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Watching this sim of a 777 engine failure on takeoffs got me wondering about RTOs, and how often they occur.

The interest was further driven after reading a comment by N1755L that might underline jeopardy in the process:

If anything is to go wrong with the engines at close to the "not-enough-runway-left-to-safely-stop" point, the pilots have only 10s of thousands of seconds of time to assess the situation and decide which decision is the correct one (attempt a stop, or continue the takeoff and get into the air).

Perhaps that's exaggeration. And surely the majority of rejected takeoffs occur at safer speeds. There appears to be a few similar questions about emergency landings, but nothing on RTOs?

I did find this article from an Aero (Boeing) magazine indicating:

Historically, the RTO maneuver occurs approximately once each 3,000 takeoffs. Because the industry now acknowledges that many RTOs are not reported, however, the actual number may be estimated at 1 in 2,000 takeoffs.

The article appears to rely on data a couple decades old. But wondering if that would be a reasonable estimate today. And, even better, if there's any data on the breakdown of RTOs by speed.

Whatever you've got will be of interest, whether the dataset is confined to specific countries or even airlines.

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    $\begingroup$ Tens of thousands of seconds? As in, several hours to a day? $\endgroup$
    – hobbs
    Commented Apr 21, 2018 at 7:47
  • $\begingroup$ Haha, yeah, sadly I read right through their (hopeful) typo :-p We live in a weird era where we read almost expecting mistakes to fix in our mind. $\endgroup$
    – JeopardyTempest
    Commented Apr 21, 2018 at 9:29

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As off today (March 21st), Aviation Herald lists 26 rejected take-offs, in 2018.

It's 110 days since the start of the year. So that's 110/365ths, or 0.31 of the year. So, the whole year will have 26/0.31, or about 84 rejected or aborted take-offs.

This assumes, all are reported in Aviation Herald, which is probably not true, so the real average number is likely to be higher. But that's a rough starting point, and probably the best estimate you will get.

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    $\begingroup$ Would probably be better to look at numbers over the last few years and averaging rather than extrapolating based on a few months. $\endgroup$
    – Notts90
    Commented Apr 21, 2018 at 15:14
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    $\begingroup$ @Notts90. Completely agree, and probably should have suggested that. It would just be more time consuming than I wanted to spend, and in essence, my answer was to show a method they could pursue. But you're dead right. But one reason I didn't do that - I've never figured out how to get the second page of search results on AH, so if you have more than one page to count.. I can't!! Cheers. $\endgroup$
    – Penguin
    Commented Apr 21, 2018 at 20:37
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    $\begingroup$ I’d say RTO’s are such a minor situation that AVH probably only hears about a very small fraction of them. $\endgroup$
    – TomMcW
    Commented Apr 22, 2018 at 18:28

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