Airlines: May 2009 Archives

Unfortunately I'm travelling and not in a position to check this out properly, but what appears to be a pretty authoritative account of some first-rate aviating by a BA 747-400 crew on 11 May has now turned up. Reports of this Johannesburg incident have been popping up over the last 48 hours, getting increasingly lurid and decreasingly accurate.

But I think this looks about right. In short, a heavy 744 out of hot 'n' high Johannesburg suffers slat retraction on rotation due to spurious double thrust-reserver reverser unlock warnings. Result is a very non-spurious stick-shaker at 12ft and no slats until 160ft. Remember, while this crew was flying the aircraft they had good reason to believe they might be dealing with a double thrust-reserver reverser deployment, in which case it's unlikely they'd still be around to tell the tale.

To repeat, I don't know if this account is correct, but assuming it is then it's a very classy piece of flying. A thought I'll take with me on my BA A320 in a couple of hours time!

Update: a factual account of this incident has turned up on the NTSB website, derived from the South African authorities who are conducting the investigation.

Remarkable video today of the evacuation of a Boeing 737 with a landing-gear fire at Houston. Some people questioning how long it took to initiate, which is something like 2 minutes after the end of the landing run. Other people commenting on all the passengers coming down the one visible slide with hand-baggage, especially the guy with his briefcase chasing his papers over the tarmac. I'm not sure about the timing - seems an age when you sit here watching the video, probably seemed like no time at all to the crew. ATC tape here.

Good to see the crew not popping the doors on the fire-side of the aircraft though. Smart thinking.

This below is the text of a letter sent from Colgan Air VP flight operations Harry Mitchel to the chairman of ALPA's master executive council at Colgan, Capt Mark Segaloff.

The NTSB has released the transcript of the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) tape from the Colgan Air Bombardier Q400 in the Buffalo crash. It ends in the usual gut-wrenching way that these documents do, and no doubt some of you will have views on whether it should even be released.

It's important in this case though because it's widely known that the issue of the so-called sterile cockpit is, at the very least, a possible factor in what happened. This cockpit was clearly not sterile for a good part of the flight, but the talk was pretty much all of aviation and life on the line. Towards the end it becomes a grey area in which the crew, in their iced aircraft, are talking around the subject of icing as well as what's actually going on.

Anyway, it's all here. To be honest I'm not sure what I think about it, and I'm curious what pilots will say.

Buried in the pile of pretty incendiary documents on the Colgan Air Q400 crash that will start to become public today, I understand there is one that will cause particular angst in the pilot community. That's a suggestion from Colgan that cockpit voice recorder (CVR) extracts should become part of the flight operations quality assurance (FOQA) process.