Yet another Hacker News

NTSB Issues Investigative Update on B-767 Runway Excursion Accident in Miami

28 points mckn1ght 1 hour ago 19 comments

imglorp 56 minutes ago | parent

tldw, per Blancolirio: unstable approach, crew should have done a go around at 1000 agl but did not attempt one until it was too late, then aborted the go around.

bdamm 43 minutes ago | parent

The "hazardous attitudes" study in this report will be gold.

wanderingmoose 26 minutes ago | parent

I think the real question is why didn't the pilots do a go around. I bet there are underlying pressures from the airlines and/or amazon to not do a go around to avoid schedule delays or fuel costs.

cadre_78 6 minutes ago | parent

Bingo.

sscaryterry 25 minutes ago | parent

Yep, its also the most intuitive way to reason about it when you look at the data. Unfortunately, a bad call. I'm sure many of us would have made the same mistake.

lisper 15 minutes ago | parent

Private pilot here. No, I'm quite sure very few of you here would have made the same mistake as evidenced by the fact that literally hundreds of thousands of aircraft land successfully every day, many of them under much more adverse conditions. This is not a oh-it-could-have-happened-to-anyone kind of screwup, this is a did-this-guy-really-go-through-basic-pilot-training kind of screwup.

sscaryterry 7 minutes ago | parent

Lots of assumptions here. Read my post as having sympathy with someone having made a mistake with a number of people dead.

I have to ask myself, if the alerts are not treated the same way as many programmers treat "warnings".

P.S. I didn't fly the plan. Attacking me?

(Edit): Downvote until the cows come home. Your lack of empathy shows.

creato 13 minutes ago | parent

> I'm sure many of us would have made the same mistake.

From the reporting and commenting on this incident, that is not the impression I'm getting. This wasn't one bad call after getting half way down the runway, this was a continuous stream of bad decision making for the entire approach, with the copilot suggesting the pilot go around too.

Also: this kind of incident is very rare, so obviously, the vast majority of pilots don't make this mistake.

bradly 40 minutes ago | parent

> There was no indication in the recorded data that speed brakes or thrust reversers were deployed.

I don't know anything about flying. Is this normal? Doesn't sound like it, but I don't know why the pilots would not have used these things that sound useful.

Onavo 38 minutes ago | parent

Depending on the plane they need the wheels to have sufficient weight on them first. Also strangely the flaps 30 and flaps 40 call outs do not match.

buildsjets 27 minutes ago | parent

The Boeing 767 does not have a Flaps 40 setting. The "Forty" callout was an automated annunciation of the radar-altimeter measured altitude above the runway.

ofcrpls 35 minutes ago | parent

The lack of contact of the left wheels on the ground, which the Weight of Wheel sensor deployment depends on, as in both wheels being grounded, which the auto-speed brakes/thrust reversers depend on, worsened the whole situation as the crew seems to be unaware why they weren't losing speed after they'd 'landed'.

Every single thing they could do wrong at, they did.

addaon 34 minutes ago | parent

Take this with all the salt that random third-party guesses about a still-in-investigation event should be taken with -- think fully salt-cured ham -- but it looks like the landing was with a quartering tail wind, and the upwind (left) gear never really got weight on it; the wheel bogie needs to be straightened by weight against both the front and back wheels to register weight-on-wheel, and the auto-brake systems need positive weight-on-wheels from at least one redundant sensor on each of the three gear to engage. Came down hot, and basically skimmed with one wheel partially off the ground for some, most, or all of the way down the runway, preventing the braking systems from kicking in.

lokar 32 minutes ago | parent

AIUI, they should never have gotten that far. They should have gone around at 1000 feet.

ajross 17 minutes ago | parent

> Came down hot

Really that's all that needs to be said at the moment. They had way too much energy[1], which anyone with flight sim or RC experience will recognize as a routine mistake when hand-flying.

The question is why all (all!) the layers of checklists and warnings and process and ATC direction somehow failed in combination to prevent. Yeah, they should have aborted for sure, but they didn't, and we won't know why for a good while yet.

[1] Which can just as easily mean "too high" as "too fast", c.f. the sink rate warnings in the logs which would be consistent with trying to squeeze the airplane down onto the runway. But again we won't know without more data.

toomuchtodo 30 minutes ago | parent

Prime Air crash: 10+ mandatory go-around triggers were ignored [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49650689 - September 2026

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xm6G7EOP5Qc

Neywiny 27 minutes ago | parent

I've been watching the Flying for Money videos on this. He has interesting insight. It's a bit disappointing he just threw the data into an LLM for processing since it doesn't seem that hard to process, but otherwise he's been pretty good at bringing up likely possibilities based on Occam's razor. Mostly around negligence and most recently about junior vs senior pilot shyness vs ego.

What I don't understand from his analysis though was early on he said the tail wind increased a minute before landing which is too quick to have communicated. If that's true, we need to get better about this. A minute to send a message is ages. It should be automatic between the airport and the aircraft.

teravor 22 minutes ago | parent

apparently they weren't even properly configured until almost touching down.