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737 Image: Pawel Kierzkowski Own work


This is the story of Turkish airlines flight 1951. On the 25th of february 2009 a 737800 was making the trip from turkey’s ataturk airport to amsterdam's schiphol airport. The 737 had 135 passengers onboard which included 7 crew members. The plane left istanbul at 8:23 am. The cockpit that day had three pilots. The first officer was being trained and the captain was supervising the first officer. Another first officer was seated in the jumpseat and was acting as the safety officer.

By 9:53 am the plane was over Germany at 36,000 feet and the pilots conducted their approach briefing. The first officer listened to the ATIS or the automatic terminal information service, a broadcast from the airport that beams out information like weather and runway in use. On that day theyd be landing on runway 18R theyd be performing a ILS cat I approach. The runway was equipped with the much more precise CAT III system but the pilots were not trained on the CAT III system. The 737 began its descent and as it did it entered dutch airspace.

By 10:15 am the plane was descending it was descending down to 7000 feet.the pilots and ATC were talking about the instrument approach when they got a configuration warning about the landing gear. That was weird they were pretty high up, landing gear configuration warnings usually happened at lower altitudes. As they flew this happened quite a few times. The captain remarked “radio altimeter”. His radio altimeter was malfunctioning; it showed an altitude of 8 feet. The radio altimeter as the name implies uses radio waves to measure the altitude of a plane, there are antennas at the bottom of the fuselage they beam out radio waves, those are reflected by the terrain back towards the plane, that delay between the transmission and reception is used to calculate the altitude of the plane. But this didnt faze the pilots too much, they were asked to descend down to 2000 feet and the captain started to talk to the ground handling arm of turkish airlines about their arrival. Minutes later the plane was at 2000 feet and the pilots slowed the plane down to 195 knots, they slowly started to bring the flaps out. Airtraffic control vectored the plane to set it up for an approach onto runway 18R. The Autopilot on the right hand side had been engaged for pretty much the entire flight and for the landing the crew wanted both autopilots online, but when they tried to engage the autopilot on the left hand side, the left hand autopilot failed to engage and the right hand autopilot disengaged. Something was off so they decided to reengage the right hand autopilot and use that for this landing.

As the speed hit 160 knots the landing gear was extended and flaps were set to 15. The plane was a few minutes from touchdown, it had lined up with the runway but it was way too high. The runway was 5.5 Nautical miles away and they needed to lose some altitude. The pilots dialed in a descent rate of 1400 feet per minute into the autopilot so that they could intercept the glideslope or the correct descent path from above. Usually you fly below the glideslope, you intercept the glideslope and then you follow it down all the way to the runway. Intercepting a glideslope from above was a bit more tricky.

A few moments later the plane was handed off to schipol tower, the first officer was flying the approach and the safety pilot noted that the radio altimeter was still broken. As he did so the plane intercepted the glideslope and the autopilot began to follow the glideslope. The plane was supposed to stay at 160 knots but from the moment it intercepted the glidelsope its speed started to fall. 10:24 am the flight 1951 got its clearance to land on runway 18R the captain acknowledged. This would be the last time theyd hear from flight 1951. The plane continued to slow it the plane hit the required speed of 144 knots at an altitude of 800 feet and they extended the flaps to 40. Moments from touch down the captain and the first officer went over some checklists. As they were about to check off the last item on the checklist the captain called out 500 feet, The non flying pilot monitors the planes altitude and makes call outs so that everyone knows where the plane is in relation to the ground. The last item on the checklist was to warn the cabin crew about the landing so that they could be seated for landing. As the safety pilot fini