Obviously this was single pilot ops and a second one was missing in front who shöuld have said " Go around " ( at latest over the threshold ) – presuming the pilot flying suffered from a severe " get-there-itis ".
I think this is a case where going around was bleeding obvious. I don’t think it was a single pilot ops issue, more likely a passengers putting pressure on flight deck issue.
I concur on the something else theory. This pilot was high houred, high experience on type, and knew this airfield. The whole approach, final scenario, is so wrong, so out of picture, that one must consider a medical issue.
Sadly, while it would be in some ways nice if this were true, I think it is unlikely. It is the same as looking for the “mechanical issue” – possible sure but not likely.
172driver wrote:
That said, 2500-3000ft/min descent rate is insane, you’d struggle even in an SEP. There must be more to this than meets the eye. I wonder if the front right seat was occupied…..
I think this is probably the most likely scenario.
I fly a jet with almost identical performance to the Phenom 300. I’ve been into Blackbushe quite a few times and it shouldn’t be any kind of an issue.
It’s not unheard of for owners to sit in the right seat of their toy and ‘fly’. I should imagine that it takes quite a strong personality to take control of the plane from your boss before he kills you all. Luckily my clients prefer to be in the back drinking champagne.
Julian wrote:
I should imagine that it takes quite a strong personality to take control of the plane from your boss before he kills you all.
Er, no! Minimum survival instinct would work!
Peter wrote:
I think that report you posted, what_next, describes a much smaller sort of error – a runway overrun which is quite common.
Yes, but this was was also caused by crossing the threshold 30kt too fast and too high. And neither of the pilots said anything about going around as an option… My point was mainly, that a second pilot does not necessarily prevent this kind of accident.
what_next wrote:
My point was mainly, that a second pilot does not necessarily prevent this kind of accident.
It will like discussing the validity of Murphy’s law, anything that can go wrong – will go wrong, eventually. This looks like it is some kind of “cockpit error”. If the cause was the pilot being incapacitated (illness or something), then a second pilot could resolve the problem. If the cause was the pilot simply did something odd and stupid, then a second pilot could also prevent this.
I am in agreement with Beechbaby in that because the approach and touchdown was so badly flown it is likely that the pilot was suffering some sort of medical incapacitation.
A_and_C wrote:
I am in agreement with Beechbaby in that because the approach and touchdown was so badly flown it is likely that the pilot was suffering some sort of medical incapacitation.
Yes. And I wouldn’t be surprised if this ‘incapacitation’ sat right there in the RHS……
I am in agreement with Beechbaby in that because the approach and touchdown was so badly flown it is likely that the pilot was suffering some sort of medical incapacitation.
Not likely.
As to why he didn’t go around, I have also posted this elsewhere. That question will be the major subject of the human factors side of the investigation. I would suspect that in the latter stages of the approach, he was operating beyond task saturation and was both overloaded and fixated on the task of landing the aircraft. It is possible that he did not hear the aural TAWS warnings at all (as we know, hearing is the first sense to go under stress) and did not contemplate abandoning his approach as he lacked the attentional capacity to absorb the cues of its instability.
I disagree that this was a momentary lapse of judgement in two ways; firstly this accident started possibly before top of descent, and certainly before the aircraft joined the circuit. What evidence, if any, the CVR may give of any approach briefing and preparation will be interesting (single pilot CRM at work), as will the descent profile flown below 10k and the speeds flown in the circuit, together with how the automation was used. Secondly, all of us are vulnerable to task saturation, although at individually varying levels of total capacity – I suspect many of us have been there, and although the clues were obvious in retrospect, they were significantly less so to us at the time.
I am very sceptical about the “other person flying” theory at the moment – given the AAIB have the CVFDR I would have thought that would be obvious on the first readout and it would have been mentioned in the special bulletin.
