AAL Overshoots runway at Jackson Hole

[Rey Ramon]

A favorite of mine in the virtual world. I'm thinking mechanical failure of some sort, but i'm no expert. hell i'm not even a real pilot.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blFw4Y1dtps

[Rey Ramon]

and shady shenanigan's by aal too...
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_airliner_ ... FtZXJpY2Fu

[Norberto Rivera]

I wonder why they felt the need to do that... and what new legislation will come of it.

[Theodore Martin]

My first thought on this was the pilot landed long and with the snow on the runway brakes were no use. Had to totally depend on reverse thrust which takes more runway to stop. AA grabbing the black box makes me think they had this thought as well.

[Rey Ramon]

i don't know...the video shows them landing before the touchdown zone. Did They just not manually break early enough after the spoilers and thrust reverser did not kick in?

[Norberto Rivera]

I'm curious about the thrust reverser deployment, well lack of deployment. Did it not extend on the right engine either? Perhaps reverser thrust was added but without the reversers deployed it actually sped the plane up?

(Note: Not a real aerospace engineer, but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night)

I had a runway overshoot a few days ago..because someone (*cough*) forgot to set the autobrakes. And in the process of seeing why that was (pilot error) I didn't switch off the A/T. Whhheeeee..oh look..the runway threshold markers on the other end!.

Don't feel bad, I've done that before. LOL Kinda forces you to go through that landing checklist doesn't it?

[Greg Gemelli]

I'd be willing to bet the Thrust Reversers were NOT armed. Maybe the Flight Spoilers too. Big time oops if that ends up being the case. You can arm the Thrust Rev at any time so the delay in the engines going into the reverse regime makes me think that they landed, then said oh (insert expletive here) get those armed!!! and then they worked. The reason I think this is the case is that the reversers did eventually work as they should. The other thought is a WOW (weight on wheels) malfunction. Many systems are tied into needing WOW information so they will only work in flight or on the ground. If they had a malfunction in the WOW system then that would also result in issues with getting reverse thrust because the aircraft could still think its not on the ground. This would also delay the spoilers from being deployed. The angle of the video is a bit forward to know for sure if the spoilers didn't deploy from my perspective.

KJAC is a pain in the butt and you don't have much RWY to use. Aircraft must be able to meet stopping requirements with only brakes though but you're going to loose 2000-2500ft of rwy before you know brakes are all you got in a situation like this. Glad nobody was hurt. All the answers will be in the NTSB report when it's made public. Usually takes a few months in a case like this that's not very serious.

Cheers

[Greg Gemelli]

Perhaps reverser thrust was added but without the reversers deployed it actually sped the plane up?

Richard with the redundancy that is in place this scenario isn't possible. The increase in engine speed won't occur until the engine is in the rev regime. Basically the reverse deploys and then the engine speeds up. So you land and are at idle power. Then the rev triggers on the throttles are actuated and this commands the engine to hydro-mechanically open the engine cowl for redirected rev thrust. Once this has occurred then the throttles can continue rearward to command an increase in engine speed. You can't command an increase in engine speed until the engine has properly configured itself. Now on the other had if the pilots pushed the throttles forward the engine would increase in power normally. Hope this helps.