“The entire normal operating checklist for the new Embraer Phenom 100 light business jet fits on both sides of a laminated card that you can slide into a shirt pocket,” former Flying editor Mac McClellan wrote approvingly in his 2009 report on the airplane. “The Phenom is designed to cut pilot workload to a minimum so there is time to focus on the overall situation while the airplane and its systems take care of themselves.”
Aftermath: Failure to Focus on the Overall Situation
Key Takeaways:
- An Embraer Phenom 100 jet crashed due to a premature aerodynamic stall, caused by ice accumulation on its wings because the pilot failed to activate anti-ice systems during a descent through icing conditions.
- The pilot had incorrectly calculated the approach speed (Vref), underestimating the aircraft's weight and, critically, omitting the anti-ice requirement which would have increased the landing distance to barely within the runway's length.
- The NTSB attributed the pilot's failure to use anti-ice to potential concerns about landing distance (due to a prior incident) and an insufficient understanding of how severely ice affects the Phenom 100's stall characteristics.
- The article also suggests a potential systemic issue, where certification standards that demand a significant increase in Vref with anti-ice can discourage pilots from using it, effectively making many runways unusable.
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