Nope not a vid, just a story from an eyewitness, me. Sometimes a little bit of knowledge is a bad thing.

A couple of days ago I flew to my Mom's in FL via Atlanta. In fact got a great view of the cruise ship from hell being towed into Mobile Bay. Flight to ATL was nice, and quick as we had some free supercruise courtesy of the Jetstream. B757, nice bird.

Next bird is not my favorite, I think they are calling it a MD 900 nowadays, still a DC-9 to me. Just about 1.5 hr flight to central FL, been checking my phone, looking at radar. Still kinda crappy as a frontal system moves through, but mostly all green, just a few tiny yellow spots on the color radar sites I look at.

I learned to fly back in the seventies at the airport we at flying into, know it's layout as well as I know as I my neighborhood I live in. Still have a pretty good Idea of the Outer marker location also.

Pretty bumpy during the descent but no big deal, am looking out the window for landmarks. Kinda tough at night and I am not that familiar with the view at night there as I once was. BUT, we are pretty darn low IMO.

The turn onto final is a little strange, more like a series of small turns back and forth. Then I figure we are at the Outer Marker.

BIG power increase, not gradual but full power NOW! Couple that with a BIG up angle of attack change and I am getting a little nervous. Up angle is more than the take off from Atlanta! Full power stays on for way over 30 seconds, closer to a minute I think.

We landed fine, pretty hard but fine.

So you experts, how far behind the power curve and below the glide path were we? It seemed to my semi-educated self that we hit the Outer Marker and somebody realized they were way below the glideslope.

I have never been on a commercial flight that seemed so low in it's final approach.

I'm no pilot, but seems to me someone screwed up.
Probably pretty common, unless they actually hit the tree tops.....then it'd be hard to cover up.
Wonder why he wasn't listening to the tower, telling him to pull up, his glide path was wrong?

Glad you made it Nix

All is well, just another close call for a guy who has survived many

I think they were still in contact with approach/Center at that time. Been awhile....

I mean they have Radar and encoding altimeters, very low traffic area. I just don't know.

I always make it a habit of saying something nice to the flightdeck when disembarking. All I said this time was "Are you guys done for the night?" They looked a little perplexed and replied in the affirmative. I said that was good as it seemed pretty crappy out there.

Dunno what happened, but seemed more than a little "below nominal" to me.

Any landing you walk away from, is a good one.....

So they say.

I hate those landings where you know something is way out of whack. Happened once flying back into san antonio one night. Came from an odd direction and they made a last minute tight turn to final. Didnt help that it was turbulent and it seem like they were having a tough time keeping it level. Hard landing too, could smell something burning as they came in way too fast it felt like.

Even more true for paratroopers.

Might have been a microburst and/or windsheer if there was weather around.

If they were too far under the glide-slope, I'm pretty sure that the procedure is to abort the landing. More likely they encountered weather.

These approaches are usually done by auto-pilot anyway, and it tends to do a pretty good job AFAIK.

Sounds like windshear or something similar.

I had a somewhat similar experience back in the '90s. I was flying into Sacramento, Ca. Nice clear day, no weather, but we nearly set down short of the runway. The last twenty or so seconds the engines were screaming and the nose was high. Tires hit the first hundred feet or so of pavement. It was my first commercial flying experience and I was NOT impressed.

Glad you made it okay.

Ground proximity alerts in the cockpit were more then likely giving the pilots heart attacks about that time.

I've experienced three go-arounds so far in my life and I'm really not a very frequent flyer - maybe take 8-10 flights per year. There could be many reasons of course (from a non-pilot perspective) - for example, if the plane you were flying in was behind an other plane and making curves to slow down giving the other plane time to land and vacate the runway, but the first plane landing was a bit later than planned your plane would have to go around.

Not everything is a potential disaster.

My only guess is it was windshear as previous guessed by other posters.

It will account for the following,

1) weaving - trying to pick their way through the localised cells.
2) sustained full power for more than a moment coupled with a severe pitch up.

Windshear is never a pretty occurance especially close to the gound so whatever it was or whatever happened, it looks like the pilots deemed it safe to continue.

Glad its just a talking point and nothing more serious.

Local weather was likely playing havoc with both your approach and the one of the plane landing ahead of you. S-turns are the common way to increase your time to a destination without lowering your speed (which in final approach is likely not possible!), and at the end of a flight the majority of the fuel has burned off, giving the airliner excess power on landing compared to takeoff, so those engines can easily get you back up if you've fallen below the power curve briefly.





The Jedi Master

Yeah...the traffic at my one commercial flight every 5 hours or so airport made the pilot weave for spacing...don't think so.

Microburst/windshear is a possibility, however, my personal experiences with those bad altitude changing weather types have only been experienced around strong cells and there were not any around in FL that night. Lots of rain, not much turbulence.

We were low at the outer marker, WAY low. Like I said I learned to fly at that airport and grew up in the area. Just was wondering how we ended up so low over 10 NM from the runway.

I personally feel that somebody up front almost screwed up real bad.

I just threw this out looking for a plausible explanation. Still considering reporting it to the airline's Chief Pilot.

Almost a minute of max power and a very high angle of attack about 2 minutes from touchdown in a large jet aircraft full of people in a very low traffic area sure smells like pilot error to me.

Maybe there is a new trick about flying under bad weather I don't know about...

Had a similar experience flying into Hobby from LAX on Southwest in a 737 in the middle of a hellacious thunderstorm back in 2001.
Lightning everywhere, driving rain and light hail pecking at the windows, plane rocking around all over with engine screaming and flaps being adjusted off and on until we got to the final approach. Landed like a sack of turds in a driving rain. They wouldn't let us taxi to the ramp for over 45 minutes as there was mucho lightning strikes all around so we just sat out on the taxiway and eventually it let up and I thanked the lord for letting me breathe another day.
Not fun but all part of flying in bad weather.