American Airlines Jet Scrapes Wingtip Landing at Charlotte: Pilots May Have Violated

On Sunday night, an American Airlines jet scraped a wingtip while landing in poor visibility at the Charlotte, N.C. Airport, according to an article in the online version of the Wall Street Journal. It states that the NTSB is “expected to look at whether fatigue may have played a role in the performance of the pilots. They had been on duty for some 14 hours before the botched landing, according to preliminary internal airline data.”

According to the article…

ATC controllers alerted the pilots that the aircraft was off the approach course. Controllers then asked the crew whether they wanted to go around for another landing, but the pilots decided to continue the approach. Faced with an autopilot that the crew did not trust, they turned it off about 300 feet before touchdown and landed the aircraft manually. The left main landing gear rolled off the side of the runway and in the process of correcting, the right wing tip hit the ground.

The incident raises many questions including whether the crew followed American Airlines’ operational rules and procedures. Those rules apparently state that when on an instrument approach, if complications occur below 1000 feet AGL, the crew should climb out and re-sequence for another landing.

Interestingly, Cirrus Design teaches aircraft owners and factory trained flight instructors a similar criteria for deciding whether to discontinue an approach to landing. For example, one version of their Flight Operations Manual describes a stabilized approach as “characterized by a constant angle, constant rate of descent approach profile ending near the touchdown point.” It later lists conditions that must be met while the aircraft is below 500 feet AGL when flying under VFR. If one or more of the conditions is not met, a go around must be executed. A similar list of criteria applies to flying instrument approaches. However for IFR approaches, pilots must execute a go around anytime the aircraft does not meet the stated conditions below 1000 feet AGL.

A couple of years ago, a local flight school analyzed their insurance claims and discovered that something like 70 or 80% of all the accident claims would have been avoided if pilots had executed a timely go around instead of trying to save botched landings. It was an eye-opener for me and I realized that I needed to put less emphasis on teaching students how to save every landing and instead teach them to immediately execute a go around at the moment they first started to think that perhaps a go around was needed.

I can’t help but wonder whether the Department of Transportation’s Airline On-Time statistics create a subtle pressure for airline pilots to attempt to save some landings they might otherwise abandon. Executing a go around would automatically add a minimum of five minutes to one of these flights and more likely add closer to 10 minutes by the time an aircraft is vectored back around onto approach.