Aviation incident DCA10IA022

(1) The flight crewmembers’ unprofessional behavior, including their nonadherence to sterile cockpit procedures by engaging in nonpertinent conversation, which distracted them from their primary flight-related duties and led to their failure to correctly set and verify the flaps; (2) the captain’s decision to reconfigure the flaps during the takeoff roll instead of rejecting the takeoff when he first identified the misconfiguration, which resulted in the rejected takeoff beginning when the airplane was about 13 knots above the takeoff decision speed and the subsequent runway overrun; and (3) the flight crewmembers’ lack of checklist discipline, which contributed to their failure to detect the incorrect flap setting before initiating the takeoff roll. Contributing to the survivability of this incident was the presence of an engineered materials arresting system beyond the runway end.