SAS flight 751, the Gottröra Miracle! Mentour Pilot tells the story

Hello everyone, welcome to the mentor and participate in the video podcast as always. I hope you guys are doing absolutely fantastic today in the video. We are going to talk about Scandinavian Airlines Flight 751, which is also known as the gotora

miracle

that you will hear about. a

story

about the fantastic crew, bravery in resource management, eh, unsung heroes, but also a surprising lack of knowledge of the system and the errors that led to this accident, so stay tuned my friend, this video is offered together with Skillshare now. Skillshare is an online learning platform with thousands of high-quality video courses and pretty much anything you can imagine.

I've been getting a lot of questions from you about how to write the perfect CV, how to apply for an airline job, and what you should think about in a Cover Letter. I did a quick search on Skillshare today and found dozens of courses on exactly this and one of those courses that I can recommend it is Yasir Khan's ultimate resume hack and it does pretty much exactly what it says. Now using Skillshare is really affordable, it costs less than ten dollars a month and if you are among the first 1000 users to use this link below, you will get two months of Skillshare Premium absolutely free so you can log in and see what classes as you can see if you I'm lying and no and if you find a class that you really like send it to me because I love to keep learning foreign guys so this is the

story

of Scandinavian Airlines

flight

751 um.

The way I have done it is like with all the other videos in this accident and incident video series. I have researched the final report or read the final report and I have also tried to find other types of contributions and one. One of them that I have used is a documentary PR3, it is a Swedish radio program that made a documentary about this accident. I've linked all the sources down here, so if you want to read it for yourself, you can, unfortunately the documentary. It's in Swedish, but some of you might enjoy it anyway, let's go over it exactly the way the fund report is written, so we'll look at the synopsis of the accident, you know how it happened and then I'll take a look at what What did the accident investigation team finally come up with, what kind of recommendations did they have and what led to this accident in the first place, so SK

flight

751 was flown by an md-81, now the md-81 is a fairly large airliner that is an extension and a larger and more modern version of the dc-9 um it has two tail-mounted engines, they have a T-tail and tail-mounted engines will become important very soon, so that this md-81 had flown the day before the accident, on December 27, 1991, and on December 26 it returned from Zurich around 10 p.m., when it returned it still had about two and a half hours left. tons of fuel in each wing tag, so there is still quite a bit of fuel there and during the flight from Zurich there were outside temperatures during the cruise phase of the flight of about -60 degrees Celsius, so the fuel inside the tanks was It is extremely cold during the night, there was mixed weather with rain and light snowfall and a temperature between zero and plus one degree Celsius, so Swedish winter weather is pretty standard.

When the engineers and technicians on the line walked around in the morning, they noticed that there was quite a lot of sleet that had accumulated on the top of the wings and there was also frost on the underside of the wings. That frost on the underside of the wings is something I'm very familiar with because we have the exact same problem with the 737 that is, if you have supercooled fuel on the wings, in that case frost will form, but that's okay, always and when it is within the defined limits, at least in the 737, it is not something we have to worry about.

However, if there is precipitation falling on top of that supercooled fuel, then you have a different problem, so the engineers told the captain who was about to take over the flight, which was Captain Steve Rasmussen along with his first officer, ulcia the mark that There was quite a splash on the other wings and the captain ordered the icing to be put on, so the icing truck arrived. They consumed about 850 liters of the icing liquid, which would be considered quite normal for such a icing. During the engine start sequence, the captain asked the engineer if the ice had been completely clear for the wings and the engineer would be monitoring the ice.

He said affirmatively, yes it is gone, it is all cleaned now, even the captain asked if the underside of the wings had also been cleaned properly and the icing crew had confirmed that was the case. The plane takes it out perfectly normal. He indicated that the captain demanded it a little slower than normal, which was to be expected when it's windy outside. and they took off from runway zero eight in Stockholm Orlando, the flag was supposed to fly from Orlando to Copenhagen and I'm from Copenhagen to Warsaw and for the first part of the takeoff roll and the rotation everything was normal, but then, at 25 seconds During the flight they started hearing this really strange kind of humming noise like that that the flight crew had not heard before, then it was quickly followed by something that sounded like a Canon explosion and several of them came in very quick successions, it was boom boom. boom boom boom boom so for each one of these hits the plane shook back and forth and just like it suddenly slowed down for each Boom the plane slowed down a little bit and then shook forward so there were a lot of vibrations and The captain , Captain Rasmussen, who was a flight

pilot

, didn't really know what to make of it.

He was looking at the first officer and asking him what that is. To be fair, the captain had not been trained on this particular problem. in the simulator, okay, what they were experiencing is something called compressor stall. Now, if you followed my channel, you know what I'm talking about. I did a separate episode on what a compressor shutdown is, but the captain hadn't experienced it before nor did he. had been trained on it in the simulator, the first officer will see in the Mark, he knew what it was or recognized it because he had been flying the vigyan in the Swedish Air Force before he started flying for SAS and the vegan is actually equipped with almost exactly the same type of engine as the md-81 has an afterburner, obviously, so I knew that with that engine, if you took too many G's off with a vegan, you could make the engine stall and when the engine stalled, that was exactly the sound it was making and that was the kind of feeling it gave you, okay, quickly, if you haven't seen my engine, the compressor stall episode, basically what a compressor stall is is something happens to it. to the compressor stage of the Jetta engine.

The compressor stage is supposed to push the air back and compress it before it enters the combustion chamber and if something happens in the compressor stage, um, and it can't do that, it can stop the individual little propeller blades. inside the compressor and when that happens it stops pushing the air back, instead the pressure builds up at that stage and pushes the air forward. Instead, that's why they felt those kinds of jerks because every time this pressure builds up and then releases forward, you get that jolt and you get that feeling of sudden slowing down, so this is what's happening now.

The way we deal with compressor shutdowns. The type of memory elements we have is that you have to disengage the outside throttle and move the lateral thrust. Since this is happening in reverse, you can pull the frame back until it stops rising. The reason you're doing this is because you're now getting less fuel into the combustion chamber, you're basically taking pressure off at the compressor stage, so hopefully that's it. Knows? Have the single stage simply stop stalling and the engine can return to operating the way it was designed; however, if you have had any kind of strange damage to the compressor, ingested something, bird eyes or whatever.

It could be fine, so there could be a mechanical failure in the compression stage and it might not help, but the captain did the right thing. Here the captain began to reduce confidence in the right engine, which is where they identified they had the problems. It was also said that the captain found it very difficult to read the smaller digital gauges they had on the new MD-81 because, compared to the old DC-9, he reduced reliance on the right side anyway. The warning was right after the confidence went down, suddenly the confidence came back again and actually not only did the confidence go up because of everything that was going on in the pandemonium that was going on, none of the

pilot

s realized that This happened, but this will provide a crucial clue about one of the investigation findings later, so anyway, unbeknownst to the crew, the left engine had also started running at this location, the fact that They didn't realize this was probably due to just a lot of warnings and vibrations that were already there, so the right engine was searching, the left engine was revving and now, if you do nothing with these compressors stopped, if you let them continue with this continuous build up of pressure and this kind of constant surges will put the engine under so much pressure that it will eventually fail and eventually disintegrate, so these compressor shutdowns were now occurring on both sides, um and the armature had increased again, it only took a few seconds for both motors. the right engine failed first it failed followed by the left engine um this is not good it's okay in the back of the seat 2 Charlie there was another pilot flying on this flight his name is Pat Holdenbury um he was also a pilot on the md-81 and had done transition training to the md-81 from the dc-9 previously now par one Mary when she did her type rating she had reacted to the fact that on the dc-9 there is a checklist if you lose trust in both engines not only The checklist

tells

the pilots how to try to recover one of the engines so that the Captain trusts again, but it would also give them some sort of plan on how to deal with flying the plane without dungeons and potentially, so you know what, hopefully, he left it on a track somewhere when he did type qualification on the md-81, he reacted to the fact that that checklist had been removed and no longer existed because he thought you knew this newer, more modern, uh.

The most effective engines were also much more susceptible to external damage, they were much more delicate, so he sat at home and prepared his own checklist in case he had a dual engine failure on the md-181, these are the steps. I'm going to rely on old DC9 procedures. Now Pat was sitting down and this was 1991 which meant the cabin door wasn't locked. In fact, many pilots enjoyed having the cockpit door open so that the passengers could see what was going on in the cockpit and this was the case that day, so he was looking in and realized that he heard both engines. speed up.

He was also a former fighter pilot, so he too recognized all the signs and looked inward. the cockpit and realized that there wasn't much to do inside the cockpit, so Captain Rasmussen, who was at the controls, was flying but he wasn't giving much advice or asking much of the first officer who seemed quite lost, the first officer was trying to find the right checklist but they were both pretty new to the guy so Pat decided he wanted to help so he ran forward, he was in uniform and ran into the cockpit and asked if could. He could help with something.

The pilots were very happy with this because the first officer, for example, now felt that he could take on some of the responsibility of reading the checklist and handing it to the more experienced Captain he now came along with. and you can concentrate on talking to a traffic control and actually access the checklist items where that platform was calling the captain, you were concentrating on just flying the plane, you still weren't 100 sure what what was going on, I could completely understand, remember. that now they're flying a plane that doesn't have any engines running, a bunch of different warning lights come on and suddenly there's an eerie silence after that initial, funny Kaka they would have had before, so when Pat walked into the cockpit, He basically turned to the captain and just said, "Look forward, fly the plane, look forward." If you listen to or watch the cockpit voice recorder transcript of this accident, you will see him saying that over and over again. "Look forward, stare." forward and that's because he didn't want the pilot flying it to start dealing with something inside the plane when he clearly needed to fly this injured bird and keep it from stopping, so the captainHe asked the captain who was now helping to start the um el Apu.

What he did, he also told him to tell the cabin crew to prepare for an emergency on the ground, so no public address was done, there was no real communication between the cabin crew and the flight crew or vice versa, but now they could simply communicate. through the door that was open, so the plane reached its highest altitude of 3,206 feet just after both engines failed and now began its inevitable slide toward the ground again. This is the first point from which the first officer could call our traffic. control and didn't call Mayday, but said they were having engine trouble and wanted to get back to Orlando and later too.

They had no engines and probably couldn't get back to Orlando during this, you have to remember these guys are in Cloud, okay, this is not like the

miracle

on the hudson, where he was upright in visible conditions and could see. What was happening around him? No, these guys were completely immersed in a cloud and the base of the cloud was about a thousand feet away. They were now at three thousand feet, so they made a slight turn to the left from a heading of zero eight zero, which is the departure heading towards a not only chord that is now slowly descending and the cabin crew who are injured, what was going on, that he saw the assistant captain running towards the cabin, he heard that they needed to prepare for an emergency on the ground, so what they did here and I'm completely shocked when I see this.

They started doing Pas correctly, they understood the seriousness of the problem and in a very, very short time they made a PA in both English and Swedish on how people should prepare. to instruct people on how to do the brace position in a very clear and concise way, which is head down, grab the ankles, which is basically just having people get into a kind of brace position like this one, so they were doing this. Pat, at home, Barry's still inside. From the cockpit, when they had descended to about a thousand feet, they now came out of the clouds and for the first time could see where they could land this plane.

They found a large field, but Captain Garasmussen decided that was too far away. He wasn't going to catch it so he decided on a smaller field, basically right in front of the plane, he only needed a slight turn to the right for an alignment as he flew the plane, now the speed was bleeding as the altitude was getting lower. bleeding Well, I saw this happening and he had his little checklist that he had made in his head, so as the speed decreased, now he started without any information giving flutters, okay, this is really important because if you want to have some chance of surviving in a situation.

This way you want to make sure that when you crash in an off-runway environment you have the lowest speed possible, so the fact that you were now helping to remove the flaps as you slowed down helped the The plane did not stop and allow The plane slowed down but in a controlled manner, the captain, you know, was still focused on flying the plane and he realized, oh, I don't have flaps, and he looked up and said, uh, flaps and performance, he said yes, I'm giving you the last flaps now. Meanwhile, the first officer who was still talking to our traffic control just looked over his shoulder and said he would take the equipment, what should we do with the equipment?

The Captain did not respond Pat Hornberry, the Captain's assistant, responded and said yes, lower the gear and just before the plane hit the tree tops, the gear was down and locked while this was happening as you are now very, very close to crashing into the first trees, the cabin crew yelled at Pat to get out of there, sit down, so he jumped out of the cabin and simply fell to the ground behind the galley wall so he wouldn't have the seat belt put when the plane hit the trees. Well, the last thing that was heard of flight SK 751 was the radio call of a very The surprisingly cool first officer said: um Orlando Tower SK 751, now we are crashing into the ground, but in Swedish the plane at this point was at about 121 knots, which is still a high speed, but it is a normal approach speed, okay, gear is down and locked. the first thing that hits the tree tops is the right wing, the right wing breaks completely when that happens, the plane starts to slowly turn to the right and hits the other wing, the other wing also hits and part of it is being hit and then the plane hits the ground tail first in that little field they were aiming for, slides about 110 meters and splits into three different ones.

After this, everything is silent until the 129 passengers and crew make it out of this plane alive. That is why this is known as the gothrara miracle. It happened just two days after Christmas and even though this md-80 had lost both engines. about a minute and a half after they left the runway in Orlando and then they crashed through the woods and in this field, each and every one survived, there were some minor injuries and there was one serious injury, a woman who seriously injured her back , but other than that, everyone survived, Pat held back, he was, you know, basically unconscious because he wasn't tied down, but the captain, Captain Rasmussen, pulled him out of the wreckage, most of the passengers actually got out. through the breakpoints in the um on the plane because most of the emergency exits were actually blocked due to the impact and what they did was basically some of the passengers went to the nearest house which turned out to be a small cabin at the edge of this clearing.

They knocked on the door and woke up a couple of teenagers who had been sleeping there. Remember that this is in the morning. And when the teens open the door outside, they see 125 people and a completely wrecked plane basically in their backyard, so the passengers are. calling rescue operations telling them that you know we are here, we have survived, we are standing in this field and about half an hour later the first helicopters and the first firefighting teams arrive at the scene and cover everything with the foam, remember that the plane It was full of fuel and it's full of jet fuel everywhere now over the forest where they hit the trees and the right wing broke but also near where the actual body of the plane lies, help some pass centers who are we left trapped but unharmed and that's basically it, it was amazing that no one died in this accident, absolutely amazing.

Well, later, when the air accident investigation team came in and started investigating this, first they had some questions, how is this possible? that these engines failed in the first place and very, very quickly zeroed in on the fact that they must have been Clear Eyes formed over the roots of the wings and given the fact that the engines are placed where they are basically straight behind the flight paths. the wings. would have been interrupted when the wind started to flex when they started, you know, pulling the elevator out for takeoff was interrupted and headed straight for the engines and, in this case, it hit both engines and severely damaged them, which would indicate why the engines were damaged, but They still did not understand why the pilots could not identify or the captain could not identify this fault, the compressor stalled before and how to fix it and also why confidence was lost and then it came back on immediately. and this is where it starts to get really interesting: during the investigation it turns out that the flight crews had not been trained on this particular failure, since compressor shutdowns were not part of the type rating or recurrent training, so that when Captain Rasmussen was flying and he felt this kind of shaking and this kind of banging that he was hearing, he didn't naturally understand what it was, nowhere were there memory elements associated with that in the MD80 at the time, that's why he was so stunned and didn't do it. understand what was happening all his ability was dedicated to trying to understand what was happening with this plane and it didn't make any kind of sense, however, we will see the first officer on the microphone who had previous experience of flying in the vigyan was able figure it out, but it was not thanks to training, so there was a fundamental lack of training here when it came to the fact that confidence returned to the engines, the research team noticed a system called ATR that is found for automatic restoration of the trust, okay, this Scandinavian Airline Systems SCS system I didn't know existed on the md-81, it turns out that this is a system that was mainly used under FAA rules in the United States, where there was no escape procedure, for what the MD80 would normally take off. and then they would reduce the confidence to, you know, keep as quiet as possible while flying over inhabited areas and then they would add confidence and continue climbing, this system was built in so that if during that kind of low confidence segment an engine would fail well, then this system would kick in, activate the outside throttle system and add thrust and since the outside throttle couldn't handle just a single trust lever, it would add confidence at both confidence levels for all confidence levels. correct and this is actually what happened, when Captain Rasmussen very correctly lowered the Confidence on the engine he was looking for and then let it go there anticipating that it would stay where it was supposed to be, the autotrophs jumped in and discovered that the criteria to attack ATR Did it add confidence to not only the end you were looking for but also the other end that also suffered critical damage even though they didn't know it at the time and this probably led to a faster destruction of the engines, true , it is not clear?

Because we don't know exactly how much damage they had before this, it's entirely possible that the engines would have failed anyway due to ingested ice and damage occurring within the engine components, but one thing is for sure: add Thrusts during compressor stops definitely do not help and the research team found it incredible that SES did not know this system existed on their aircraft nor had the pilots been informed about it. The pilot did not know that this system existed, it was in the manuals. Well, if you went in and read the actual md-81 aircraft manufacturer core manual, it was described there, but then it was not transferred to the internal manual, so that was also the research team's finding that Obviously, this type of systems not only have to be included in the manuals, but also trained and have to be some kind of way for the crew in a situation like this to disable the system so that it doesn't act against the will of the uh. from the pilot okay, so the investigation came with 15 different points, uh, recommendations to increase safety, the way these points are raised is that they are general, like whether this point should be done, including things like, for example, be more careful and have a system applied to make sure that you are truly clear of Clear Eyes before sending a plane, both the flight crew and the icing crew and the airline must have a system applied with the quality of the system to ensure that is the case and then Several points are due to pilot training and knowledge of the system like this.

What I mean is from my point of view, though when I look at this, there are a couple of things that really warm my heart. First of all, it's something we talk about very often. about here at Canal Metropolitano, what is the importance, when something like this happens, of dividing the roles so that the pilot who flies concentrates on flying the aircraft, the pilot who monitors concentrates, you know, dealing with the problem, which is what happened here even though Captain Rasmussen didn't. He didn't fully understand what was going on nor did he give his first officer really clear orders.

They still worked quite well independently and continued flying the plane. The plane never stopped nor did it know that it diverted attention from its primary duty. who was piloting the plane and then you have the initiative on Holmby's part, who risked his life by running into the cockpit and starting to take on roles and applying his own knowledge of the system and his own situation, you know, technical situational awareness. . which he had achieved on his own initiative of building that checklist and having that checklist in his head, so together these three showed a really good synergy and managed, in a peculiar way, to resolve this situation to get the best results possible in this situation.

I love seeing how people work together and how one plus one plus one is more than three in this case, besides that I want to send a big victory lap to the cabin crew. I mean, it is a sign of enormous professionalism andknowledge. and courage in the way they handle this without receiving clear instructions from the flight crew taking the initiative to start, you know, giving the PAs to initiate the call for a support position normally in a situation where we are about to Landing outside the field, pilots will give instructions to prop, aim, prop, about 30 seconds before impact.

That didn't happen. The cabin crew took that initiative and did it too, and their quick understanding of what was going on was probably due to their absolute professionalism in the way they dealt with the information to the passengers and how they put them in a support position. It was one of the many reasons why this ended in such a positive way for us, but it was a really interesting experience. fun report to read. I highly recommend that you start reading the final reports. They are really very interesting and if you have questions about this and want to talk more about it, write your questions in the comments below.

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