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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

> While they were still late in calling a go-around (they should have done it before being anywhere close to touching down due to their unstable approach)

Barring a massive tailwind, they had enough groundspeed to go around at touchdown (158 kts).

I think we'll find throttling to G-A and then aborting the G-A caused the crash. If they'd committed to landing they at least wouldn't have overshot with that much energy. If they'd decided to G-A even at 00:15, they may have been well within margin to take back off.

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They didn't have much runway left at 00:15 and were far slower than 158 at that point. They came in far too fast, descending too rapidly; first touch was >50% down the runway, and they didn't get the left gear down, so the spoilers and brakes didn't apply until even later.

Should have had a better approach; should have gone around before they even touched the ground; conditional on the bad approach and first touch, they should have gone around after the initial touch 50% down the runway. But they made the wrong choices at all of those points.

Yea, they couldn’t get the left gear down because they they had enough airspeed to execute a go-around!

Literally 5 consecutive minutes of making 100s of wrong decisions snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

According to news reports, a magistrate judge at OSHA has been sandbagging an investigation into retaliatory firings by this airline (of pilots who reported unsafe practices with maintenance, CRM, training, scheduling, everything). I wonder if the NTSB will include that judge in the investigation. It seems like he or she has a lot to answer for.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/miami-plane-crash-21-air-safety...

Do we have a name for the judge?

> But they made the wrong choices at all of those points.

This tends to be something we see in most incidents, because the cases where someone makes the right choice at one of the points tend to not become incidents.

An interesting thought is that the more obviously bad/incompetent/terrible decisions or (in)actions were involved in an incident, the better it is, because it means more things had to go wrong for a disaster to occur (more slices of cheese in the Swiss Cheese model).

Yeah, to some extent. But you see a lot more of this in GA (or Part 135) than in Part 121 airline operations. This was exceedingly bad judgement by real professional pilots in a 767.

> They didn't have much runway left at 00:15 and were far slower than 158 at that point

You're correct. When they first annunciate G-A, they've missed the chance. (They almost certainly had enough airspeed to G-A even after touching down, though.)

My question is whether throttling up for G-A at 00:15 is what caused the overshoot to extend out of the airport (versus if they'd committed to braking). This will come down to runway conditions, braking performance and the throttle responsse of their engines.

> This will come down to runway conditions, braking performance and the throttle responsse of their engines.

Well also, at what time point did all the tires finally make simultaneous firm contact with the ground? Ie were they going slow enough for braking performance to even matter?

Left main gear finally touched down at 00:19 and they slowed from 134 to 120 knots between 00:19 and 00:15.

> I think we'll find throttling to G-A and then aborting the G-A caused the crash.

Not even a chance.

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