This is not GA related accident but it’s another example of reckless crew that is hard to believe that exists in today’s CAT world.
In essence, they missed the intersection where they were supposed to enter the runway and, instead of turning back to taxiway and continue to the proper one, they decided to takeoff. Despite the ATC warnings of remaining runway ahead not sufficient, they supposedly ran calculation on tablet and concluded that 1273 m would be enough for Embraer E195 with 106 POB (and probably a lot of fuel on board) to takeoff safely. Of course during the ground roll they exhausted the runway and even more (there were tyre marks on ground at rotation point), rotated at the edge of stall (can be seen on video footage) hit the light pole (two sounds of hitting can be heard) and severely damaged left wing, fuselage and left horizontal stabilizer. The damage caused fuel leak and several other systems failures with crew continuing flight with low pass and the below MSA towards mountainous area. Luckily ATC warned them several times and vectored them to proper holding area and, after assessing the damage, they successfully landed. It’s amazing how this didn’t ended with 106 casualties when you look at the points and the extent of the cuts where wing and tail were damaged.
From what I’ve read (p*rune, among others) it was even worse. The plane COULD have taken off in the available runway, if they had selected flaps 20 instead of flaps 10. But they didn’t.
There are really a lot of opportunities to re-learn what we already know as a community. I’m afraid that we are doing a very bad job of re-teaching lessons from the past. Not just in aviation, but in general.
Effectively this type of incident (Serbia’s Traffic Accident Research Center has rated the occurrence an accident) has already happened countless times. Complacency, time pressure (slots, delays, flight duty times, etc), distraction, loss of SA (can happen on the ground too), or plain mistakes (wrong data input), have been found to be the driving factors.
I know Airbus was/is working on something, but find it amazing that to this day no practical means of warning, or better yet electronic AI interaction has been implemented to cover for intersection takeoff mistakes.
That was a close shave indeed…
Dan wrote:
I know Airbus was/is working on something, but find it amazing that to this day no practical means of warning, or better yet electronic AI interaction has been implemented to cover for intersection takeoff mistakes.
Completely agree. All the information we need is included in our EFB app – it knows something about the aircraft, the position on the runway, the runway length, altitude, even a bit of weather data. The only thing it does not know is how many beers the pilot drank before getting on the airport shuttle bus. :(
The system would need to know that you are planning to take off. That’s not trivial. I guess one could auto detect a takeoff config (flap setting x or y, plus sitting on a known database runway?)
Performance plus subscription of FF gives you good perfomance assessment and knows when you enter runway, I think it should be able to tell you that runway in front is not long enough, but we shouldn’t need an app for that, it’s just basic flight skills and airmanship…
The system would need to know that you are planning to take off. That’s not trivial.
When you start ground run with incorrect configuration you get master warning and configuration error, so the system knows you’re about to takeoff. Also, remaining runway length is known.
When you start the ground run, yes. But not when you roll onto the runway.
I am surprised that warning is not implemented. I guess the view is that the pilot ought to know this much!
Peter wrote:
The system would need to know that you are planning to take off. That’s not trivial. …
// Define a function to calculate distance between two GPS coordinates
FUNCTION calculateDistance(lat1, lon1, lat2, lon2):
// Implementation to calculate distance based on coordinates
// This can use Haversine formula or any other appropriate method
RETURN distance
// Define a function to check if near a runway and going slow
FUNCTION checkPositionAndSpeed(currentLat, currentLon, currentSpeed):
// List of known runways with their GPS coordinates and lengths
runways = [
{"name": "Runway 1", "lat": 45.0, "lon": -75.0, "length": 3000}, // Length in meters
// Add more runways as needed
]
// Define the threshold for being "near" in meters and speed in knots
NEAR_THRESHOLD = 500 // meters
SPEED_THRESHOLD = 10 // knots
// Loop through each runway to check distance
FOR runway IN runways:
distance = calculateDistance(currentLat, currentLon, runway["lat"], runway["lon"])
// Check if within NEAR_THRESHOLD and speed is less than SPEED_THRESHOLD
IF distance <= NEAR_THRESHOLD AND currentSpeed < SPEED_THRESHOLD:
// Check if runway is too short
IF runway["length"] < getRequiredRunwayLength():
RAISE Alert("Runway too short for expected aircraft performance!")
ELSE:
PRINT("Near runway: " + runway["name"] + ", but length is sufficient.")
// Define a function to get the required runway length based on aircraft performance
// This could be a constant or a more complex function depending on aircraft type, weight, etc.
FUNCTION getRequiredRunwayLength():
// Placeholder value, should be replaced with actual logic to determine required length
REQUIRED_LENGTH = 2500 // Example length in meters
RETURN REQUIRED_LENGTH
// Example usage
currentLat = 44.5 // Current latitude
currentLon = -75.5 // Current longitude
currentSpeed = 8 // Current speed in knots
// Call the function with current position and speed
checkPositionAndSpeed(currentLat, currentLon, currentSpeed)