In the spirit of Monday morning quarterbacking, lets discuss what to do if you find yourself in this situation. Without a doubt, they should have caught this earlier.
So, your scenerio is your on takeoff roll at CRW. Your heavy. Cold air temps, clean dry runway. Somewhere between 100kts and your 135ish V1, you discover that the flaps are set at 8 rather than 20. What would you do?
If I was closer to 100kts, I would Discontinue Takeoff Immedietely. If you discover the flap set wrong at closer to V1, I would fly. If my F/O was flying, I would call for the controls and I would keep the aircraft on the ground as long as possible before a slow rotation. Think of it as a windshear recovery with degraded performance.
It sounds like this crew made the decision to continue, but to reset the flaps to 20. As posted above, as soon as they went to 8.1 deg, Master warning and aural "Config Flaps". They probably did not figure on that aural and it caused a second or two to reconsider. That second might have very well brought them above V1. Regardless, it brought them closer to the end of the runway. I think they ended up in the EMAS because they changed their mind. If they had decided to abort first, or not abort after the Config Flaps, I think its safe to say there would be no pics for us to look at or NTSB reports to read.
So, your scenerio is your on takeoff roll at CRW. Your heavy. Cold air temps, clean dry runway. Somewhere between 100kts and your 135ish V1, you discover that the flaps are set at 8 rather than 20. What would you do?
If I was closer to 100kts, I would Discontinue Takeoff Immedietely. If you discover the flap set wrong at closer to V1, I would fly. If my F/O was flying, I would call for the controls and I would keep the aircraft on the ground as long as possible before a slow rotation. Think of it as a windshear recovery with degraded performance.
It sounds like this crew made the decision to continue, but to reset the flaps to 20. As posted above, as soon as they went to 8.1 deg, Master warning and aural "Config Flaps". They probably did not figure on that aural and it caused a second or two to reconsider. That second might have very well brought them above V1. Regardless, it brought them closer to the end of the runway. I think they ended up in the EMAS because they changed their mind. If they had decided to abort first, or not abort after the Config Flaps, I think its safe to say there would be no pics for us to look at or NTSB reports to read.