BA pilot feared the worst as he struggled to land plane

Times (UK) ^ | 1/19/07 | Steven Swinford and Richard Woods

[GovernmentShrinker]

THE pilot of the British Airways aircraft that crash-landed at Heathrow said he feared the flight would end in “catastrophe” as he struggled to cope with a double engine failure just two miles from touchdown. First Officer John Coward, 41, said both engines lost power simultaneously, leaving him with just seconds to bring the aircraft down.

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Investigators examining the wreckage of flight BA038 are now focusing on the theory that the crash was caused by a failure in the avionics and electronics systems that control the plane’s engines. . . . A senior industry source said: “. . . The AAIB has identified that the problem seems to be connected with the avionics and and electrics which link the flight deck to the engines.

-- snip --

A former 777 pilot said that it was extremely unlikely that both engines would have suffered failure at the same time. “For two engines to fail at that stage of the flight - it’s not lack of fuel or contamination,” he said. “It’s got to have been commanded \[by the automatic control systems\]. We are all aghast.”

[GovernmentShrinker]

How fast would the systems have rebooted? Remember, the co-pilot first noticed a problem 40 seconds before planned landing. And we don’t actually know that the systems didn’t start rebooting, either just before or just after the landing.

Like I said, I don’t really think this was an EMP, but I do think al Qaeda, with its vast money and expertise, is capable of producing an EMP weapon that could do this sort of thing, though perhaps with unreliable results — i.e. a reliability level that wouldn’t be acceptable for military or law enforcement use, but would be acceptable if your only purpose is to wreak havoc in the Western world. Something highly unreliable would surely be easier to build, and thus some into existence sooner, than something reliable.

[keepitreal]

This COPILOT had bawrs. BIG ONES! He dropped the nose of the aircraft , got up some speed, and then brought the nose up so she would drift in. If he had pulled up for a go around, they all would be dead. WOW!

I'm tired of hearing that airline pilots are just glorified bus drivers. This is what they should be paid a good living for.

[GovernmentShrinker]

No, the investigators said on Saturday that they were focusing on avionics and electrical systems. Remember, the very first concern in a crash landing situation is fire. Determining whether there was any significant amount of fuel in the tanks or spilled in the crash path would have been accomplished within a half hour of the crash, probably sooner. It’s possible that something caused the flow of fuel to the engines to be stopped, but at this point I think the “ran out of fuel” possibility has been ruled out.

At this point, they’ve already moved the plane off the tarmac — something they most definitely would not have done without establishing whether there was fuel in the tanks. And if the tanks had been breached by the impact and lost their fuel while skidding along, every passenger and emergency ground crew worker would have smelled it — there was a very short distance between the impact and where the plane came to a complete stop.

[TalonDJ]

I don’t know the hot start reboot requirements on that particular system but it would be a matter of a handful of seconds. Yes we don’t know if it happened but I would have expected it to mention somewhere if all the displays blanked. They described thir dawning knowlege that something was wrong in terms of ‘the autothrottle moved the levers and now extra thrust happened’ instead of in terms of ‘everything went out for a few seconds and when it came back we were losing power’.