All the pilots out there (NSR)

[Mister Moose]

It would be almost unheard of for a pilot to corner the aircraft at a dangerously high speed as you are trained that A) the nose gear is the most vulnerable, and you do not want to collapse it, B) Cornering reduces your chances of stopping, it rarely improves them.

It might not have been dangerous, but it was, by far, the fastest turn I've seen. Everyone was thrown to the left in their seat.

There are high speed exits built into all larger airport runways these days.
Doesn't look like it

Right. Sarasota never had the traffic to warrant reconstruction to include one. I mentioned that as perspective in normal operations at BOS, EWR, JFK, etc. Highspeed turn-offs are taxiways that 'fork' off at 30 degrees instead of 90.

When you say you saw "runway lights' out the window, what do you mean? There are many lights on an airport at night, in many colors. The centerline lights change colors at the last 2,000 feet.

I mean the end of the runway. If we had not turned, we'd be in the grass. The lights I was talking about were running perpendicular to the runway in groups of 5. Looking at the map, we landed from top left to bottom right, and turned right onto "A"
If they were red, it was the end of the runway.


"Engines getting killed" sounds like normal power reduction to idle. What do you mean by "sounded like reverse engaging"? Reversers make no noise engaging, and if they failed to deploy you would have felt forward thrust when the engines spooled up.

Bad use of words. We could hear power reduction. But things got very loud before we even started slowing down - could be wind over the flaps, maybe the breaks, I don't know
This is interesting. Since it sounds like you have flown a fair bit, you would know what the engines spooling up would sound like, and you don't identify it as such. You know what high speed pavement rumble sounds like, yet it is an unusual noise to you. Braking can sound like a rumbling/whining, and you would have felt the deceleration, but you don't mention that either. Brakes can fade when used at high speed, but they would have worked initially.

If the safety of stopping was in question, there would have been aggressive braking. You can ruin the brakes in a panic stop when reversers fail, but thats cheaper than a new airplane.

It seemed like the breaks were used pretty heavily, my in-laws were outside the terminal and could hear the landing (we were the only one at the time) and they thought something was seriously wrong.
Interesting also... your parents thought something was wrong based on noise? There really isn't enough information here, but Kahuna may be onto part of it. 9500 feet is a lot of room for an MD88. Touchdown is normally at 500 to 1,000 feet. He must have landed a little long. Did you notice out the window a lot of runway going by before touchdown? Why do you say it was a 'normal' touchdown? Perhaps the reversers only partially deployed, enough to prevent forward thrust, but not enough to provide braking. The crew kept the power up longer than normal, resulting in a 'noisier' landing? (The anti-skids, if working, would not make any noise, and if the anti-skids failed you would have smoked several tires)

My guess is it was no big deal, a normal procedure clumsily executed. Some pilots earn the name 'cowboy' because they are hard on the airplane.

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