Originally Posted by 29.92
How did the crew exactly mess up the TO data on their laptop? An MK pilot in Luxembourg told me they used the previous airport as the current airport based on the recordings they recovered. That's a pretty bad mistake, but at what point don't you realize you aren't accelerating fast enough and push the throttles up? Maybe fatigue played a bigger part than poor training but the end result was the same, sorry to say.
When you have fatuige built up from many days of interupted rest it is easy to make this kind of mistake. The 747 Flight deck is 30 feet above the runway surface. Trying to judge your speed or acceleration visualy with any kind of accuracy is pointless. Especialy at night. Halifax is a short runway for a 747 and the crew was most likely using a reduced thrust setting when the needed max takeoff thrust. If they had pratts, going to "clink" power would not make enough difference late in the takeoff roll to get them airborne. And high speed aborts generaly dont work out at 700,000 plus pounds. What a bummer for these folks! Very sad. In my days as a 747 F/O. I have seen these kind of mistakes personaly. Fortunately we broke the chain before it got ugly. Hopefully we will get some new regs that will address the fatiuge dangers in 121 supplemental international ops.