Essay

Landing is the default

An approach ends in a landing unless somebody calls it off. On September 6, 21 Air Flight 7598, a Boeing 767-33A flying cargo for Amazon, overran Runway 30 at Miami International. It struck a passenger van on the airport perimeter road, then an SUV on the public road beyond the fence. Five of the seven people in the van were killed. The other two, and the one person in the SUV, were seriously injured. Both pilots had minor injuries.

The NTSB published a summary of both recorders on September 9 and a preliminary report on October 1. Both are marked preliminary and neither names a cause.

The captain was flying and the first officer was monitoring. About seventy seconds before touchdown, as the captain called for flaps 20, the first officer cautioned that they were too fast. He “made additional comments regarding the airplane’s excessive speed throughout the remainder of the recording.” The report’s next sentence: “There was not a consistent verbal response to the comments about speed.”

Forty seconds before touchdown came the electronic thousand-foot callout, then the airplane’s own warnings: “sink rate” twice, “too low terrain” five times. Ten seconds before touchdown the captain called for flaps 30. Sixteen seconds after it, he called for a go-around.

The airplane crossed the threshold about 105 feet above the ground at 177 knots groundspeed and touched down about 3,750 feet past it, at about 160. The weight-on-wheels signal, which tells the airplane it is on the ground, switched between air and ground for about seven seconds and settled with about 2,730 feet of runway remaining. The brakes went on at 146 knots. At 120 they came off and the throttles went forward to the go-around thrust setting, with about 930 feet left. Moments later, with about 415 feet left, the throttles were back at idle and the brakes were back on. A jet has two other ways to slow down, speed brakes and thrust reversers. The speed brakes stayed stowed and the reversers never deployed.

The airplane crossed the end of the runway at 113 knots.

The easy lesson is sixteen years old. Brief the approach, agree on the number, go around when you miss it, no discussion. In 2010 the FAA recommended that airlines put two things in writing: either pilot may make the go-around callout, and the flying pilot’s “immediate response” to it is a missed approach. The Flight Safety Foundation’s 2017 go-around report wants operators to brief, before descent, the instability factors “that will result in a go-around.”

I am not an airline pilot, and the NTSB has published neither 21 Air’s procedures nor this crew’s briefing: its cockpit summary covers the last six minutes of a recording about two hours long. What these two pilots had agreed to do, I cannot say.

Now the objection, and it is the right one. The rule this lesson asks for is already standard guidance, the first officer already said the airplane was too fast, and it landed anyway. The same Foundation report puts compliance with go-around policies at “approximately 3 percent of unstable approaches.” At Burbank in 2000 a Southwest 737 touched down at about 182 knots and came to rest on a city street. Asked afterward, the captain stated the go-around criteria and “could not explain why he did not perform a go-around maneuver.”

Concede it in full. A rule on paper does not fly the airplane, and a lesson that says to write the rule down was delivered in 2010.

Why the rule fails is in the same report. For most crews who continued an unstable approach, it says, “no one made the actual decision to continue; that is, there was no communication about the decision to continue, it just happened.”

That is what a default is. A caution about speed describes the airplane. A go-around callout ends the approach. In the NTSB’s summary the first officer’s comments on speed, however many there were, never become that call: the first go-around call it lists is the captain’s, after touchdown. The summary is a list of select events and no transcript has been released, so this is my reading of an incomplete record. The investigators have not made it.

None of it faults the first officer. On this record he is the one who raised the speed, and he kept raising it. What FAA guidance asks of a monitoring pilot next is the hard part: if the pilot flying “does not respond to two successive challenges,” then per the operator’s procedures, and if safety indicates, call “I have control, going around” and take the airplane from the captain. These two had first flown together that morning. In a 1994 NTSB study of 37 airline accidents in which the Board cited the crew, the captain was flying in more than 80 percent, and 11 of the 15 with a known pairing history happened on the crew’s first day together. The Board has drawn no conclusion about this pairing.

The Foundation’s fix is to make continuing cost a sentence. Its recommended calls are “active, not passive or conditional”: one “is made at the assigned point during every approach. This forces communication.” That is still a rule on paper. What changes is the default: the approach goes on because someone said it should. Whether 21 Air’s procedures have such a call, I do not know.

None of the people killed was aboard. That is reason enough to count the margins outside the cockpit. No arresting bed was installed past the end of Runway 30. Thunderstorms were reported at the airport, and the tower cleared the flight to land without stating the wind, which the report notes is required when a tailwind component exists. The reported wind, 190 degrees at 17 knots gusting 26, works out by my arithmetic to roughly five knots of tailwind and sixteen of crosswind on that runway, more in the gusts. Every speed quoted for this flight is a groundspeed, and the airplane’s weight and target speed are unpublished, so nobody outside the investigation can say how many knots too fast it was.

A default never has to win the argument. The go-around does, out loud, while there is still an approach to abandon. From the first caution, Miami had about seventy seconds of one. The call came sixteen seconds after touchdown.

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