FlightSafety International advanced training director Dann Runik may be considered an expert on the potential dangers of high-speed rejected takeoffs. That wasn’t the case just a few years ago, however, before a major business aviation OEM identified a disturbing trend in the number of incidents involving abort decisions at or above V1 takeoff decision speed.

“The people in [the OEM’s] flight ops said, ‘We need to do something about this,’” he recounted to attendees at the 2015 Citation Jet Pilots Association (CJP) Convention earlier this year. “‘As an OEM, we want to write guidance of how to make the go/no go decision.’”

Runik admitted to having reservations at first. “No other OEM had ever done this, for what I thought were good reasons,” he continued. “There are too many fingers in the decision. They listened politely, and said, ‘No, for all the reasons you just said, we want to do it… and, you should be the one to do it.”

What followed was a thorough examination of the situations leading to high-speed aborted takeoffs, as demonstrated in the FAA’s Takeoff Safety Training Aid that reviewed approximately 430 million takeoffs since the dawn of the jet age in 1958 through 2003.

“Of all those takeoffs, 143,000 were aborted, and of those, 97 ended in fatal accidents or incidents that seriously damaged the airplane,” Runik said. Perhaps surprisingly, just 21 percent of those 97 serious overruns involved engine failure.

In light of the ever-increasing level of cockpit automation available to pilots, Runik addressed the commonly held mindset that pilots should abort their takeoff for any number of crew alerting system (CAS) warning messages.

“No one can deny that we know more about our airplanes today, in real-time, than ever before,” he said. “We’re safer than we’ve ever been...except at V1, because of the multitude of things that can come up and sucker us into wrongly aborting takeoff.”

As an example, Runik pointed to the 43 red or amber CAS alerts that will push through the takeoff inhibit system in the Citation Mustang, widely considered to be among the easiest turbine aircraft to manage.

“It’s a fair question: if you’re going to abort for those things, what are those things?” he asked. “Loss of both generators, for example. Is the airplane still safe to fly? Are both engines still turning? Sure.

“And here’s one I found very interesting: anti-skid fail. What is your accelerate-stop distance required based on [during an aborted takeoff]? Operational anti-skid.” he said. “If you’re going to abort the takeoff, you should be able to answer the question of how dangerous that high-speed abort might be.”

In addition to his role at FlightSafety, Runik is also a captain for Delta Air Lines on the Boeing 747-400–a position that recently provided him with firsthand experience about making that split-second, go/no-go decision.

“We’re rolling down the runway in Tokyo, and just prior to V1 we get a red CAS message: CONFIGURATION: FLAPS,” he recalled. “I continued the takeoff, [although] our zero-flap maneuvering speed is 288 knots; we would have been 100 knots too slow if I’d truly forgotten the flaps.

“We were climbing out safely, but my crew beat me up about it, and I was second-guessing myself, too,” Runik continued. “Once we were above 10,000 feet it dawned on me: the alert would have come when we first applied takeoff power if the flaps hadn’t been set correctly.” Maintenance later found a faulty micro switch.