Flying Machines

On a wing and a prayer

Those magnificent men in their flying machines...
This piece is about three air crashes of which one relates to a bizarre incident that happened some 25 years ago.

Descriptions of air crashes are generally depressing or gruesome, but the cases dealt with here are, be assured, neither. This article only deals with cases that meet the three basic requirements. Primarily, there should be no death among the passengers or crew; and secondly, here should be no incidence of fire. Lastly, the crew should exhibit a high level of airmanship in bringing the powerless aircraft safely to the ground. Instances of overshooting or skidding off the runway are not considered even if the first two conditions are met. Will we be comfortable enough to choose the “preferred crash”? We will deal with it later, now for a short background.

The first would be the recent case of a US Airways A320. The Airbus flew into a flock of Canadian geese one minute after takeoff. This resulted in both engines ingesting birds leading to total engine failure. Stuck at a low altitude with no power amidst the high rise buildings of New York and congested airspace, the captain decided to risk ditching the plane on the Hudson River as he couldn’t return to La Guardian or proceed to Teterboro in New Jersey. There is no question that the captain executed a perfect textbook landing on the calm but freezing waters of the Hudson. This would surely have resulted in a major catastrophe had the Hudson not been calm. Imagine if there had been no river below the lifeless A320 but just towering urban landscape all around! It was an immense risk attempting to land on a busy waterway, but that is precisely why the ferries were able to assist in the rescue so quickly.

The second incident is the crash landing of a British Airways Boeing 777 at London Heathrow in January 2008. Flight BA038 had departed Beijing on its non-stop flight with 152 people on board including 16 crew members. A preliminary investigation suspected that ice in the fuel lines caused the jet to lose power forcing it to make a jarring emergency landing. With no such incident on record, this had been noted as an unprecedented event for any large modern aircraft. The report also acknowledged that though the exact mechanism in which the ice caused the restriction is still not known in detail, it had been proved that ice could cause such a stricture in the fuel feed system.

Aviation fuel contains a small amount of water that cannot be completely removed. When fuel temperature drops below freezing, it is natural that this water should turn into ice. The report reveals that the temperature in the fuel tank had dropped to -34 degrees Celsius while flying over Siberia. But that is not unusual. The high altitude at which jetliners operate is a very hostile environment with extremely low temperatures and air pressure. But the engines work efficiently in the rarefied air. Aircraft engines need more fuel to power the takeoff and also when the plane slows down to land.

In the case of Flight BA038, it is believed that the system was not able to produce the required engine thrust at the critical time even when both engines were running. As the engines were starved of fuel, hey were not able to generate the required thrust to keep the slow flying aircraft in the air. The plane was already locked on to the ILS and was at a height of just 600 feet and two miles from touchdown when the auto-throttle demand for fuel went unheeded.

Such a loss of power occurring a few miles from the runway threshold creates a very ominous situation for any aircraft, and more so for a wide-bodied jet. But the crew still managed to control the descent to land with the wings level on grass just over the perimeter fence at Heathrow. As it touched down on the soft ground, the landing gear sank into ground and got torn off. The aircraft left a 350-metre-long drag mark on the ground. Experts believe that the ground run was surprisingly short. This was just about to stall when it made ground contact. The landing gear, engines and wings suffered extensive damage; but there was, fortunately, neither fire nor any death.

The third incident dates back to July 1983. It is about a Boeing 767 (Air Canada, Flight 143) carrying 69 persons including a crew of eight. The crew discovered, to their utter horror, that the aircraft has no fuel only after both engines had stopped! The 767 was cruising at41,000 feet and was midway between Edmonton and Montreal. What went wrong? The story goes something like this.

A maintenance team had knocked out the computer that calculated the amount of fuel required. So the ground crew did the calculation manually even though they had never been trained to do such a calculation. Incidentally, Canada was shifting to the metric system from the British system at that time. Ignorance of metric conversion resulted in a monumental botch. Fuel used to be measured in pounds earlier. But in the metric system, it is first measured in liters and then its weight expressed in kilograms. The engineers wrongly calculated the weight of the fuel left in the tank as 13,600 kilograms when actually it was just 6,200 kilograms.

Luckily, the Boeing was flying at cruising altitude, and the captain was experienced in gliding. Even then, the jet would not be able to make it to the nearest airport at Winnipeg. In another stroke of luck, the first officer knew about an unused airport nearby at Gimli. The pilot guided the plane to the airport and landed there with nothing worse than a collapsed nose wheel assembly. He aircraft, which became famed as the Gimli Glider, retired n January 2008 and has been ferried to the Mojave Desert for a long earned rest! Initially, the captain was demoted for six months and the first officer suspended for two weeks. But in 1985,both pilots were honored with the first ever Federation Aeronautique International Diploma for outstanding airmanship.

With the advantage of hindsight, my choice would be the Heathrow event as the preferred crash. Reason, you reach the destination in one piece and you are well within the airport perimeter.

That is the purpose of flying, is it not? Which one of the three incidents would you choose?