Paper Title
Effects Of Flare Operation On Landing Safety And Its Applications In Preventing Landing Incidents Of Garuda Indonesia
Abstract
A long touchdown, which is one type of flight incident, is defined as an aircraft's contact with the runway over the normal touchdown area. Touchdown distance is generally used as a standard baseline for judging whether a landing is long or not. Long touchdown itself would not lead to major loss of life directly but will increase the occurrence probability of runway excursion accident greatly. Meanwhile, the runway taxiing time of aircraft will be prolonged if the landing is long and this will decrease efficiency of runway utilization and increase probability of runway conflict. The aim of this paper is to discover key flight parameter features of long touchdown incidents by analyzing Quick Access Recorder (QAR) data and put forward prevention measures from the perspective of pilot operation at the same time. First, 11 flight performance parameter variables were defined, covering major landing stages from 1500 ft to touchdown. Then 100 cases of selected QAR data from B737-800NG Garuda Indonesia’s flight were divided into two groups according to the threshold of identifying normal and long touchdown. Second, each flight parameter variable of these 100 flights was compared between groups and then the logistic and linear regression models were developed respectively to further examine the links between touchdown distance and these flight parameter variables. Third, potential flight operation causing performance difference of long touchdown incidents was also analyzed. The study would analyze whether flare operation would greatly influence touchdown distance and touchdown vertical acceleration, the control column and throttle operation in flare would affect landing performance conjointly. These findings could be the basis of developing a mathematical and quantitative model for further revealing the relationships between pilot operations and landing performance, which can also be applied in practice to prevent landing incidents and even accidents.
Keywords - Flare Operations, Landing incidents and accidents, Runway Excursion, ANOVA, Quick Access Recorder, Logistic Regression