All I know about airplanes I learned from Patrick Smith.

But, I am surprised by the Midway crash. It seems as if every action was "within parameters", except for that reverse thrust delay, so it seems as if one, and only one, "mistake" led to a fatal accident. My understanding was that airplane saftey standards are set so that it takes more than one mistake to lead to a fatal situation -- at least, that's how I (and the experts) am guided when making decisions about cycling in traffic.

It also seems that there were no "unusual" physical events -- you know, like a runway far slicker than expected for the weather conditions. I'd be surprised if a thorough investigation of the accident did not undercover additional sources of human error.

As for lightning strikes: I'm surprised that there is a plane to be built of composites, given the rate of lightning strikes. Again, I had always assumed that safety margins were calculated to provide astronomically small risks per flight. If composites crack during a strike, and a strike can happen once a year, this seems very problematic?

if the runway was known to be short, slick, and with a slight tailwind, why did they hit the ground 2000 feet from the end of it?

I dunno but I'd feel a lot better about skirting multiple saftey margins and about the composites and all of it if this country's government was run by people who weren't intent on destroying government.

During my deployment to the Western Pacific theater in 1969, the 707 we were flying across the Pacific aboard was stuck by lightning. At the remove of almost forty years, I can still see the lightning dancing on the wing. We landed at Guam, all of us troops huddled in the tiny visitor's center while the plane was checked for damage.

It was not damaged, apparently, as we all reboarded and continued our flight to Okinawa.

Of course this was back in the days of aviation yore, when an aircraft was built of good old aluminium, not wonder materials.

Edward Moore

Given the conditions alone, I would think that a touchdown almost a third of the way down a short runway would be an automatic go around.

Are the pilots immediately aware of how far down the runway they are? Is that data obtained electronically, or by those signs on the side of the runway?

The Pilot writes,

"On average, a large jetliner is hit about once every three years. Regional aircraft, plying lower altitudes where there's a greater propensity for strikes, are hit about once a year. Putting that another way: Approximately 26,000 commercial jetliners and turboprops are flying around the world. Assuming a given plane is struck once biannually, more than 35 planes suffer lightning strikes every day."

I took the first two sentences of this paragraph to mean that this is how often such incidents occur. The last sentence reveals that he means how often it happens to each individual plane.

Oh. That's quite a difference.

I'm reminded of the old joke: "Every four minutes, a woman gives birth to a baby. Your job is to find that woman and stop her."

To answer a couple of reader queries:

Crews use a combination of signage, lights, and surface markings to determine distance along a runway.

Landing two thousand feet beyond the threshold is not unusual. Although crews occasionally aim slightly short, or slightly long, as the situation may warrant, aiming for the *very end* of a runway would be dangerous. Instrument landing systems, like the one used by flight 1248, typically guide aircraft to a point about 1,500 from the threshold. Legally, the designated "touchdown zone" is the first 3,000 feet or half the strip's total length, whichever is less.

However, with respect to unusually short runways, some carriers *do* require that go-arounds be initiated if the aircraft is not down within a specific distance -- usually between 1,500 -- 2,000 feet. I am unaware of Southwest's policy.

Patrick Smith

I was confused by the tail wind issue regarding the incident at Midway. Aren't landing approaches usally arranged into the wind?

I'm struck by the fact that the investigators can say that given all the parameters of the aircraft, coupled with the weather parameters on the surface of the runway, they were 800 feet over the end, given where they touched down. When you spell out the performance envelope, it's a little hard to see how the landing could have been allowed if (big if) the data was plugged in beforehand. In theory, knowledge of this point on a performance chart is required for any take-off or landing. In this case, there are a lot of variables. So what didn't they know? How can you translate 'good' here, 'fair' there, into feet on a runway, in real time?

The slightly gossipy information about Southwest pilots being 'cowboys' is fascinating. Couple that with almost 4 decades of flying without a fatality? Should I feel good or bad? I guess the 'good' cowboy is the one who knows the art and practice of flying so intuitively that he (she) just gets it done. In theory, this 'good' cowboy would have done a quick 180 somewhere near the end of the runway, evoking high fives somewhere up in the tower. The 'bad' cowboy is the one who thinks he can do anything. Lots of old, slightly bold pilots at SW?

It's hard to believe there are any 'cowboys' in the upper echelon of aviation. I thought the theory was to train people from the first flight (ab initio) and then advance only those who fit snugly in the corporate slots. Can you really say Southwest pilots do 'x' under 'y' conditions, whereas American pilots would avoid the situation?

Good column.

I think Patrick Smith is correct. This Southwest Airlines incident reminds me of the days when Captain Eddie Rickenbacker was running Eastern Airlines. He'd admonish everyone in the companyl, proclaiming, "You can't make money flying the pattern."

He encouraged his pilots to cut the pattern to get in fast and turn around.

More than once (actually all the time) Eastern flights would report they were at some point nearer to the airport than they actually were, and when cleared, they'd drop down to a lower altitude and scoot in ahead the flight ahead of them. No one in the business trusted an Eastern approach report.

This ended abruptly when a typical Eastern approach report led to the collison between a Eastern and TWA heavy above Brooklyn, New York.

Southwest, did not have any paid for facillities at ORD and this would have had a financial impact if that flight had to pass MDW to go to O'Hare. That might have contributed to everybody's thinking, which led to trying to fit a size 12 foot into a size 7 shoe.