HOW This Aircraft FELL 30 000 Feet in Less Than 2.5min! | China Airlines 006

This Boeing 747 is literally falling out of the sky, the crew is performing some pretty terrifying aerobatic maneuvers and if you've ever wanted to know how much force it would take to start tearing a plane apart in the air,

this

video will give you an indication. Stay tuned, many thanks to the airline pilots club for sponsoring

this

video. It is late morning on February 19, 1985. A China Airlines Boeing 747 SP is cruising at 41,000

feet

over the northeastern Pacific Ocean. About 300 nautical miles northwest of San Francisco, the flight is a scheduled passenger service from Taipei in China to Los Angeles in the United States and took off at 1622 Taipei time and has already been flying for approximately 10 hours aboard the

aircraft

with capacity for 251 passengers with 5 pilots and 18 cabin crew, the flight crew that operates this flight is very experienced the captain is a 55-year-old man with 15,494 hours of total time helping him is a 54-year-old first officer with 7,734 hours and a 55 year old male flight engineer with 15,510 hours who also augmented the flight crew as a relief captain and an additional flight engineer and both were resting during the time of this event the

aircraft

he was flying is a boeing Relatively new 747sp has four prattan whitney jt9 delta seven alpha engines rated at forty six thousand one hundred fifty pounds of thrust.

There had been some problems on the two previous flights of this plane with engine number four, which is the engine located on the right wing, the furthest from what had happened. was that the crews had reported a loss of thrust in engine number four and the subsequent need to restart it in cruise and because of that it had been disassembled and had been thoroughly examined on the ground by a team of engineers and had partly been replaced. and then the engine had been tested on land and found to be working satisfactorily. The weather in the area where the plane flies is a bit unstable.

They just flew through a cold front and associated with that cold front is something. Called a jet stream, a jet stream is a fairly narrow band of very strong winds and when those strong winds brush against slower moving air particles, they create these vortices that create turbulence and the aircraft was experiencing turbulence just before for this event to occur, which prompted the captain. turn on the seat belt sign and that will turn out to be a very good move. In fact, at this point the aircraft was flying on autopilot and the autopilot was connected to its PMS performance management system, which is very similar to the more modern FMS variant. flight management system that we are using in airplanes today, the performance management system was also connected to the external throttle, which was configured to maintain a speed of mach .85 as the aircraft approached a stopping point.

Mandatory report called redo clear air turbulence suddenly. What made the problem with clear air turbulence a little worse now is that sometimes the speed of the plane can begin to fluctuate, in this case the speed began to increase until reaching the point of mach 88 and because the autothrottle was activated, The car The throttle wanted to maintain a speed of mach 0.85, so it began to reduce reliance on the four motors to reach that speed, the speed began to reduce and when it reached the point of mach 84, the outer shell began to tell the thrust levers to increase again, but something happens here. although the autotrust was now ordering the four trust levels to advance the epr, the engine pressure ratio on the number four engine did not increase and this indicates that the trust is also not increasing because the plane was already flying through turbulence, The flight engineer had set the engine start switches to in-flight start which provides continuous ignition to all four engines and is normal procedure to do so when flying through turbulence, but when the flight engineer realized that the engine Number four did not respond, it started.

Apply the hanging or slow engine acceleration procedure. Now this procedure is not an emergency procedure, so it does not have an abnormal checklist attached to it. It is a complementary procedure and that is why the flight engineer can perform this procedure from memory. So what it does is it once again lowers the confidence level to engine 4 and then slowly starts to raise it again in the hopes that it will solve the problem. Unfortunately you forget one crucial thing and that is that in this procedure you also have to turn off the bleed air on that engine and the reason why that is important is because what is probably happening to engine number four right now is something called purge charge hogging.

During normal circumstances, all four engines will provide high-pressure lead air to the pressurization system. On the aircraft, this is done by one high-pressure and one low-pressure air bleed valve on each engine, when the engine is running. at low thrust both valves are open, but as the engines begin to rev up to higher confidence settings, then high pressure. The bleed valve will close and only the lowest pressure data valve will open. The problem is that if one engine accelerates slower than the others, you could get into a situation where the three engines that have accelerated will close their high-pressure air bleed valve. but the slower engine has both the high and low pressure bleed valves open and in that case that engine will absorb a lot more bleed air charge when bleed air is sucked out of the engine, which will actually take away some of the thrust . hinder your acceleration, so it could become a kind of self-playing piano, where at first it's slow and it keeps getting slower and harder to get that end to work, which is why it's so important to close the air bleed valve on this procedure, but the flight engineer forgets to do this while this is happening.

Remember that the outer vane and outer throttle are still engaged and the number four engine, which is situated farthest from the right wing, begins to deliver

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thrust, which means that thrust asymmetry is beginning to develop where in the left wing both engines generate confidence and on the right wing essentially only one engine generates confidence, this means the plane will start to turn to the right, the autopilot does not have any authority over the rudder is fine, this is the same on the 737 that I'm flying so the only thing the autopilot can do to counteract this yaw is to start bringing the aileron in to the left and bank it to the left to counteract the yaw that is forcing it to the right now the engineer The flight officer also notices that the main light generator has appeared on engine number four and this is actually an indication that the engine is not only struggling to accelerate but has actually failed, so he calls this to the captain and tells him that now we have a failure on engine number four and it starts to prepare to issue the engine failure checklist which is a normal checklist and it also starts to prepare to calculate the cruising altitude of the aircraft tree engine because the airplane It cannot sustain 41,000

feet

with only three engines, so it is very important that you quickly find out what altitude it can maintain because otherwise the speed will begin to reduce.

At this point, the captain also asks the flight engineer to try to restart the engine even. although the plane is still at 41,000 feet and the highest altitude for a restart attempt is actually 30,000 feet, the first officer heard and saw all of this happening and heard the flight engineer announce engine failure while this is happening, is watching returns and notices that the supplemental flight engineer has stuck his head into the cockpit and first also tells him to get in and start helping the flight engineer try to restart the engine. The first officer is also looking down at his instruments and notices. that the speed is starting to decrease, so he tells this to the captain, the captain responds to this by telling the first officer to contact Oakland air traffic control and request lower levels so they can begin the descent and maintain speed to stay safe. at time 10 14 and 11 seconds the first of them calls auckland atc and asks them to come down he does not declare mayday he does not declare pan and does not notify them of the engine failure at this point oakland atc tells them to wait and this is a good reminder for any pilots watching why it is so important to establish at least a panning pattern because then you will attract the attention of our traffic control and they will most likely not tell you to wait they will issue an immediate descent clearance which is what desired in a situation like this, the first officer later testified that he heard nothing else coming from Oakland ATC, but the ATC transcript shows that between 10 and 15 13 and 10 1828 ATC arrived and cleared Air Flight 06 China to descent plane level 270 and then they were called six more times without any response from the flight crew, it is very likely that the reason the crew could not answer that was that they were in the middle of this horrible disruption that is about about to happen.

Meanwhile, the captain is monitoring his airspeed and doesn't like what he sees, the speed is going lower and lower, which is to be expected when you are holding 41,000 feet and he has lost an engine, so the captain decides which will turn off your pms system which will release the airplane from altitude control and then turn the pitch control wheel on the autopilot control panel down to initiate a descent but still on autopilot, but remember that the autopilot has no no helm authority. Well what is happening right now as the captain is trying to get the plane down and is concentrating on its airspeed is that the thrust of the remaining engines has been increased to Continuous Maximum, this has also increased the asymmetry between the wing left and right, so the plane is actually starting to drift to the right.

The autopilot has now entered its maximum input on the control wheel to the left, which is 22 degrees on the control wheel. This does not mean that the plane is turning 22 degrees to the left, it simply means that this is all the outside pilot can do. In fact, what the plane is doing is starting to turn slightly to the right and this is all due to that asymmetric trust. What needs to be done now is that the captain needs to start turning the left rudder to straighten the plane and have the control of the plane, but for some reason this is not done, it is concentrating more on its speed.

There is no rudder input and the plane begins to turn further and further to the right, the captain continues to monitor his speed and notices that the plane is still decelerating and decides that he is now going to disengage the autopilot to pitch the nose forward. down and get the speed under control what you don't realize is that by disengaging the autopilot you will now face the full effect of asymmetrical confidence, something that you have not yet compensated for in time 10 14 and 50 seconds the plane has taxied 64 degrees to the right and is now descending four degrees just 10 seconds later they are at a roll angle of 92 degrees and are descending 27 degrees the plane continues to turn at a really high roll rate and this makes the captain believe there is something wrong With this instrumentation, he simply cannot believe what he is seeing.

The same thing is happening to the first officer. They communicate this to you. They think something is wrong with our instrumentation, but there is no indication that anything is wrong with the three of them. The primary goodbyes indicate the same thing, they have no warning flags to indicate that they are actually showing the horrible truth of what is happening to the aircraft. They continue to rotate a full 360 degrees around the roll axis as pitch approaches vertical. By doing so, the speed also increases and approaches its maximum certified limit. The captain realizes this, but since they are now inside a cloud layer and he doesn't trust his instrumentation, he simply doesn't know what to do and now they have completely lost their situational awareness while this is happening, the flight engineer realizes that the airplane is adopting an altered attitude, he approaches and increases the thrust of the engines, but he also notices that the engines do not respond immediately.

This is probably because they are still at a pretty high altitude up there, the air is very thin and the jet engines take a while to respond to trusty stick inputs, but since things are now speeding up and getting worse so quickly, you probably just don't think about it. As he assumes all four engines have been shut down, the flight engineer now raises his hand and turns on the backup ignition switch to try to restart.turn on the engines that he believes have failed, but as he does so, the captain, who is desperately trying to stop increasing center speed is now pulling hard on his yoke while doing so at this high speed, is actually subduing the plane. at extreme g forces on the first pull-up he does, he pulls 4.8 g, that's so many g forces.

As the flight engineer who is trying to restart the engines is forced with his face and hands towards the center pedestal, the reserve captain and flight engineer have now also entered the cockpit to see what is happening and the They push to the ground and cannot get up from there only because of the G forces. Finally, the captain manages to stop the speed of descent and continues pulling. Let him remember that he is still in the clouds. He still doesn't trust his instrumentation, which means the plane is now rising and the airspeed is accelerating and reaching only 80 to 100 knots, the indicated airspeed.

When the captain sees this, he panics and pushes. forward to regain speed in control and this once again accelerates the plane. above the maximum certified speed, what happens next is that the captain and first officer would use their combined force to try to pull the plane out of this dive and as they do so they create a crushing 5.1 gs that lasts several seconds and only To put this into perspective, the type of G-forces that astronauts will be subjected to during a launch or during reentry is around 3 gs. At 11,000 feet the plane breaks out of the cloud layer, which means that the pilots now have a real horizon that they can use to orient themselves, this means that they manage to level the plane at about 9,500 feet, increasing their confidence to stabilize the flight and it looks like they now have the plane under control, but they have descended over 30,000 feet in

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than two and a half minutes, now you might think that will be the end of this horrible story, but you couldn't be further from the truth and I'll tell you all about what happens next to this plane right after this.

Short message, I have some really exciting news for you. It is now 100 free for anyone who has even the slightest hint of wanting to become a professional pilot to join the airline pilots club using the link below. The club will offer you things like the Airline Vocational Aptitude Test which will show you what you might need to improve before you start your training. This test can also be used during or after your training to prepare for the airline application process. It will also give you access to airline quality. E-learning like threat and error management and crew resource management and access to a large community of people like you who might be on their way to starting their training or people who are already in training or people like me who can give you feedback. of what the industry is really like, this and much more is now available absolutely free and if this sounds interesting to you, we will use the link in the description below, it is the airlinepilotclub.com registration and let's start working towards it. you in the right seat right now go back to the video so the Boeing 747 house now levels out at about 9500 feet and the pilots are starting to get their bearings the flight engineer comes over and checks if the engines are running or not and he discovers that yes, motors one, two and three are working normally, they respond normally to input from the truss lever, but motor number four still fails.

Use the non-normal in-flight engine restart checklist to start finishing number 4 and start up, so now you have all four engines back up and running at 10 17:05 the first officer calls air traffic control and reports that we have experienced a fire, we have an emergency and we are at 900,000 feet the first officer also requested that the radar vectors be returned to course towards Los Angeles, air traffic control provides this and also gives them clearance to ascend to the upper flight to 200. During the climb, the first officer calls our traffic control and says, "We can, we can control the plane," which I bet is a nice thing to hear.

If you are at air traffic controller, Oakland atc also comes in and asks the plane if they want to divert to San Francisco, which is the closest available major airport on their route, but the crew responds that conditions are now normal. We would like. To continue observing Los Angeles, shortly after this they get further clearance to climb to flight level 3-5-0, but during the climb the flight engineer is doing a panel scan and notices that the main body doors that lands here are open and that's the The main body gear is actually down and locked when they realize this, they level out at 27,000 feet because the maximum altitude they can fly at with the gear out is 29,000 feet and start looking at their fuel numbers to see if they can actually continue the flight or not. with the remaining fuel and reach Los Angeles, in addition to this, the flight engineer also notices that the number one hydraulic system is completely depleted, it is indicating zero somewhere around here, the crew must have also contacted the cabin crew in the back because at time 10 38 and 39 seconds they call traffic control again, declare an emergency and say that they have injured people on board and that they would like to divert to San Francisco.

Air traffic control obviously gives them a direct vector to San Francisco and gives them a descent at unknown discretion. Basically, they can descend however they want to get to runway 2-8 left in San Francisco. The plane begins its descent. All engines are operating normally at this point and they are using the external pilots as they begin their approach. They also realize that they need to lower the gear manually because they have lost the number one hydraulic system, so they do this and proceed to make a successful normal landing on runway two eight left after landing. The captain turns into one of the high speed ones. taxiways, but since it lacks a hydraulic system, it only has limited nose wheel steering, so it decides to stop the plane on the taxiway, turns off the engine and asks for a suit to take them to the terminal, but What happened in the back and Well, it turns out that as far as the passengers and crew were concerned, it actually wasn't that bad.

One of the cabin crew members had injured his back so badly that he had to go to the hospital, but he was discharged about three and one days later. One of the passengers had fallen and broken his right foot, but those were the only injuries suffered by people in the cabin. There was also a big mess because the overhead compartments had opened and things had fallen out and people were scared, but the true extent of gravity. The details of this accident actually came to light when the engineer started looking at the plane because what they found was that, first of all, both wings had permanently folded upward about two or three inches at the wingtips. , now they were still within the airplane manufacturer's kind of tolerance, but the left aileron had been permanently damaged in several places and when they got to the landing gear section of the airplane they realized that both the load assembly of the Left and right landing gear had separated from their attachments due to the enormous g. -forces this, in turn, had forced the main body landing gear outward and knocked down the landing gear doors which had separated and simply fallen off the plane, which is why the landing gear doors They were indicated open and the train was lowered and locked when the engineers arrived.

At the rear of the plane, the epinaut was horrified at what they found because large sections of the horizontal stabilizer had been completely torn off. On the left side, the outside of the horizontal stabilizer and the outside elevator were completely gone and there was also a break with it in the elevator actuator hydraulic line that was connected to hydraulic system number one, so that's where it had been drained from. the number one hydraulic fluid and on the right side there was very similar damage to the outside of the The horizontal stabilizer was also gone and only a small part of the outside lift remained.

The engines were in surprisingly good condition. There was a little scuffing on the fan rotor friction strips, but other than that they were reasonably intact, engine number four was removed once again. and they put them through testing and this time they found some fuel feed anomalies which were probably the cause of the engine shutting down in flight, in my opinion this just goes to show how incredibly durable these planes are and how much punishment they can take and still carry on. flying safely is absolutely astonishing in my opinion the conclusion of the final report was that a single engine failure had led to asymmetrical confidences that the asymmetrical confidence had been masked by the autopilot who attempted to keep the plane's wings level by flying forward the captain had been obsessed with airspeed and was unable to input any rudder to stabilize the aircraft, which in turn led to a loss of control once he disengaged the autopilot and lost a lot of situational awareness because both he and The first officer did not believe what they saw on their Flight Instrumentation, this loss of situational awareness was only resolved when the plane came out of the cloud and they gained access to a natural horizon that they could use to stabilize the plane.

Interestingly, there were no recommendations that came out of this accident, but I think that there are some things that we can still learn from it, for example, know your situation, know your airplane, understand what it shows you, so that if you encounter, for example, an engine failure, know what to do also if you don't really understand If your automatic systems are doing well, disconnect and fly the plane manually and do it as soon as possible. Then you can always reengage autopilot once he has everything under control and also trust that his instrumentation is fine unless there is a sign of failure or an obvious sign. indication that the instrument is not working, you and your vestibular system will still be better off now if you want to watch a crazy video about pilots who had to fight with their plane and lose control of it for more than two hours, then watch The Video It's really amazing up here.

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