The Wrong Number Almost Killed 185 People | Thompson Airlines 1526

This is the story of thompson airways 1526. On the 21st of july 2017, a boeing 737-800 was on the ground at belfast international airport and it was getting ready for the flight out to corfu in greece. The plane was full of people looking forward to their holiday. But the thing is before they could get the plane all the way out to greece the pilots needed to get the plane ready for the flight. The pilots got to their base 1:15 pm and then started the process of getting the plane ready for flight. While the first officer walked around the airplane to see if it was fit to fly, the captain was in the cockpit programming the FMC or the flight management computers. He fed all the information that the plane would need to operate safely. Things like their route, what runway they were expecting to depart from, all that good stuff. Once the walk around was done the first officer listened to the ATIS broadcast and the pilots computed their weights and balance for this takeoff. With all of that done the pilots were getting ready to push the plane back, as the plane was being pushed back one of the techs on the ground noticed that the nose gear had some worn rubber, so the techs made the choice to replace the tire. Which meant that the plane had to be brought back to the stand while the tire was replaced. Now that some time had passed the pilots recalculated some of the numbers that they had already put into the FMC and all looked good. So they taxied the plane to runway 07. Heres the thing though, while they were cleared to takeoff from runway 07, they didnt need the entirety of the runway, sure the plane had 185 people on board but thiis wasnt a very long flight. The 737 while small is mighty, so the decision was taken to takeoff from the taxiway D position. From this point the pilots had 2654 meters or 8700 feet. This might be a bit of foreshadowing but theres a saying and it goes something like this “The three most worthless things to a pilot: • The runway behind you • The altitude above you • The fuel you left back at the airport”. With this the 737 lined up with the runway and the computers brought the engines up to the calculated thrust setting for this takeoff. The jet started rolling down the runway and before long the plane was pushing up against 130 knots, but the pilots thought that something was wrong. The plane should be much faster for where it was on the runway. The 737 was stuggling to get airborne. At the point that they hit v1 there was only 900 meters of runway remaning. The 737 then took off but it wasnt climbing fast enough, people that were looking on saw that the plane took longer than expected to get airborne. Even thought the plane was climbing the it wasnt climbing as fast enough as it should and so the main gear smashed into the lights at the end of the runway. After that even though the plane was climbing slowly it was able to climb enough to avoid any of the obstacles that were in its way. The pilots once airborne had known that something had gone terribly wrong and knew that they had come close to disaster. The pilot in command then contacted both the canadian TSB and the british AAIB to let them know about the incident. If youre wondering why the canadian TSB was contacted its because the plane was on a wet lease from a canadian company, sunwing. The takeoff was so low that the controller that was supervising the plane did not transfer it to the departure frequency because he was sure that the pilots would need some help. But the call for help never came, after the plane was transferred to the departure frequency the controller sent out a crew to investigate, at the end of the runway they found broken lights that the plane had ploughed through on its way into the sky. It was obvious that this plane had come shockingly close to disaster, if something had gone diferently, if the winds had shifted, or if an engine underperformed then this plane would have been in some serious danger. So now the question is why did the plane underperform by so much? Why was it in such danger in the first place?