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To: justlurking

No, it looks ugly. 1300 fpm rate of descent is very scary. It really is almost twice what is required. A good rule of thumb is half of the ground speed. By that I mean 140 Knots over the ground gives about 700 fpm descent rate on the normal 3 degree glide path. 140 knots is pretty close to the approach speed for the 777’s at UAL (a little slower for flaps 30, a little more for flaps 25).

109 Knots at 100 feet (if I’m reading the numbers correctly) is very, very scary. Even if they would have cleared the sea wall, that is definitely tail strike speed. I don’t know if it was a 777-300, since the are slightly longer, they have a tail skid just in case.

That looks to me like a profile where the engines did not spool up. British Airways had a similar incident happen at Heathrow. They had ice crystals in the fuel lines that prevented spool up on their Rolls Royce engine on short final.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Airways_Flight_38


108 posted on 07/07/2013 10:54:49 AM PDT by ALPAPilot
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To: ALPAPilot
It looked to me like they were at or below the normal descent rate until about 4,000 feet, then realized they were too high and increased their descent rate.

But, they continued to bleed off airspeed and were too slow to check their descent at 600 feet.

However, I don't know why. There might have been a delay in spooling up the power, or they may have reacted too late.

111 posted on 07/07/2013 11:01:25 AM PDT by justlurking (tagline removed, as demanded by Admin Moderator)
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To: ALPAPilot

We know that the sink rate suddenly dropped at 200 feet AGL/1 mile/20 seconds out. Engines did not spool up until a couple of seconds before impact. From this, I think one can conclude that (given no flap changes that late in landing) someone pulled back the yoke. That would be beyond stupid at that point.


165 posted on 07/10/2013 2:16:24 PM PDT by brkorb
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