I’VE GOT MY FIRE EXTINGUISHER HANDY SO COME ON……
After watching the Lufthansa incident, I am of the opinion that the
PIC should probably be indicted on felony stupid charges. The only
reason there weren’t 100+ fatalities is because it wasn’t their time
to die and a small bit of plain old fashioned luck!
This guy was no hero; he’s just damned lucky that his ‘get there-it
is’ and hard headed determination to end an approach in a landing did
not cost some innocent people their lives.
Let’s think about it: he had more than an hour of fuel on board, no
emergency situation necessitating an immediate landing and he decided
to try to land with a 100MPH crosswind???? There’s a reason each and
every one of us is taught ‘go arounds’ and there is a reason behind
all the discussion on aeronautical decision making.
Yes, the airline has a schedule to keep. Yes, people want to be on
time and hate delays; but I would much rather arrive late than become
“the late..”
If you read Harmut's link, you'd know the PIC let his pretty young lady
copilot "do" that landing, which as I expressed to John Cooper, was apt
to be the key error. Here are my comments:
I have a friend who's a Captn. for AA and he told me a story when his
copilot, a young lady, had the landing - as he tells it, she was on
too hot (and running out of runway) and rather than speak, yell or
admonish, he just reached up and gently pushed the levers into full
back (as I recall the story). After the dust settled, she simply
looked at him and said, "Thank you".
I am confident that if he was PIC he would have had a firmer approach
(in the Lufthansa deal), e.g. "I've got it!!" (or he would have simply
informed that he would take the landing when the weather problem
became obvious) - the fellow is the best pilot I've flown with. He
and I flew in my Earth Scoop (he'd not been one before) and he did
some really interesting things that I do not know how to replicate,
none of which stressed the plane beyond normal operation. Previously
he flew C-130s in the N. Guard at OQU, among other routines like
flying New England Airlines (Westerly-Block Island).
In other words, to my reaction, the Capt. "screwed the pooch" when he
let the fråulien attempt to land in obviously harrowing conditions and
obviously not for the right seater. I wouldn't be surprised if my AA
friend could have pulled off this landing. Der fråuline clearly had
not accumulated enough "right stuff" for the occasion.
Jim Beach Brennan
