Originally Posted by
FXLAX
This is a good point. Pilots seem to point outcomes when deciding safety. But the industry, rightfully so, has long moved past outcome based safety. In other words, just because there wasn’t an accident/incident, doesn’t mean the flight was at an appropriate safety level. You can go 100mph in your car without a seatbelt and never have anything bad happen but that doesn’t mean it was safe.
Also, as a reminder, the APS does add 1500 feet to account for landing in the touchdown zone.
I am not familiar with APS but at my workplace we use OPT and it probably is almost identical to yours. Technology is such a nice tool to have these days but in many ways it makes us lazy and I am just as guilty as everyone else on this issue. We must always guard against complacency as pilots and I try to do this on every flight and not always successful.
I was wondering if you guys are still dual qual-ed for the MD-11 and MD-10? I have about 3000 hours on the MD11 and always thought it was a pretty tricky airplane to land. My colleagues have told me the DC-10/MD-10 is quite a different animal. If Fedex is like my previous job you guys probably don't get a whole lot of landings per month. I wonder if this had any factor in this particular incident? I can't imagine having to swap back and forth between these two aircraft especially if it has been months since you have flown either type. Cheers.