Ameristar MD83 at Detroit on Mar 8th 2017, overran runway after rejected takeoff due to elevator malfunction
http://avherald.com/h?article=4a5ecf6a&opt=2048Summary: MD-82 with jammed right elevator in the full-down position. V1, Vr, pilot pulls back, nothing happens, pulls back some more, nothing happens, and calls RTO 12 seconds past V1, when it was physically impossible to stop on the runway that they ended up overrunning by more than . Pilot flying was a captain in the left seat, in the right seat we had a check airman giving type differences instruction (the left seat pilot was now to the MD-80, but not to the DC-9), so the right-seat pilot who was pilot monitoring was the PIC. They did do a walkaround and saw the right hand elevator in the full down position, and they did perform a "controls free" before take-off which went normal. That is because the elevators of the DC-9 family are free-floating and mechanically independent both from the control column and one from the other. When you move the control column what moves back there are some small tabs in the trailing edge of the elevators that generate the aerodynamic force that moves the elevator. And the tabs themselves were working properly.
Question for Dummy Pilot if he happens to be around: Is there any indication in the cockpit of the actual position of the control surfaces in the MD-80? (the controls should quickly float to their equilibrium position as soon as the airplane gains a little bit of airspeed, so control position check say the 80 kts call may detect a control surface that is jammed way off its neutral position).
Great reaction by the captain who was not the PIC, great teamwork by the check airman who was pretending to be an FO. These are the cases where you abort after V1. The plane will not fly and we are going to crash, so it's better to doing while braking rather than while accelerating. And everybody walked away (except the plane).
Now, had the pilot decided to insist with the take-off and everybody died when the airplane hit God knows what at 200 kts, we could not have blamed him either. These are situation where the pilot just doesn't know what's going on and what's the safest course of action. It could be just that the plane was nose heavy and they set the trim for an tail heavy CG by mistake, or that the plane was heavier that they considered when they calculated Vr, or things like that, and he might have decided that it would fly if he waited a little bit longer and gained a little bit more of speed.
In the end, the pilot had the right gout, the check airman (who wanted to not-abort after V1) had the right composure to play his role and resist his initial impulse to take over the controls, and once the decision to abort the take-off was taken, it was executed flawlessly and everybody lived. A rare combination of bad luck, good got feeling decision, good luck, a perfect performance by the crew, a runway longer than needed, and a nice overrun area. This could have gone much worse in so many ways.
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