Of course if you're familiar with this story (and who isn't) then the answer will be easy. What's wrong is the skidmarks on the taxiway. But it's still not at all clear what happened. Interesting take on this incident and the Northwest distracted crew here, It's a sensible argument but I'm not sure I really agree - I think it's too narrow. Clearly the actual potential consequences of the NW incident on the day were not as serious as the DL landing at Atlanta, but I wonder if that's really the point. The question is how come that NW situation could have arisen, and when you've worked out how come, what other consequences could have arisen from those factors in different circumstances. Ditto the DL incident of course.
So DL may perhaps be more important than NW, but until you've worked back to the root causes you can't tell.
on November 2, 2009 10:38 AM | Reply
I can undestrand stree for pilots after an over-night flight and a new assigned runway for landing in the last miles but i have two questions:
1) how to take a taxiway for a runway? taxiways are blues and runways are white
2) why the ATC has changed runway in use in this critical phase of flight?
Hi Kieran. Great Blog!
Guzzo from Italy