They didn't have much runway left at 00:15 and were far slower than 158 at that point. They came in far too fast, descending too rapidly; first touch was >50% down the runway, and they didn't get the left gear down, so the spoilers and brakes didn't apply until even later.

Should have had a better approach; should have gone around before they even touched the ground; conditional on the bad approach and first touch, they should have gone around after the initial touch 50% down the runway. But they made the wrong choices at all of those points.

Isn’t there a regulation for idle to full go-around thrust in a maximum of 8 seconds?

If so, it’s tight… but i feel like they should have made it if they had stuck to that plan. They commanded full power 15 seconds before the crash, and were pretty close to (if not slightly above) their stall speed (depends on load). I suspect they just needed another 10-20 knots and enough energy to climb.

> think fully salt-cured ham

I recently learned that you wash/soak the salt off before consuming it. So, are you talking pre or post wash? ;)

Here's a neat video of an accurate reproduction, including a taste test after sitting "in a ship hold" for 7 months! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tWQpJ8kR5U

Nothing prevented the pilots from applying speedbrakes. Nothing prevented the pilots from deploying spoilers. However the pilots were busy doing other things and, this is where your comment comes in, relied on automatic systems which require weight on the wheels

AIUI, they should never have gotten that far. They should have gone around at 1000 feet.

> Came down hot

Really that's all that needs to be said at the moment. They had way too much energy[1], which anyone with flight sim or RC experience will recognize as a routine mistake when hand-flying.

The question is why all (all!) the layers of checklists and warnings and process and ATC direction somehow failed in combination to prevent. Yeah, they should have aborted for sure, but they didn't, and we won't know why for a good while yet.

[1] Which can just as easily mean "too high" as "too fast", c.f. the sink rate warnings in the logs which would be consistent with trying to squeeze the airplane down onto the runway. But again we won't know without more data.

After applying the brakes for 8 seconds, they then went to full throttle to try get back in the air for four more seconds. That's bonkers.

> Every single thing they could do wrong at, they did.

There are just too many ways to screw up for that ever to be the case.

For instance, they could also have been lined up to land on something other than the runway they were cleared to land on -- see Air Canada Flight 759, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Canada_Flight_759, which came within 14 feet of colliding with an aircraft on the taxiway they mistook for the runway..

The Boeing 767 does not have a Flaps 40 setting. The "Forty" callout was an automated annunciation of the radar-altimeter measured altitude above the runway.

I've never heard of anything even close to this.

Airlines in the US do not pressure pilots to avoid go arounds. Pilots in the US do not delegate life or death decisions to ops, especially since the FAA legally holds them accountable for that. All pilots are aware that they are responsible for the decision to go around or not.

Any airline found to be pressuring pilots to avoid go arounds would be in a world of pain with the FAA.

On cargo flights in particular timing and fuel usage are less critical than passenger flights, and a go around doesn't affect either much.

Pressure to avoid go arounds would also be incredibly counter productive since go arounds exist to preserve life and property. Pilots do go arounds to avoid costly incidents.

You are correct that the question is why they didn't do a go around, but I would bet a large sum of money that airline pressure to avoid go arounds was not a factor.

In one of the videos you can see dark clouds behind the plane. I suspect the pilots knew they'd have to divert to a different airport if they couldn't land and put pressure on themselves to not have to do that.

I suspect the pilots knew it wasn't a great approach but it just didn't click how bad it was. They just felt committed to the approach and thought they could 'fix it' without realizing how bad things really were. Having good enough situational awareness that you wave off when you are supposed to generally means that you also aren't wildly off speed/other parameters. They clearly had lost situational awareness.

The thing that amazes me about this is the timeline here:

00:30 The nose and right main gear touched down at a groundspeed of 158 knots.

...

00:19 The left main gear touched down at a groundspeed of 134 knots.

00:15 A pilot called for a go-around.

11 seconds and 24 knots after the nose touched down and then the left main finally also touched down? Wow. Then 4 seconds after all that the go-around. It is one thing to hold the nose off for that long, but a main mount?!

Bingo.

Could a company that won't let delivery drivers stop to pee possibly be pushing their pilots that hard? Yes. Yes, they could.

Jeff Bezos must have every dollar to pay for his wife's grotesque plastic surgery Mar-a-Lago face.

If people die in the process, that's regrettable but its a sacrifice he is willing to make.

"Capitalism caused this crash"

> I'm sure many of us would have made the same mistake.

From the reporting and commenting on this incident, that is not the impression I'm getting. This wasn't one bad call after getting half way down the runway, this was a continuous stream of bad decision making for the entire approach, with the copilot suggesting the pilot go around too.

Also: this kind of incident is very rare, so obviously, the vast majority of pilots don't make this mistake.

Private pilot here. No, I'm quite sure very few of you here would have made the same mistake as evidenced by the fact that literally hundreds of thousands of aircraft land successfully every day, many of them under much more adverse conditions. This is not a oh-it-could-have-happened-to-anyone kind of screwup, this is a did-this-guy-really-go-through-basic-pilot-training kind of screwup.