The A380 lost a further 109ft, dipping to just 395ft, before climbing away, the aircraft’s ground-proximity warning system having sounded ‘terrain’ and ‘pull up’ alerts.
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Back in the days before that safety feature, they would have crashed.
Side note: Boeing must be happy to not-be-the-last-tech-problem.
The wing span is only 282 feet.
Horie Krap!
The radar controller was yelling at them, too.
[I know I’m commenting on an old article, I just happened to see this on a search and decided to comment.]
Exactly right, there’s been crashes for this very reason even with these newer safety features. I don’t know about this exact mishap but I think I know what happened, this happening at night is a very big clue.
There’s a human factors thing that happens at night. When approaching a lit-up airport at night, your brain is easily fooled to think that your ground-track distance to the airport is much less than it actually is. Your brain also perceives your altitude above the ground/airport to be much higher than actual. A pilots natural reaction is, “Oh crap, we gotta drop some serious altitude now!” So they drop altitude faster than the regs say they’re supposed to, they figure that the alarms and audible warnings are due to descent rate instead of actual altitude, and by the time they see that they’re close to the ground with an excessive descent rate, it’s too late to pull out. Luckily these guys caught it in time to save it. The human brain is easy to fool, especially at night. Trusting your eyes and seat-of-the-pants feel and not keeping a good eye on instruments has killed a lot of people.