Establishing “committed-to-stop” points on landing for turbine airplanes and allowing pilots to use prescription sleep medications to counter insomnia were among the recommendations generated by the investigation of a Hawker 800A accident in Owatonna, Minnesota, U.S., that killed all eight people aboard and destroyed the airplane on July 31, 2008.
In its final report, the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) said that the probable cause of the accident was “the captain’s decision to attempt a go-around late in the landing roll with insufficient runway remaining.”
Factors contributing to the accident were “the pilots’ poor crew coordination and lack of cockpit discipline; fatigue, which likely impaired both pilots’ performance; and the failure of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to require crew resource management (CRM) training and standard operating procedures (SOPs) for [U.S. Federal Aviation Regulations] Part 135 operators.”1
The …
