correct link below
Crazy idea which I probably can guess the answer to: how much mega-engineering would be required to install a series of arrestor wires at both ends of a runway, beefed up of course for the much greater mass and thus momentum of a passenger jet vs. a fighter jet? Once trouble starts brewing, the cabin crew can radio ahead for the things to deploy as they drop their tailhook and thus avoid the no-man’s land between V1 and getting to a workable altitude.
Actually I’ve seen it at dual use airports used by the military. I’m guessing it’s for small tailhook aircraft. Stopping a million lb 747 would be quite an upgrade in such an effort.
Without significant re-engineering that would come with a severe weight penalty, the moment the hook snags the wire, the whole assembly tears loose of the jet taking some amount of the tail with it.
It would require spending a huge amount of money and reducing the payload of each jet substantially to solve a problem that occurs approximately once every never, and already has other workable solutions in place.
Arresting wires are a non-starter at the scale of airliners.
There is existing tech for ameliorating running off the end at moderate speed after a botched landing, brake failure, or an attempted takeoff reject that doesn’t quite get stopped before the end of the runway. IOW, great for running off the end at WAG 100 knots. Not 180 knots. See Engineered materials arrestor system - Wikipedia. And numerous posts in this thread about EMAS over the years.
These are typically installed on runways with very little empty space beyond the official runway such that any significant overrun even at low speed would put the airplane over a cliff, into water, or into a city. Greatly amplifying the scale of the disaster.
At least in principle such things could be built at any runway and sized to absorb whatever size of airplane is relevant traveling at up to just barely flying speed. The problem is it would take a lot more real estate than is available at nearly every airport.
And this speaks to a fundamental misunderstanding. Which is perfectly understandable. This stuff is complicated and a lot of explanations are less than clear.
For the case of engine failure, a failure after V1 in a bizjet or bigger should always result in the airplane flying away with no real risk of ground impact off the end of the runway. All the engineering and all the preflight planning is aimed at that outcome. There is no no-man’s land.
That is not true of smaller, lighter airplanes. They can get into a place of “too fast to stop, too slow / underpowered to fly. A crunch or crash is inevitable; it’s just a matter of whether the pilot(s) try to fly and fail or try to stop and fail. Either way failure is already baked in.”
But: You can always posit a failure worse than a single engine failure. Rolling down the runway just about to rotate and the main gear collapses on one side. Or the wing falls off after colliding with a fire truck. Or the flaps on that side retract uncontrollably due to gremlins. Or grossly misset pitch trim results in no rotation. Or the flaps are up or badly misset. All those things and more happened at least once in the history of big jet aviation.
In all those cases V1 is sorta meaningless. Whether the failure is above or below V1, from that point the airplane is going to go on an uncontrollable excursion wherever its momentum and the random drag forces of stuff scraping on the ground take it.
It seems plausible that UPS had a lot more going on than a single simple engine failure. Had there been something akin to mega-EMAS at that runway as a known last ditch place to put an airplane that really doesn’t want to fly today, they might have been able to avail themselves of that.
Some sorts of accidents are best avoided by prevention, not amelioration.
Question for the pilots here:
My understanding is when a plane on takeoff hits V1 they are committed to taking off no matter what is going wrong. They can no longer stop in time on the runway.
I get why that makes sense but why are there no exceptions? (this being one)
If you know your plane has no chance at flying then why limp into the air only to crash into (likely) dense population outside of the airport? If you are going to crash do it on the airport! Likely the crash will be less severe (since the plane has been slowing) and there is no one to kill by crashing (outside of the people on the plane but they are doomed either way) and the airport has emergency services able to help faster than crashing outside the airport.
Why is it “better” to proceed with the takeoff when such a catastrophic malfunction occurs?
I think the solution is real estate and the use of EMAS. In the case of Louisville there is a road followed by buildings at the end of the runway. There is nothing to work with. The crew can’t lower the nose to regain speed. The only option is to climb or fly through a building.
The short version is determining whether you have a no-hope situation or not in the time available is considered to be impossible. The likelihood and number of pilots stopping (and crashing) for safely flyable situations is considered to greatly exceed the number and likelihood of pilots stopping for hopeless situations.
You’re right that this is a gap in the safety armor. But just like the old saw that “hard cases make bad law”, it’s also the case that “rare weird accidents trigger calls for overall poor or harmful remedies”
This is probably going to be TL/DR for most of us, but I’ll give a quick version of the performance course that I’ve taught…
You’ll see various interpretations of V1, but without trying to be too nuanced, it is indeed a decision speed for the pilots. A number of factors are involved in the computation: V1 must be set after minimum controllable airspeed on the ground and in the air (in other words, the plane must be controllable aerodynamically). There’s a “startle” factor built into it, which is the time it takes the pilot to recognize an engine failure and respond to it. That number is set at two seconds for my current bizjet, and V1 is set after it.
So during takeoff pilots are trained to remove their right hand from the thrust levers (if flying from the left seat) and put it on the yoke. This is to keep us from attempting to reject the takeoff after V1. It is indeed generally safer to take an airplane into the air with an engine failure than attempt a high speed abort. In my plane we teach a “go mindset”, because there is very little which would render this particular aircraft incapable of flight.
The rare exception of a rejected takeoff after V1 being the correct decision is a flight control malfunction. Will there be room to stop? Depends…
Another performance calculation is “balanced field length”. That condition is when the accelerate-stop and accelerate-go distances are equal. In other words, it takes the same amount of space to reject the takeoff or continue flying, given an engine failure at V1. If you’re on a balanced field, that space takes up all available runway. However, if your runway happens to be longer than the computed BFL you have more stopping distance.
Bored yet?
When I was living and flying in Lancaster, it always amused me that MHV runway 22 points to a cemetery.
A commercial plane should be able to climb minimally with the loss of one engine assuming the aircraft is intact and not adding additional drag. If they had cleared the building and power lines then they could have stabilized, gained speed, and climbed out for return. In this case there is ZERO ground options. When they hit the building that slowed the plane down and the left wing likely stalled. At that point the right engine powers the wing over into the knife edge we see in subsequent videos.
Because of the speed attained on the runway they passed the abort option and THEN had an engine failure that damaged the wing.
Reminds me of the old joke. After an airliner crash into a cemetery near the runway a couple days later the local authorities issue a press release saying they’ve recovered 1200 bodies and the death toll is still climbing.
ba-dum tish! 
All transport category aircraft are certified to climb out after an engine failure at V1. For those computations you get into required gradients for the segments of climb. Usually the second segment is most restrictive. Again, briefly…
The first segment ends at gear retraction, and after that point pilots are trained to make no further configuration changes until reaching TOSA (takeoff safe altitude) or what airlines usually call an “acceleration altitude”. That’s set no lower than 400’ AGL. At that point the plane is accelerated to Vfr (flap retraction speed, usually V2 + 20, or so) and cleaned up. Then begins third segment climb.
This depends on the pilots doing a few things correctly. In some planes they do little more than bring the gear up and sit on their hands until TOSA.
I read that as flying a Lancaster…& was quite jealous for a second
Where did they bury the survivors?
My understanding is private planes do a “run-up” prior to takeoff. Juice the engines a bit to see if anything is likely to break.
I don’t think commercial jets do this. Why not? (that said I doubt that would have caught the problem of an engine falling off the wing in this case)
Because once a jet engine is lit and running, that’s it. Internal combustion engines involve many tiny explosions as they operate. Jet engines are a continuous flow. The shorthand for how a jet engine takes in air and results in propulsive force is “Suck, squeeze, burn, blow.”
So there’s no real need to test it after startup and taxi. If something’s wrong, it usually turns up during those phases. You also have the time up to V1 during takeoff if something really unexpected happens. But again, it’s often a safer option to take it in the air than to reject a takeoff at a high speed, even if it’s a bit below V1.
Edit: Also, modern airplanes have a lot of automated engine control. Startup, fuel flow and other parameters are controlled and monitored by computers. In my current bizjet we can see N1, N2, fuel flow, ITT and a few other parameters. But basically green gauges are good, red is bad. Then we use the checklist.
The other side of that is the primitive ICE engines used on airplanes have rather weak ignition systems compared to modern ICE cars. Which they make up for by having dual redundant ignition systems. Such that an ICE aircraft engine might run just fine at idle with a badly malfunctioning ignition system. But would fail completely or deliver inadequate power when a takeoff is attempted.
Separate to the above ICE aircraft engines above the simplest have a controllable pitch prop. Which acts more or less like an automotive continuously variable transmission, permitting a wide range of power output at a constant RPM by altering the “gearing” of the prop to the air. If that’s got a malfunction, it’ll also behave normally at idle.
So a run-up is used to suss out any problems in ignition or prop control. The engine is set to a mid-high RPM, typically 75% of red-line RPM, then each of the dual ignition systems is switched off in turn to see how well it runs on just one. As well, the prop is cycled through its range of control to ensure it’s working normally.
Both of those concerns are simply NA on a jet engine, primitive or modern.
I would be too. Heck, I’m jealous that my wife got to fly Black Hawks.
I’m not in a position to argue with the commercial pilots regarding engine function but I would put an asterisk on it. A full run-up sees pressurized hoses and connections tested and may expose a fan blade out of balance.
On a different note. I don’t know if commercial pilots do this but I can see an advantage to a fully loaded plane holding the brakes during a run-up for a little extra power coming off the line.
Statistically it is safer to take a malfunction into the air than it is to try and stop on the remaining runway. Is this true for every malfunction? No, but having an unusual malfunction at a critical point in the take-off isn’t the time to be trying to come up with novel ideas. We are trained and primed to be go minded and in the extremely rare case that continuing is the wrong thing to do, there probably is no “right” thing to do. That MD-11 was in trouble regardless of what they did. Same with the Concorde.