When you try to land with too much energy the airplane refuses. When you get within a wingspan or two of the ground then ground effect starts giving you more and more lift. That plus excess speed means the airplane simply will not come down.
To force it down you lower the nose but that can end up castering on the nose wheel, starting a PIO event (pilot-induced oscillation), or as in this case the left wing just refused to stop flying. The "quartering tailwind" is a red herring. The jet was well within its tailwind limits - most of the wind was crosswind at that point and the tailwind contribution wasn't anywhere near enough to explain what happened. When you get above glide slope things get worse as you now need to lose altitude but that increases your speed. Even if you get the speed under control if you come at the runway with a 1700-2500fpm descent rate inertia can slam you into the runway.
They were coming in with way too much speed. They leveled off and got above glide slope because they were trying to bleed off enough speed to get within flap speed - flaps give you more drag which they desperately needed.
I made the transition this year into a much higher performance airplane and even going from a Cessna 172 to an A36 TN Bonanza the difference is stark. You must be way further ahead of the airplane in the Bonanza or you will find yourself screaming into the airport at 170kts when your landing speed is more like 80kts. And discover you are above flap and gear extension speed with all power taken out - thus without a good way to slow down.
Transport category jets are that times 100. You absolutely cannot get behind the aircraft. You plan your descents. You begin them much earlier. You pull power earlier. You add drag before speed runs away.
Above all else when you're barreling in 40kts above landing speed you call a go-around and try it again. It is way too late to fix it.
This accident started 30 minutes before they touched the tarmac. A complete failure of planning, of execution, and of ADM (to admit the problem and go-around).
Did fly jets, although not transport-class ones. Just to hammer home that everything here is correct, and the common thread through all aircraft types is disciplined execution.
You fly an approach on airspeed and/or angle of attack, and on glideslope. Period. You're either there or you're correcting to get there, and you're correcting at a point that you don't need huge oh-my-God corrections in close. If you can't do that, sucks to be you, take your waveoff like a real man or woman, and next time suck less.
Do companies punish pilots for go arounds for costing them fuel and delays? If not outright punished, does it cost them in potential promotion/raises? Do they look into a go around enough to determine cause or are all go arounds assumed pilot error by the company?
No, a go around is not a pilot error and it's not punished.
It's almost the opposite. There is automatic monitoring for stable approach criteria (simplified: you must be at speed X with flaps selected etc by altitude Y). So this example would cause an automatic report from the aircraft to the airline, because they were too fast (not within stable approach criteria) and still continued the approach instead of going around.
However even in those cases it's not meant for punishment but for safety improvement. In most professional operations these reports are made anonymous, and only for example someone from a union committee gets to know who the crew were and could have a talk with them if necessary.
> No, a go around is not a pilot error and it's not punished.
But the cause of a need to go around can be pilot error. There could be non-pilot error needs for a go around like when there is a runway incursion so the pilot is waved off. If a pilot makes a bad approach, would that not be pilot error? Not being a pilot, I'm not sure of the procedure. I'm assuming a 767 uses autopilot for the majority of the flight. I just have no insight on whether the pilot or the autopilot is responsible for the approach.
The industry does not treat a go around like an error. You'll only ever get questions when you don't go around while procedures clearly require it, like what seems to have happened in this case.
On autopilot use: The pilot is always responsible for the approach. You can definitely have an unstable approach on autopilot if you configure it wrong or ask it to do things that can't be done within the stable approach criteria. A common example is trying to slow down and descend at the same time, most jets can't really do that.
But "responsible" does not necessarily mean to blame in aviation. The industry as a whole follows the Just Culture principles (see: https://www.caa.co.uk/general-aviation/general-aviation-at-t... ) The purpose of a report is to learn from it and improve safety, not to blame the crew.
AFAIK all Part 121 Passenger operations in the US (and most worldwide) have a no-fault go-around policy. Most have eliminated even the minimal requirement to denote a log entry as to the reason lest that make pilots reluctant to do the right thing. Some airlines even have monitoring programs and will penalize pilots for not going around when they should even if they save the landing. They don't want a bad habit to develop (normalization of deviance) because some day the holes in the swiss cheese will line up and the pilot won't be able to save the landing - and by then it will be too late.
Part 121 Cargo and Part 135 Charter are ... another story. Quality of training and procedures vary a lot. Some are run about as well as the Part 121 Passenger operations. At others a go-around is a career-limiting move.
I do not know how 21Air operated - leave that to the NTSB to discover - but it would not surprise me whatsoever if Amazon leans heavily on their contracted ACMIs and yanks contracts for delays. A go-around means an extra 15 minutes (give or take) and Amazon cuts their logistics schedules razor thin so they don't have to pay for extra labor. A 15-20 minute delay in unloading the airplane can mean the sorting center staff and delivery trucks sit idle (though it wouldn't surprise me if they just stiff the delivery contractors for the wasted time).
This isn't necessarily done with ill intent - the middle managers at Amazon are just chasing their numbers and an operator that prioritizes safety will inevitably have worse on-time performance. As is often the case these days outsourcing / contracting can end up being a race to the bottom even if no one intends it that way. FedEx Ground is all contractors who bid on routes. If you ever wonder why the driver throws your package or leaves it in your driveway: they had to be the lowest bidder to get the contract and that means X deliveries per hour or they lose money. It just so happens that with air cargo operations this kind of pressure can easily lead to an accident.
This should not be the case for any modern airline; too many accidents were caused by exactly this problem in the past.
However, I don't doubt shady operations might be doing this(more so if they aren't carrying passengers). They won't be around for long if they are caught doing this kind of nonsense and it causes an incident (or accident in this case).
Today there may be some rules (more than X go arounds because of weather, you have to divert, etc).
If there is a company willing to bend rules to increase profits, I'd bet it'd be Amazon's retail side. Not via explicit punishment, because that'd be too easy to catch, but bonuses for timely arrivals, fuel efficiency, and so on.
Well they tend to optimize heavily by discouraging things like bathroom breaks, and I’ve seen evidence of this thinking in how they treat their drivers. I’m not sure why this would be extraordinary? On its face those incentives don’t sound bad except that they will incentivize unsafe behavior in edge cases like this.
I think it matters a lot because Amazon doesn’t have their own airline. They contract out their aviation to multiple companies.
The incentive is to pick the lowest bid and that could be a company whose culture creates indirect pressure on pilots to be on time. All it takes is a dispatcher in a small company that is constantly irritated when things are late. Knowing that the other people are going to be angry with you for being late can make you hesitant to go around, causing exactly this type of accident.
Is this what happened? Probably not. Pilots get tunnel vision for any number of reasons.
Isn't there a call out usually where the plane says "minimums" and the pilot flying has to verbally confirm that they are committed? You'd think for this flight, that would have been the final time to realize they need to go around? Or is that strictly just a visibility call-out?
No you must pass the stabilized gate well before minimums; legal requirement is usually 1000ft above the airport for IMC (instrument conditions), 500ft for visual conditions. AFAIK airlines can set higher minimums and may set other configuration gates (eg 1500ft gear must be out, flaps in landing configuration).
To be stabilized you must be lined up laterally (eg localizer captured) and on glide slope (vertically aligned). Airspeed must be Vref +/-10, final landing configuration (flaps, gear, etc), sink rate correct (<1000fpm), power set (not idle), and all checklists complete.
Typically the pilot monitoring should make a callout for this (eg "Approach") and the pilot flying responds ("stabilized" or "unstable, going around").
The "minimums" callout is to verify that you can see the runway sufficiently to land. The exact requirements vary - a Category I ILS you can go down to 200ft without seeing the runway. A Category IIIb ILS is 50ft. Technically Category IIIc allows 0 so has no decision height and requires no "minimums" callout but I don't know of anyone crazy enough to allow this - you wouldn't be able to taxi off the runway with zero visibility.
The stabilized approach gate is a performance & configuration check. Is the aircraft configured for landing and on the correct performance profile with the expected automatic guidance?
Minimums callout (DA/MDA) is a visibility check. Can we see the runway to whatever degree our approach requires?
btw: If you are curious the various ILS categories impose performance and redundancy requirements on both aircraft and the airport ground equipment. Things like backup transmitters, self-monitoring to catch drift, battery backups, etc.
Yeah but that's what I mean, like having to acknowledge minimums and saying "yes let's do it" is like the last like external trigger that they should have listened to and decided to go around.
Yes that's true. They knew before but at 1500 they should have gone around. At "minimums" callout they should have gone around. When they floated so far down the runway they should have gone around.
Instead they waited until they were about to go off the end with idle engines to try it - the one time it was too late to go around.
The thing I’ve come to appreciate between my first few days in a sim, a lot of sim time, and then actual time behind a yoke is that like a lot of things, landing is peaceful and easy if you’ve done all the prep ahead of time. Which is precisely your point.
The further in advance you cut power, descend, and get your airspeed set, you’ll find you have plenty of time to go over your checklists, mentally rehearse, and get configured. By the time you’re touching down, the plane wants to be on the ground.
If you’re coming in high and fast, you have significantly abbreviated time. And you’re constantly fighting airspeed and altitude. If both are high, trying to lose one just increases the other. It’s a losing battle and one you’re fighting on an accelerated and accelerating time frame.
When you try to land with too much energy the airplane refuses. When you get within a wingspan or two of the ground then ground effect starts giving you more and more lift. That plus excess speed means the airplane simply will not come down.
To force it down you lower the nose but that can end up castering on the nose wheel, starting a PIO event (pilot-induced oscillation), or as in this case the left wing just refused to stop flying. The "quartering tailwind" is a red herring. The jet was well within its tailwind limits - most of the wind was crosswind at that point and the tailwind contribution wasn't anywhere near enough to explain what happened. When you get above glide slope things get worse as you now need to lose altitude but that increases your speed. Even if you get the speed under control if you come at the runway with a 1700-2500fpm descent rate inertia can slam you into the runway.
They were coming in with way too much speed. They leveled off and got above glide slope because they were trying to bleed off enough speed to get within flap speed - flaps give you more drag which they desperately needed.
I made the transition this year into a much higher performance airplane and even going from a Cessna 172 to an A36 TN Bonanza the difference is stark. You must be way further ahead of the airplane in the Bonanza or you will find yourself screaming into the airport at 170kts when your landing speed is more like 80kts. And discover you are above flap and gear extension speed with all power taken out - thus without a good way to slow down.
Transport category jets are that times 100. You absolutely cannot get behind the aircraft. You plan your descents. You begin them much earlier. You pull power earlier. You add drag before speed runs away.
Above all else when you're barreling in 40kts above landing speed you call a go-around and try it again. It is way too late to fix it.
This accident started 30 minutes before they touched the tarmac. A complete failure of planning, of execution, and of ADM (to admit the problem and go-around).