B737 Next Generation Undifferentiated
Flight Crew Air Transport Pilot (ATP)
Time Pressure; Situational Awareness; Confusion; Distraction
Aircraft Equipment Problem Less Severe; Inflight Event / Encounter Other / Unknown
Flight Crew Became Reoriented; Flight Crew Executed Go Around / Missed Approach; Flight Crew Took Evasive Action; General Maintenance Action
Aircraft
On short final at LAS ILS 25L in perfect night conditions (VMC; no wind) perfectly stabilized at 500 ft AGL; we received a 'Too Low Terrain' followed by a 'Pull Up' Warning (that occurred at 300 ft AGL.) We both looked at each other in disbelief that this was happening since everything was 'perfect.'We decided to perform a go-around procedure; but did NOT perform a 20 degree nose up emergency thrust escape maneuver. Sometimes you just have to inject common sense into aircraft malfunctions/instrumentation errors and not cause huge concern/fright in our Passengers about a calm situation turning into an aggressive; emergency maneuver. It simply was NOT warranted in this situation; despite what the book says. Rocketing up in altitude in a busy airspace such as LAS creates its own risks that just were not warranted. Strangely enough; I had a similar experience about 10 years ago also at LAS 25L at night at 2000 ft AGL where we had the same thing happen! It turns out there was a bad database for terrain in the system and the plane thought we were near hills when we were not. I had followed up on that one with Maintenance. I wrote this incident in the logbook for Maintenance to check out.I wanted to get this report in so that when you analyze the FDAP you will have a back story to what really happened. I would do the exact same thing again despite what is drilled in to our brains about 'Pull Up.' This was clearly a malfunction in the airplane.
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A B737NG flight crew at 500 ft AGL to LAS Runway 25L received an unexpected; false EGPWS 'TOO LOW TERRAIN' and 'PULL UP' caution warnings and executed a go-around. No terrain is located at the position so a database error is suspected.