Storm cells on final approach.
One of the most enjoyable parts of flying professionally is you get to meet and fly with pilots from all different backgrounds. Many have had colorful experiences and have some good stories to tell. A pilot I’ll call Will had a story that was most memorable for me.
Sometime in the 1990s I flew a trip with Will and I thought he was a terrific pilot. I don’t remember many of my copilots unless I see them again or fly with them a few times, but Will stood out. I just remembered how professional he was doing checklists, following standard operating procedures and flying precisely when it was his turn to fly.
Will was not a big talker or a braggart. He and I had the usual cockpit conversations at cruise, and somewhere along the line I asked him what he flew in the Air Force. He said the F-111, and that led to more conversation. I knew some pilots who flew that famous airplane, and I wanted to know a little more about it. Eventually, he mentioned that he flew the raid on Libya in 1986. In fact, the way he put it, he was the one who “put a bomb through Gaddafi’s window.”
Will went on to talk about having to fly a circuitous route from England through the Gates of Gibraltar for diplomatic reasons and having to hit the tanker multiple times to get to Libya and back. I remembered the raid and the terrorism accusations against Gaddafi and President Reagan deciding enough was enough. When Will talked about it, he was very matter-of-fact, and everything he said rang true. His story and his skills matched.
Tail Strike In Charlotte
Some years later, I retired and took a job doing accident investigations with the NTSB. In 2015, my division chief dropped by my office and assigned me to work on an American Airlines accident at Charlotte Douglas International Airport. I got busy and called the head of the safety department at American to get the names and background information about the pilots involved. When he told me Will was the captain, I immediately remembered him and what a good job he had done when we flew together.
The NTSB is very concerned about improprieties. The board avoids having even the appearance of bias during an investigation. I walked into my chief’s office and told him that I’d be glad to proceed with the investigation, but he should be aware of the possible appearance of partiality. He reassigned the case to one of my colleagues.
The Airbus A321 that Will was flying had a tail strike while he was attempting to land on runway 36L at Charlotte, causing damage to the airplane and the runway. The A321 is 146 ft. in length. It is a stretched version of the standard A320, which is 123 ft., 3 in. long. Stretched airplanes have less tail clearance than standard airplanes when they land, and thus are more prone to tail strikes. In addition, Will was dealing with a deceptive wind condition which he misjudged.
When you parse out the details of what happened in the last few moments of the approach, you can understand how Will and his copilot were working with conflicting information about the wind. On the one hand, Charlotte was landing to the north despite a prevailing 6 kt. tailwind. That was within the airplane’s approved limitations. There was a wind shear advisory in effect, but that is not unusual. Pilots land in convective conditions all the time.
On the other hand, they flew through a rain shower that temporarily obscured their view of the runway, and they observed another rain cell right over the runway end. The tower advised them of a wind shear alert with a 20-kt. loss of airspeed on one mile final and advised that another aircraft had reported 8-15 kt. airspeed gains at 300 ft.
Finally, Will chose to land with flaps full instead of flaps 3. Flaps full creates more drag and makes it easier to stop on a slippery runway. The runway was wet from recent rain. Flaps 3 is recommended for landing in windy conditions. It makes a go-around easier. He had to weigh the conflicting guidance and decide. He made the wrong call.
At 2.8 sec. before the airplane impacted the runway, a “Windshear, Windshear, Windshear,” aural alert sounded. Will applied maximum thrust, but the airplane struck the runway hard as the crew commenced the go-around. They made another circuit of the field and landed safely. There were no injuries to the 159 persons aboard.
Analysis of the flight data recorder (FDR) showed the airplane entered a small microburst on short final about 7 sec. prior to the landing attempt. The wind shifted from a headwind of 15 kt. to a tailwind of 15 kt., then back to a headwind. The vertical acceleration at landing was 2.6 Gs.
The NTSB’s probable cause was “an encounter with a small microburst on short final at low altitude that resulted in a loss of lift and a tail strike during the go-around. Contributing to the accident was the captain’s decision to continue the approach without applying appropriate windshear precautions in accordance with published guidance.”
In retrospect, Will used poor judgment in continuing the approach. However, every one of us who has flown in and out of the big airports has had to pick our way through windy, rainy conditions while trying to decide which of the many information sources we are seeing and hearing are the most believable. The choices aren’t always obvious.
Even if you know you can handle adverse winds, last-moment wind shear accelerations can’t be stopped. Skill can’t save you. That’s when a strong measure of caution exceeds a high level of skill in importance.
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