United
 

I think it becomes a matter of statistics. We have all been in these situations and have been lucky. If enough airplanes operate in adverse conditions something like this will eventually happen. Always glad to hear everyone is ok.

Ban alternates within 30 miles of a large body of water. Add a new alternate filing requirement for coastal destinations: if your destination is coastal, have a noncoastal alternate. I'm only half kidding.

Never been faced with island reserves? Nowhere else to land, and a two hour fuel reserve?

If we ban alternates within 30 miles of a large body of water...the pacific is out, isn't it?

You sure as hell are, in the very thread you demanded closed, mr. freedom-of-speech.

I would beg to differ. I know of a significant number of carriers that operate day in and day out on ice and snow contaminated runways with numbers of takeoffs and landings at least comparable that don't slide off the end. Not that it'll never happen, but but I do see significant differences in the steps these carriers take to ensure the exact situation in this thread does not happen, from planning to execution. Luck is not a strategy. Again, I concede that every once and a while something comes out from left field that no one could have ever foreseen or expected, but these days that is incredibly rare.

If that's the case, how is it that my 135 (rather large and standardized one BTW) has larger safety margins than those 121 carriers you mentioned above? We sure as * don't even dispatch to severe icing.

Your 135 outfit is as large as United Airlines? It's scheduled? There's a difference between an on-demand outfit and one that's as expansive as the largest operator in the world, with far more scheduled departures and arrivals in a day than your company will see in a year.

No, mishaps are NOT inevitable, but yes, they do happen.

There's an idiotic and overused saying in the light airplane world that there are those who have made gear up landings, and those who will...and yet virtually never do we find gear up landings in professional cockpits; particularly airline cockpits. Is it possible? Of course it is, but given the method of operation and training, both possibility and opportunity are vastly diminished. Standardization and regular training and checking make a difference by orders of magnitude.

Severe icing, by definition, is icing which exceeds the ice protection capabilities of the aircraft.

If you've never been in a situation in which your destination weather was not as predicted, you haven't flown for long. We plan, we calculate, we update, and yet, despite the advances in prediction, reporting, monitoring, and observation, the weather on arrival is still very much what you see is what you get. The flight ahead made it in, and you don't. You fly over the field and see it clearly, yet visibility on approach is below minimums. Previous flight had good braking, but it's gone downhill due to temperature change, freezing rain, etc.

Mishaps are not inevitable. That they exist doesn't contradict that. It simply means they continue to happen and that more can be done, on a case by case basis, on every flight operation, to work toward reduction.

It can happen to you, too.

You may have answered your own question?

I live in GRB. I don't know the specific information that the flight crew/dispatch was looking at. That being said, GRB is a relatively quiet Charlie airport. The last scheduled flight arrived at about 2315L the night before. The first scheduled departure isn't until like 5am. I'm not sure if there were any braking action reports between 2315 and the incident. Maybe when GRB got notification of the diversion, they had an ops guy go out and do a braking test. I don't know. All I do know is the rain/freezing rain that night was pretty heavy. I had to close my bedroom window for noise, I had a hard time getting my car started the next day (probably because of water in the line), and I could have went ice skating on my apartment's parking lot. The actual conditions obviously deteriorated from whatever the last reports were. No company or pilot is going to dispatch an aircraft to an airport with the intention of overrunning the runway. Accidents happen, and I'm just glad to hear that no one was hurt.

Like I said. I don't know if/when the braking action report was generated. If there was a recent report, disregard my rambling. But how do we prevent this in the future? When a quiet airport gets notification of a diversion at an odd hour of the night, wake up farmer Joe and have him go drag racing on the runway a few times with the airport SUV.

I'm not kidding at all. Previous employer would use nearby coastal airports as alternates for coastal destinations. I was very leery of that, sometimes the only difference between the two airports was that one was close to urban stuff and surrounded by a lot of pavement, which was warm from the sun and tended to keep the marine layer at bay just a little longer in the evening.

I always like it when I get CRW or ROA as alternates. Just the places I want to go when the weather sucks!