneventfully.
It was only later that it dawned on me what had happened - the captain had pressed on below minimum because he didn't want to divert. I was new to civil airline flying and new to the airline so wondered if that was how things were done around here. Of course I quickly learnt that it wasn't.
This all came back to me last week when I read about an A330 that landed off the side of the runway in Kathmandu. Apparently the pilots had trusted the accuracy of the aircraft's GPS based navigation systems enough to continue below the published approach minimum. Of course they were wrong.
To read about the outcome on Skybrary click HERE
He was flying down the non-precision approach, with the landing lights glaring onto the clouds in front of the windscreen and the anti-collision beacon intermittently looming orange. At around 500 feet from touchdown I called 'minimum' as dictated by the SOP and there was certainly nothing like a runway in sight. The captain replied - I forget what he said but we continued descending as before and about a hundred feet later the runway lights appeared through the rain and we touched down uneventfully.
It was only later that it dawned on me what had happened - the captain had pressed on below minimum because he didn't want to divert. I was new to civil airline flying and new to the airline so wondered if that was how things were done around here. Of course I quickly learnt that it wasn't.
This all came back to me last week when I read about an A330 that landed off the side of the runway in Kathmandu. Apparently the pilots had trusted the accuracy of the aircraft's GPS based navigation systems enough to continue below the published approach minimum. Of course they were wrong.
To read about the outcome on Skybrary click HERE
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