STOPPED SHORT Not according to plan

Posted on 12/14/2015

Thursday evening’s chartered flight from New York to Doha, Qatar was meant to celebrate an Airbus A350-900 XWB’s first-ever journey from the US, but things didn’t go quite as planned. The aircraft sped down the runway at JFK, watched by passengers on their seat back screens - before coming to a sudden, screeching halt.

The incident was captured on video by Zach Honig, editor-in-chief of The Points Guy, who was among the 36 passengers on-board due to travel back to Doha, Qatar, from the US. The airline's chief executive had visited New York to announce a new marketing campaign and the launch of the first A350 commercial flights from Qatar to the US and Honig said he was quick to jump at the chance to fly in the Airbus 350 with a handful of invited guests. He wrote on his blog, "As you can see in the video, about 18 seconds after we began rolling down JFK’s runway 22R, the aircraft self-aborted, bringing us from more than 100mph to a loud, screeching halt in roughly 15 seconds.

"For a plane of this size and weight, stopping that quickly required a lot of force. "To give you another idea of how abruptly we stopped, as you can see in the picture below, nearly all of the 200+ pillows and blankets landed on the floor, having previously been neatly arranged on each seat in economy. "Fortunately, nobody was hurt, but some passengers (including myself) were quite shaken."

Amid the confusion after the plane stopped, cabin crew told passengers to turn off their cameras and remain in their seats. Honig was also asked to stop tweeting. In the video, a flight attendant is heard telling passengers, ‘everything is fine’ as the plane begins to taxi along the runway at a slow speed. "The journalist across the aisle from me said that he wanted to get off the plane, and after a call with my mom (who was understandably very upset after seeing my tweet), I wanted to get off, too.” Said Honig. "We both let the PR rep sitting near us know that we wanted to disembark, and he made a few phone calls and it seemed like that was definitely going to happen.

"Except it didn’t. Instead, Qatar’s Chief Commercial Officer, the highest ranking executive on the flight, came over to reassure us, explaining that an 'indicator' was responsible for the abrupt abort. "As I understand it, for some reason the A350 decided that our 11,000-foot runway was too short to support the takeoff, and the plane applied the brakes at full force — all on its own." Honig apparently called his mother back and one hour and 40 minutes later the plane eventually took-off safely for the flight to Doha.