February 19, 2008...5:46 pm
BA38 puzzle grows as investigators find nothing major wrong with 777 that crash-landed at Heathrow
It is very unusual for the basic cause of a major jet aircraft accident not to be found quite quickly, which makes the already puzzling January 17 crash landing at Heathrow of BA 38, a British Airways Boeing 777, even more so. The British Air Accidents Investigation Branch has today issued another interim report on the accident, basically saying it still does not know what happened.
According to today’s report, nothing out of the ordinary has been found so far, except for damage to the high pressure fuel pumps, but the manufacturer assessed them as capable still of delivering full fuel flow. There was no bird strike, and nothing wrong with the fuel, which was loaded in Beijing for the jet’s flight to London.
Examination of the data recorders and the plane has found that the engines and fuel systems were operating normally when thrust was lost in both engines just as the big jet approached Heathrow on finals, causing it to slam into the ground short of the runway, suffering extensive damage but fortunately, causing only minor injuries among the 152 passengers and crew.
A lot of fuel escaped from the damaged jet after its landing, but fortunately it did not catch fire. The AAIB has issued a safety recommendation about this. It has told Boeing to notify all 777 operators to tell pilots to switch the fuel supply switch to off before operating the fire extinguisher handle. Doing it in the reverse order during this incident apparently worsened the fuel leak.
Investigators are now trying to replicate the damage to the fuel pumps to match it with the flight recorder data to see if that can explain what happened.
As I said in my January 28 article on this incident, until the cause is found, every pilot who flies this aircraft and every airline that operates it will be more than a little nervous. Air New Zealand has eight of the 594 Boeing 777s in service world-wide. The 777 has been a very safe airliner. Until January 17, not a single one had been in a crash since the first one flew in 1994.
3 Comments
February 20, 2008 at 11:35 am
Not to mention any prospective passengers. I love the 777s.
February 20, 2008 at 12:21 pm
So does this mean attention focuses on the pilots?
February 20, 2008 at 12:33 pm
No. The published accident reports are clear; I link to the latest. The 777 came in normally on autoland. At about 600 feet, and two miles from touchdown, the autothrottle demanded more power, but after an initial increase in thrust, it dropped away. First Officer Coward, the pilot in command, advanced the thrust levers, but still nothing happened. In a heroic act of airmanship, he managed to glide the 777 over the airport perimeter fence despite the low altitude.
The flight data recorder and other devices have shown that the pilots acted in every way correctly and saved 152 lives in the process by sheer flying skill. Some mechanical or other systems problem will have caused the loss of thrust, but it has not yet been found. Investigators are currently concentrating on the damage to the high pressure fuel pumps, attempting to see if that caused the problem. The manufacturer says the pumps should have worked even with the damage.
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