As someone who watches a fair amount of online videos related to aviation, one of the concepts I have picked up is the Swiss cheese model for aviation accidents, which posits that there are a variety of things that have to go wrong for there to be an aviation incident and that if one or more of these elements is removed, an accident is prevented because of something going right rather than wrong, or someone doing a job correctly instead of incorrectly. As it happens, the plane trip I took on early Friday afternoon from Johannesburg to George managed to fit several, but not all of the layers of swiss cheese and so it was only a near-incident rather than an incident.

As a passenger, the first thing I noticed that seemed a little bit strange about the flight was the variation that the plane’s departure time had, going from 12:10PM to 12:20PM and then back to 12:10PM. I wondered what was prompting this change and whether the change resulted from the time spent in taxying, which could vary considerably in Johannesburg. So far, though, this is no particularly big deal, and we board the full 737-300, which appears to be a somewhat older plane in the Airlink fleet, old enough at any rate that there is no wifi nor power or usb plugs on the plane. By and large the plane trip took place in good weather, although in addition to some high clouds there was also a bit of turbulence at the beginning of the flight.

The rest of the flight, though, was smooth, and the landing into George was so butter smooth as well that it was by no means immediately obvious what had gone wrong when we found ourselves after the plane came to a stop some 20 yards before the end of the runway staring straight at a localizer and the end of the runway, abruptly turning right so that we turned right at the last taxiway and then entered the airport. The buttery smooth landing turned out to be an illusion, and it became obvious that the landing was too much of a glide where the pilot let too much of the runway get away from him before we touched ground.

Why then did the pilot not initiate togo mode and attempt a go-round at that point? It was at this point where the last layer of the Swiss cheese model that we could see as passengers became clear, when we, who were waiting for an additional wheelchair from the airport crew to take both my mother and step-father, found ourselves waiting at the airport to get away from the plane as the first passengers on the return leg to Johannesburg were being wheeled out to get on a plane that was being turned around in record time in order to make the return leg. This was a plane that had no time to initiate a go-around. Instead, this was a plane that had to be landed and then needed to disgorge its passengers and take off other ones quickly in order to make an ambitious set of legs between the cities of Johannesburg and George over the course of the day.

When viewed in that light, it was clear that something as minor as a near-departure from the runway at George because of pilot error when it came to estimating (or calculating) the landing distance of a 737-300 on the runway after touchdown, however close it came to taking place in the observation of its passengers, was likely not ever going to be reported unless the ATC made the pilot take down a number and call it to explain himself and his thinking process. It is perhaps not to be assumed that this ended up happening, and so it is that my own account, which is limited by nature of my being a mere passenger on this flight, might end up being a rare record of something that nearly became, but for 20 yards of stopping distance, a much more exciting and troublesome sort of situation.