> So on the whole I would say this incident demonstrates that the current safety standards, contingency plans, and pilot train all work as needed. I don’t think there’s anything here to suggest that the pilots manual skills are rusty

According to the article they had 30 feet of runway remaining when they brought the plane to a halt. So, yeah I guess, everything worked out, but I wouldn't say that was indicative of a well oiled machine.

Well yes, that’s one of the criticisms in the final report. That the flight plans didn’t provide adequate additional runway length to handle this specific runway in the rain. I think there may have also been criticism of the airport runway maintenance with too much rubber build up on the runway.

All of which resulted in this plane having less margin for error than it should have done. But that’s what we have safety factors, to account human error and natural deviation in the environment. In this case that safety factor prevented this incident from being more serious, and post-mortem has identified areas for improvement, which will no doubt be instituted.

To me, all of this points to extremely robust safety procedures that have prevented the loss of life in an extreme and unusual scenario, and is capable of analysing the outcome to find ways of further improving safety so it’s capable of surviving even more extreme situations.

Expecting any safety system to cope perfectly with every scenario is unrealistic, but one that handles pretty much all of them without any serious injury or loss of life is clearly working very well.

To put things in perspective, an A330 lands at 140 kts, which translates to 236 ft/sec, which means that if the plane had travelled along the runway at 140 kts for 130 milliseconds longer, then they'd have a runway excursion.

Now, they would have decelerated before the malfunction, so maybe a 500 millisecond slower reaction time would have caused the plane to leave the runway. Maybe, 3 second delayed reaction time would have resulted in the plane hitting a building or a wall.

That doesn't sound a robust safety factor to me.

You’re making a lot of assumptions about the braking capability of this plane. Notably you’re assuming that the plane was completely incapable of stopping in a shorter distance, ignoring pilot reaction time.

The report mentions that the pilots failed to apply maximum manual breaking till they were a good distance down the runway. A reasonable interpretation of this fact is that the pilots were afraid of locking up the wheels by accident, so they were applying the minimum breaking they though they could get away with. It was only when they were getting towards the end of the runway that the pilots realised they really needed to break a tad harder.

In short if the runway had been an extra 300feet long, the pilots would have still stopped the plane within 30ft of the end. It’s perfectly natural and completely rational for people to consume every ounce of available safety factor when your dealing with the unknown. So measuring the consumed safety factor after the fact isn’t inherently useful or indicative of what the actual minimum safety margin needed to be.

Additionally a runway excursion is not inherently dangerous, provided you don’t do it at high speed. It never going to be very good for the plane, but leaving the runway doesn’t automatically result in all the passengers dying.

This report doesn't indicate any fault or blame at all on the pilots: they reacted with reasonable actions to the circumstances as they arose. The only possible nit one might pick is the PF's delay in asking for the PM's assistance in braking.

But, yeah, the report does fault (kinda) the runway conditions and insufficient margins in the flight path/plan to account for an extreme such as this. The fact that a terrible tragedy did not have to occur to make those identifications seems to indicate a very well functioning system to me.