West Jet 2017 close call recreation

There is a 737 pilot that posts on Youtube on airplane topics. Quite often it is based on the official report of an accident or incident, and he usually goes into much more detail than you would get on the news. This is a recent post he did on the WestJet 737 that got very close to the ocean attemping a landing at Sint Maarten during a heary rain storm in 2017, before they did a go around. The animations and explanations are quite good.

Youtube MentourPilot


BTW, while most of his posts are about accidents, he is usually pretty clear that air travel is extremely safe and you normally need a number of things to go wrong to have a bad outcome.

Great video.....thanks for posting.

Thanks for posting the link - really well done! I watched this from my balcony at Royal Islander. I'd gone upstairs because of the rain. Thought they were going in the drink

Interesting to see the animation point out that they thought the white roof of the Maho was the runway due to poor visibility. Explains how they got in that predicament.

a very interesting (and scary) video. Good to know the outcome was ok. Thanks for sharing.

Wow, that was absolutely terrifying!! Now I'll be really nervous whenever flying into SXM in bad weather!

Very interesting. And here is some of the video of the event he mentions:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uN3Fd0x0FoQ

Jenni, thanks for that link, that is a great video. Carol, don't be too worried, as he explains in many of his other videos, in most instances there are numerous redundant systems that are designed to keep us safe. In this case, even though the controller set the lights to night level , which actually decreased the popi lights instead of increasing them, the pilot flying went below the 3,000 foot minimum without visual confirmation of the runway, and the pilot monitoring ( the captain ) failed to notice they had an unstabilized approach and that their rate of descent was too high, ( if he noticed either at that point he should have called a go around at 1,000 feet, one of those systems - EGPWS - did kick in and told the pilot flying to pull up.

Thanks very much and seeing that our two children lives in Toronto , West Jet is our flight , but with our new born Grand Son , my Shirley did AirCanada to go and return with West Jet because of the high fare cost . We are planning my trip soon too.

barry--I didn't really understand a lot of what he was saying, but in this circumstance, it appears it was clearly human error that caused such a close call. And that is the thing--you can't totally take the human out of the equation, and humans are fallible.

Carol, agreed, humans are fallible and are usually the cause, but another way to look at it is that if you assume there were 5 big jets landing a day ( I just checked and today had 9 large jets ) times 7 days a week , and the last time there was even a close call was 10,000 landings ago ( it was just over 2,000 days ago ) so it is incredibly safe.

barry--sorry, that doesn't do it for me.

Great story!

We've been on WestJet same flight but in 2015. The pilot tried to land but the weather was so bad that he had to divert and try again thirty minutes later. He came in to land and turned the nose of the plane sideways and made landing. Everybody was clapping and hugging each other after it landed. Scared the crap out of us.

My son and future daughter in law were on that flight. Though complete strangers upon boarding in YYZ, the 45 delay before landing solidified their budding relationship. Today, they are proud parents of two sons and live in Edmonton.

Wow, that's pretty cool!