Crippled Airbus A380, saved by Pros! | Qantas flight 32

Hello everyone, welcome to the mentor and yet another video podcast, as always, I hope you are doing absolutely fantastic today with the video, guys, we are going to talk about a

flight

where things go very bad, very fast, we are going to talk of an uncontained

flight

. engine failure that cascades into hundreds of different system anomalies and how the knowledge, crm and aerial skill of the flight crew save today we are going to talk about

qantas

flight 32 so stay tuned one three one zero one six three one right third three one This video is brought to you in conjunction with Blinkist.

Now I don't know about you, but I love listening to podcasts and audiobooks when I'm driving to work or when I'm working out, and now I love listening to nonfiction books. Blinkers have made it really easy for me because they have over 3,000 nonfiction books in their library, and the real genius of Blinkers is that they take really large works of nonfiction, like hundreds of pages of books, and condense them. to the most important points, which they call blinks, which means you can listen to an entire audiobook for about 20 minutes, which means you can listen to two books during one training session, which is absolutely fantastic now that I'm listening to a book.

Now there's Bill Bryson's Almost Everything Story and it's really good, guys, those of you who use this link down here, which is Blinkist.com Mentorpilot, we get an absolute free week so you can check that I'm not lying. for yourselves and then you will get 25 off the price if you choose to register so check it out my friends so last week I was reviewing the final report of Smart Wings flight 1125 that ended up flying over Europe after I experienced a engine failure at 36,000 feet, now that report was riddled with very strange decision making and questionable crm, so I thought today I want to talk about what really happens in most cases, which is where a flight crew really professional and well trained actually saves the day when something happens so

qantas

flight 32 is a great example of how good CRM is and how good management and knowledge of the system is crucial to a safer flight because sometimes the worst nightmares happen, sometimes you end up with system failures that you didn't even think were possible and when that happens, you need all that knowledge and all that CRM and use all the resources around you to get the best possible result , so flight 32 was a scheduled flight departing from Changi. from Singapore Airport to Sydney was flown by an Airbus A380 and consisted of quite a different flight crew.

They had five pilots in the cockpit, 24 cabin crew members and 440 passengers on board. The reason there were five people in the cockpit was that this was a check flight, so the flight crew was being checked, but not just them, the training captain who was doing the check was also being checked. verification, so there was a verification captain and a senior verification captain on board. This happens sometimes when we review a new workout. captains, it has to be done by an experienced training captain, so from time to time you end up with these types of flight crew configurations, so on the 737 800, for example, I flew with four people in the cabin, which It is very crowded for 737 less.

So in the case of an Airbus 380, but what you have to understand when it comes to CRM when you have a situation like this is that there will be a lot of nerves on the flight deck and people will get nervous because they are under control and there will also be questions about what the actual chain of command is when you have three captains on board. Now this is where Captain Chris Richard, Chris Pigney, is showing the first sign of what kind of leader he is because already on the bus he was heading to the airport and also before leaving he had an argument with the other members of the flight crew about exactly this saying that this is the chain of command.

I'm the pilot in command and then you have your first officer. The second officer and the control pilots are sitting there watching, the only reason they will interfere is in case of a security breach, which is how it works when we do line checks, generally speaking, but it was very, very important that he did this. of course because that not only relaxes the cabin atmosphere but also shows exactly who does what in case of failure and that will be really important very soon, so the Airbus A380 was now full of fuel to fly to Sydney and they had a takeoff normal and He exited, took the landing gear, took the flaps and at approximately 7400 feet, the flight crew heard two knocks very close to each other, the airplane began to yaw indicating a problem with one of the engines and the first message of the electronic camera appeared now. -cam stands for electronic centralized aircraft monitoring system, full disclosure here guys, I'm not Airbus qualified so you'll have to bear with me, but if you think of ecam messages as the kind of master caution system we have at Boeing . where ecamm instead of what we get which is just a general failure message, ecam actually says what is wrong and what the flight crew should do, so the actual action items and ecam message indicated overheating from engine number two which is on the left. side of the plane and that initiated the first response from the flight crew, so the pallet flying was the captain, he pressed altitude, kept the plane level and hoped that the external confidence would start to reduce the confidence because that's what it does to try it. to maintain speed but this is where the signs of multiple failures started to become obvious because the autocross didn't work so the captain had to manually de-trust and continue flying while the first officer was monitoring the pilot and started steering the ecamm checklist and the ecom.

The checklist included reducing confidence in the indicated motor and then waiting 30 seconds to see what happened. Well, during those 30 seconds, the first officer also made a panning call, which is an emergency call to air traffic control to let them know that they need a potential priority. and to explain to air traffic control why the aircraft was not following standard instrument departure just when this was done. The electronic camera messages changed from engine overheating to engine fire for a couple of seconds and then back to overheating because this is normally how fire systems work well, there tend to be loops that measure the temperature inside the engines and The difference between an overheat and a fire is just a temperature difference, so it briefly caught fire and then overheated again, leading the flight crew to believe there was probably a major fault with this engine and decided to shut it down, since they turned it off as expected.

They received engine failure message number two; However, this was not the only failure message they received because unbeknownst to Yes, the flight crew, what had actually happened was that a faulty oil stop tube inside the number two engine had ruptured and had dumped oil into the intermediate pressure turbine where the oil had ignited and basically shut down that part of the turbine which had then wreaked havoc inside the engine, had gone through the engine, so now it is an uncontainable engine failure and shrapnel had flown through about 20 different places on the underside of the wing and on the underside of the fuselage, shrapnel had ruptured the fuel lines it had.

The ruptured fuel tanks actually caused a fire in the fuel tank which extinguished itself, but also, crucially, in two of the main electronic trunks of the Airbus 380. Therefore, the Airbus 380 has electrical systems redundant that work with different types of cable bundles. Throughout the plane and in this case this rappel had managed to damage the two main ones and when you start having electrical faults and electrical things going wrong, there can be any number of system faults that originate from that and this is what that the flight crew I started seeing it, so instead of the single message from the car for a bad engine and then failures, in this case they now had a flood of messages from ecam and why is this important?

Well, what you need to understand here guys is that a plane is not smart, okay, a plane will just tell you what's wrong with it or, on the 77 800, it will just go off a bunch of different warning lights and bells, It won't tell you how to interpret a multiple failure scenario, that's fine. of the checklist, if you look at the 737 for example, it is based on the assumption that the fault checklist you are reading is the only fault pressure, not that it has multiple faults that could affect the same system and does Why is it okay if you believe?

In this regard, it is somewhat obvious, since you cannot create checklists for every imaginable scenario, you cannot have checklists that intertwine with each other, so this means the same for Airbus, which must execute every ecam checklist and then you should use your knowledge of the system. their situational awareness to get an idea of ​​what is wrong with their plane and this is exactly what this flight crew is doing, not only was he now working together with his first officer and his second officer, but he was also using the help of the senior control captain. and the czech captain, so using all the resources available, if you have seen my video about piyosi, now you will start to realize what these guys are doing, they are trying to find out what the problem is and then they are using information from their camera electronics. from the cabin crew to the pilots who are sitting in the jump seat, which we'll get to in a second and then as they've gathered the information they start selecting the different options that they have, so how are they going to know how to deal with failures themselves? they're going to fly the plane and how they're going to ultimately land, the selected option they continually run and evaluate, so they follow the pi model here to the letter, anyway, so just to give you an idea of ​​the type of failures. what they were facing uh the ecam messages we are receiving included the green hydraulic system low fluid level and low pressure the green hydraulic system on the Airbus is one of the main hydraulic systems the yellow hydraulic system had engine number four pump error there was A failure of the main electrical air conditioning trunks number one and two, that was the indication that the main electrical trunks had been partially cut. flight control in alternative law. wing slats inoperative, so cutting-edge devices did not work.

They reduced spoiler control and ailerons, to say the least. Possibility to actually operate the aircraft in the role of landing gear control and indicator warning, so I am not sure if the aircraft will be able to land to lower the landing gear normally or not. Multiple brake failures, including the anti-skid system in some of the landing locations. gear pairs and that's going to be important when it comes to checking landing distance later on multiple fuel system errors, including the ability to dump fuel, so the electrical issues they were having prevented them from dumping fuel and, of course, this was only After departure, they were now carrying a large amount of additional fuel, which placed the plane well above its maximum landing weight center of gravity.

Messages. There were fuel imbalances that started to build up due to the engine failure now but also problems with the movement of the fuel from different tanks to maintain the center of gravity where the outside throttle was supposed to be and the outside ground was not working and the Ice systems were not working. Left wing pneumatic bleed leak, which means that hot air from the pneumatic bleeds is leaking into the left wing, which could cause a fire and then overheating of the avionics system and when you have an overheated avionics system Depending on how long it lasts, you could start losing crucial instruments, so this is a flurry of things going wrong now, here Captain Richard does something that is really indicative of what kind of leader he was, when he faced all these dozens or even hundreds of different failures, instead of just focusing on what wasn't working, you actually started reviewing the systems that were working so well, so what do we have?

What can we do? How does the plane really work? How does it respond to control input? How do the engines respond, etc., and this is a crucial way to try, when you're faced with a multiple failure scenario, to just increase your situational awareness.understand what you have to work with and what you can do and this involves your management and that of the rest of the flight cruise of this entire crisis. It's a great focus on the mission at hand, the goal, what you're trying to accomplish, and what kind of tools do you have at your disposal?

Now that they were dealing with this failure, air traffic control wanted them to depart into an established holding pattern. The flight crew looked at him and asked if they could go to a holding pattern that was designed especially for them that was closer to the airport about 30 nautical miles from the airport and the reason they are doing this is most likely Richard the captain and the rest of the flight were thinking what if this turned into a real catastrophic scenario? How quickly can we get this plane on the ground instead of further away? They wanted to be closer to the airport, about 30 nautical miles, it's almost a glide distance to the airport while they were dealing with the different ecam checklists and now flying into this holding pattern they sent a second officer to the cockpit.

Now that the cabin crew had tried to locate them, they used the emergency cable to try and contact the flight crew and unfortunately that was lost with all the ecam ding messages that have been broadcasting non-stop, so the crew The flight attendant had not heard the cabin crew, but were now able to communicate and instruct them on what was happening when the second officer entered the cockpit. He was alerted by what appeared to be a passenger, but turned out to actually be an off-duty pilot. that he was sitting in one of the passenger rooms and that pilot showed him on the in-flight entertainment system that there is a camera in the back. of the Airbus A380 showing an overview of the plane and in that camera you could clearly see that there was liquid running down the left wing, which further indicated the type of damage the plane had.

The second officer then left. Even at the bottom of the plane he looked at the wing and could clearly see that there was damage to the left wing as well as the engine, so he returned with our information to the cockpit and they talked to each other. and during this time, both the captain and the senior Czech captain took numerous steps to tell the passengers what was happening, that they were having technical difficulties and also communicated with the cabin crew to inform them what was happening to have an continuous communication keeping everyone in the loop here which reduces the anxiety level, although people hear that they are having technical problems, most of them could see it after the window anyway, so it is much better to hear than yes , the flight crew is aware of what is happening and they are dealing with this, they are not given any information at all and rumors are spread because when you have 440 passengers, panic is likely to break out unless this is handled properly. a good and efficient way, so it took the flight crew a little over 50 minutes. to execute all the hundreds of ecam actions they had to do and while doing this the second officer along with the senior Czech captain were trying to calculate the required landing distance because remember they couldn't drop fuel this meant they were also more 50 tons overweight, that's fine and just to put that in perspective, a 737 empty weight is about 42 to 43 tons, so they were carrying more than a 737 over its maximum landing weight along with the flaws that they had to not work. uh, slats with problems with the brake systems, all that when they put that into the computer, basically the computer couldn't come up with a figure, but when they modified it a little bit, they eliminated the possibility of a wet track because it was a nice day and it was dry.

They managed to come up with a figure that indicated they could stop the plane if they landed right where they were supposed to be at speed with about 100 meters to spare. Well, this indicated that They were able to land, now they began to prepare for that and the preparation consisted of doing a series of flight control checks, so they were decelerating the plane in waiting, testing the plane. Now you may wonder why you would do that and the key. The important thing is that you don't want to end up at low speed on the last approach to the ground and find that part of your flight controls are not working, so performing continuous flight control checks like this is another indication that this crew was really in the top. of the things they called for about 20 nautical miles final, which is a good 10 miles or almost double the normal final line, the airplane started setting it up with whatever flaps they could get out, they couldn't lower the landing gear with a line normal. system they had to use an alternative extension system to be able to remove the landing gear but finally the plane was aligned to land the plane flew downwards they tried to use the external pilot but the autopilot kept disconnecting a couple of times so the captain I just decided no, I'm just going to fly this manually, which is probably smart too because then you'll get a little better feel for how the plane is moving, and after decelerating, they continued doing these flight control checks because a plane could fly very well with the flaps retracted and the landing gear retracted, but if it has to take damage while you extend a leading edge device well, in this case they could only trail edge devices, for example, if there is So, of suddenly you might have a problem with the flight controls and as the speed decreases it's the same thing so they were continually checking that yes we have everything in the control asset now the sender comes down to observe the landing .

Meanwhile, the senior Czech captain told the cabin crew to prepare the plane for a possible runway overrun and possible evacuation, so everyone was ready for that and landed the plane perfectly. What was initially supposed to be very slow deceleration probably had to do with You know the lack of anti-slip on some of the pairs of wheels, but they finally managed with maximum manual braking to stop the plane completely about 150 meters before the end of the runway at this point, since air traffic control was well informed, all the emergency equipment began to approach the plane and the pilots began to shut down the plane, shut down all the engines or at least thought they had shot down all the engines and when they shot down the last one, the plane went into a sort of degraded electrical mode, but before doing so they observed that the temperature of the brakes on the left side was close to 900 degrees Celsius and rising, so the brakes were extremely hot, which was completely normal if you think about landing in 50 degrees Celsius. tons of overweight, but the problem, of course, was that they had seen that they were losing fuel and, in fact, the fuel was dripping very close to these hot spots and at any moment it could have burst into a fire.

They knew it. Well, the first officer. He asked the captain if he could tell the firefighters to start soaking the area under the brakes with firefighting foam to make sure the fuel was covered in foam and couldn't reach the brakes. The captain thought it was a great idea, so he told him. the information to the firefighters who did that and that probably

saved

them from the fire, but now, of course, comes the dilemma: if you evacuate the plane, okay, you have 440 people on board, you have the brakes on red hot and, furthermore, it turns out that one of the engines engine number one did not shut down no matter what the flight crew did the firefighters said the engine was still running the flight crew did everything they could they pulled the fire lever they fired the two bottles of fire to the engine nothing stopped the engine stopped running so there was probably some kind of electrical fault in the communication with the engine the engine kept running so now you have the engine running you have hot brakes you have some leaks on the left side and you have passengers. on board, okay, a less cool flight crew could have started an evacuation to try to get everyone out as quickly as possible, but these guys intervened and talked to both the firefighters and the monks themselves and said, let's try to disembark the passengers on the right side using normal steps and that's what they did so they put a set of steps in the front the passengers started disembarking and that was after an hour of trying to turn off the engine and trying to secure the plane after landing.

It took another hour to get all the passengers off the plane, so this whole ordeal took over two hours from landing to everyone getting off the plane, while the cabin crew was ready to start an evacuation at any given point and The flight crew said that if we see that there is a possibility of a fire or that the fire is breaking out, then we could initiate emergency evacuation and, you know, just start evacuating normally, but I didn't have to do that and because I didn't have to. No one was hurt, so this whole incident with all these multiple failures and everything from cutting-edge devices not working, hydraulic failures, uncontained engine failures, did not result in a single human being being injured, a good portion of the engine that had .

It exploded, fell on a bataam island, fell on a couple of vehicles and a school, but no one was seriously injured and they finally managed to stop the running engine with two fire trucks who simply filled it with firefighting foam and effectively smothered the engine and that's how they shut it down, so what can we learn from this? Well, you can learn a lot of things, first of all, the use of CRM from all the available resources, all the flight crew and cabin crew and even some people. The standoff with the plane helped get as much information as possible to make the right decision.

Stay calm. Look at what the airplane can do and not what it can't do well. You need to plan for the worst, but you need to. to handle what you have, which is what they did, they used a variation of piosi that I talked about in a previous video, so check out that video if you're more interested and then once they landed and everyone went down and

saved

the captain. In fact, I went in and talked to all the passengers, explaining what had happened, how it happened, and what led to this not being a public relations disaster.

You know, with social media, everyone's filming, everyone's tweeting it. Now all the passengers felt that the flight crew had done a great job, the cabin crew were calm and relaxed and knew what they were doing and this is what was being sent to the Twitter sphere. Well, they were bathing the flight crew and the cabin crew was praising them and saying how it was. how they were receiving information, how they were being treated and something that of course should have been a PR disaster actually turned into something quite positive now the final report is out and I have links to some of the reports. below and some of the items I've used to create this video, but overall this is a brilliant example of what flight crew and cabin crew do every day because what you don't understand is that little glitches happen. .

Small things happen and if left unchecked they can lead to bigger things, but that's not the reason you don't hear about these things, it's because there are trained flight crew, cabin crew and trained engineers. They're handling it the way they're trained to handle it every day so it doesn't become a headline, okay, and that's what I want you to learn from this, this is what you should and can expect from your crew to board, guys. I bet you have questions about this and I love having your answers to my videos and also your suggestions for other videos I should make about other events that have happened so if you have questions and want to talk about it write your questions and suggestions here in the comments give me a like to the video, share it with friends who maybe need to see it and if you want to have deeper discussions, in that case get the Mentor Aviation app, it is completely free to download, you have to download the links below and you can enter and chat with me or other flight crew members or aviation enthusiasts.

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