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On the 18th of may 2005 a chartered A320 tail number JYJAR was flying from fuerteventura in spain to Leeds bradford international airport in spain. The plane departed the spanish city at 7:35 am and the first officer was the one who flew the plane into leeds. The four hour flight was as boring as could be. I suspect that the passengers onboard were dreading going into work the next day , you know how you get at the end of a good holiday? But for now that was the biggest problem that they had. The A320 was radar vectored to land on runway 14 and theyd be using the ILS system. Before they lined up the pilots went through the approach. They talked about speeds and things like that, they decided to keep the autobrake on low as the runway at leeds was almost 7400 feet long and the weather was good. Today wasn't the day for aggressive braking.

As the plane was on final the captain took over from the first officer as neither pilot had flown into this airport before. So it made sense to have the more experienced pilot in control. Just in case something went wrong.as they landed Their speed was right where it should have been, they touched down smoothly,but they landed 700 meters or 2200 feet away from the end of the touchdown zone. But with plenty of runway left this shouldn't be an issue.

The pilots verified that reverse thrust was indeed engaged and that the spoilers were out the captain even added a bit of manual braking after touchdown. But as the a320 hurtled down runway 14 at Leeds the captain felt that something was wrong. His plane wasnt slowing down as he expected it to. So he applied max breaking and selected max reverse thrust. But the plane didn't slow down. The first officer also was braking as hard as he could trying to get the plane to slow down. The runway at leeds isnt flat there's a depression in the middle and so the pilots hadn't seen the end of the runway. But as they came out of that dip they saw that the end of the runway was fast approaching. The captain knew that the odds of them stopping before the end of the runway was slim so he thought of using the alternate braking system but using that would mean that he would lose his nose wheel steering and he definitely needed that as there were houses just 2000 feet from the end of the runway adding to his problems there was a shallow decline after the runway so if the plane over ran it would slide down a hill. Faced with the very real prospect of overrunning the runway the captain knew that his best option was to take the plane off the runway onto the grassy sides of the runway.

As he decided to do that the plane ran through the end of runway 14 and now they were in the runway overrun area and. The captain put the plane into a right turn and it skidded to a stop. It basically did one of those handbrake turns. With the nose wheel in the grass the plane was safe . They had just narrowly avoided disaster as there was only 35 meters or about a 100 feet of paved surface remaining. To put that in context there was just the length of one a320 standing between them and the start of the downward decline. All 178 people were fine not one person was injured.