Human ingenuity saved the day for plane in crisis

[November 19, 2010]  WASHINGTON (AP) -- One moment, the super-sized airliner was climbing thousands of feet over Indonesia. The next, the engine exploded, shooting flames and shrapnel through one wing. Computer warnings of impending systems failures throughout the aircraft started flashing on cockpit screens.

That was the position five pilots found themselves in two weeks ago when their Qantas jetliner suffered an extraordinary engine breakdown that set off a cascade of events. Each one would have represented a serious safety problem on an ordinary day.

The Airbus A380, which was carrying more than 450 passengers and crew, is on the leading edge of a new generation of smarter, more highly automated airliners -- planes so sophisticated that they can sometimes even override a pilot to prevent a critical error. But in this crisis, the pilots' quick and creative thinking, not computer programming, landed the plane safely.

"These conditions were a step beyond what the airplane was designed for, and it was the pilots who sorted it out so that it resulted in a safe landing," aviation safety consultant John Cox of St. Petersburg, Fla., said in an interview Thursday.

Richard Woodward, vice president of the Australian and International Pilots Association and a fellow Qantas A380 pilot who has spoken to the pilots, told The Associated Press that the amount of failures faced by the pilots was "unprecedented."

"There is probably a 1 in 100 million chance to have all that go wrong," Woodward said in an interview.

But it did.

Engine pieces sliced electric cables and hydraulic lines in the wing. One of the beams that attaches the wing to the plane was damaged as well. And the wing's two fuel tanks were punctured. The leaking fuel created an imbalance between the left and right sides of the plane, Woodward said.

The electrical problems prevented the pilots from pumping fuel forward from tanks in the tail. The plane became tail heavy, a condition that could have caused the Singapore-to-Sydney jetliner to lose lift, stall and crash.

And then there was that torrent of computer messages, 54 in all, alerting the pilots to system failures or warning of impending failures.

Luckily, two extra pilots, both captains, were aboard the flight on Nov. 4, two of them undergoing evaluation. In all, the crew had more than 100 years of flying experience.

"The computer can only do what it knows how to do," Cox said. "These extreme catastrophic conditions, very rare as they may be, point to the need for very high-quality training and high-caliber individuals flying the plane."

The pilot, Capt. Richard de Crespigny, concentrated on handling the controls, while the others dealt with the computer alarms and made announcements to the passengers, some of whom said they were frantically pointing to flames streaming from the engine. Working flat out, it took 50 minutes for the pilots to address all the messages.

When pilots receive safety warnings, they are supposed to check the airline's operating manual and implement specific procedures. But with so many warnings, the Qantas pilots had to sort through and prioritize the most serious problems first.

It's likely that for some of the problems there were no procedures because no airline anticipates so many things going wrong at once, said John Goglia, a former National Transportation Safety Board member.

Attention since the Nov. 4 incident has focused on the Airbus 380's damaged Rolls Royce engine. As many as half of the 80 engines that power A380s, the world's largest jetliners, may need to be replaced, Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce said Thursday. That raises the possibility of shortages that could delay future deliveries of the superjumbo.

Qantas has grounded its fleet of six A380s.

Woodward nonetheless praised the plane, saying it was a testament to its strength that it was able to continue to fly relatively well despite all the problems. But he also said it's likely reconsideration will be given to the design and location of electrical wiring in the wings.

Airplanes are supposed to be designed with redundancy so that if one part or system fails, another can perform the same function. That didn't always happen in this case, safety experts say.

"The circumstances around this accident will certainly cause the regulatory authorities to take a long and hard look at a number of certification issues," said Goglia, the former NTSB member and an expert on aircraft maintenance.

"What we have got to ensure is that systems are separated so that no single point of failure can damage a system completely," Woodward said. "In this situation, the wiring in the leading edge of the wing was cut. That lost multiple systems."

However, Michael Barr, who teaches aviation safety at the University of Southern California, said a commercial plane can't be designed with certainty to withstand a spray of shrapnel, which can inflict damage anywhere. The proper focus, he said, should be on determining what caused the engine to fail and fixing that problem.

All the experts were agreed on one point.

"It must have been an exciting time on that flight deck," Barr said drily. "It's not something you'd ever want to try again."

[Associated Press; By JOAN LOWY]

Associated Press writers Rohan Sullivan in Sydney, Greg Keller in Paris and Joshua Freed in Minneapolis contributed to this report.

Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.