This is an excerpt from a report made to the Aviation Safety Reporting System. The narrative is written by the pilot, rather than FAA or NTSB officials. To maintain anonymity, many details, such as aircraft model or airport, are often scrubbed from the reports.
On a training flight for my multi engine instructor add-on rating, my instructor and I decided to practice rejected takeoff procedures.
My instructor would cut one of the mixture when airspeed reaches half of the rotation speed and I would use throttle and brakes to maintain control.
The airport was quiet in the early morning, so after the first rejected takeoff practice, with lots of runway remaining, we performed a second rejected takeoff without getting back to the beginning of the runway.
Seeing that there’s still lots of runway remaining after the second rejected takeoff, we performed a third rejected takeoff, which was a big mistake because the brakes have been getting very hot after two back-to-back rejected takeoff practices.
So with the much less effective brakes, we were not able to stop the airplane on the runway. We overran the runway about 10 to 20 feet before finally coming to a full stop on the grass.
Visual inspection revealed no damage to brakes, tires or propeller, but we could see the very hot brakes smoking for more than a minute.
The cause for this incident is that we were fixating on practicing the maneuver efficiently by doing consecutive practices as long as there’s runway remaining. We considered traffic (no one else was flying at the airport) and our skills (proficient), but unfortunately didn’t consider that consecutive rejected takeoffs would raise the temperature on the brakes dramatically. So we misjudged the distance required to stop our third rejected takeoff.
Primary Problem: Human Factors
ACN: 1908797
There are a lot of reasons why an FAA approved A.A.T.D can save you big money,and this is one instance.They should have at least tried it in the sim on the runway in use.I know i would have said” lets try this in the sim first”.It would have paid for that right there!
Three most useless things for a pilot:
1) Altitude above
2) Runway behind
3) Fuel left behind
Performing emergency procedures is fine, But damaging an aircraft is needless, unless there would be an actual emergency!
All brakes have a limit T stopping power. As I recall a BE400 BEECHJET limit is 7 million foot pounds. I saw a BEECHJET the a mechanic did a brake job and didn’t do the brake break- in correctly. The jet was on the ramp with collapsed struts, burning titres and a $100,000 damage.
If you’re doing rejected take- off practice remember Vmcg is low speed because the rudder is least effective. If you do a n abort at 50% Vs allow lots of cooling. Take off normally but at pattern altitude extend the gear so it cools.