In 1998 an AirFrance airbus takes off from Paris, enjoys a pleasant flight across the Atlantic, and runs into trouble when landing during a thunderstorm at Toronto,. The pilots have been warned about slippery runways and lightning but they try to land nonetheless and the airplane plunges off the end of the runway and down a slope. Broken fuel lines begin a fire. A black pall hangs over the wreck as -- amazingly -- all the passengers and the crew manage to get away and survive. From the air, the airplane still looks like a jumbo jet except that almost the entire fuselage is charred, empty, and hollow. The nose, tail, and wings remain intact. The image is that of a fish whose body has been eaten, leaving only the skeleton.
Investigators conclude that the pilots should have aborted the landing. Before they were able to touch down, they had already passed over half its length -- and it was the shortest runway at Toronto's airport. The airplane also bounced and slid along the ground for a critical seventeen seconds before reverse thrust was deployed.
But even if the reverse thrust had been used at once, it may have been too late to prevent the runoff. These accidents are common and usually involve runways that are too short to handle increasingly large modern passenger jets. The problem in extending runways is that the main airports have been swallowed by urban sprawl and are surrounded by highways and other developments.
Municipalities have found ways around that. There is (or was) a small fishing village at the very bottom tip of San Francisco Bay, in operation from the time of Jack London and Richard Henry Dana. It was in the way of plans to expand an airport, so the village was deemed uninhabitable because of flood danger. Good-bye Alviso.
Investigators conclude that the pilots should have aborted the landing. Before they were able to touch down, they had already passed over half its length -- and it was the shortest runway at Toronto's airport. The airplane also bounced and slid along the ground for a critical seventeen seconds before reverse thrust was deployed.
But even if the reverse thrust had been used at once, it may have been too late to prevent the runoff. These accidents are common and usually involve runways that are too short to handle increasingly large modern passenger jets. The problem in extending runways is that the main airports have been swallowed by urban sprawl and are surrounded by highways and other developments.
Municipalities have found ways around that. There is (or was) a small fishing village at the very bottom tip of San Francisco Bay, in operation from the time of Jack London and Richard Henry Dana. It was in the way of plans to expand an airport, so the village was deemed uninhabitable because of flood danger. Good-bye Alviso.
