Why did this Plane ACCELERATE uncontrollably after landing?! | Britannia Airways Flight 226A

this video is brought to you together with curiosity stream check out the link in the video description below for your special deal it's just before 10 o'clock in the evening on the 14th of september 1999. the weather in girona airport which is situated in the north of spain is horrendous with torrential rain lightning and gusty winds a boeing 757 from britannia airways is on final approach for runway 2-0 in girona the crew has already executed one missed approach from the opposite runway and they're now on their last attempt before they have to divert to barcelona but luckily this time in between the windshield wipers the crew can see the runway lights after approaching the captain whose pilot flying looks down onto his instrument momentarily and when he looks up again the runway is completely gone it's just blackness what's about to happen is equally terrifying and interesting it's the story about britannia airway flight 226 alpha stay tuned britannia airways flight 226 alpha was scheduled to fly from cardiff in the united kingdom down to geronia in the north of spain on the 14th of september 1999 and it was scheduled to be an evening flight the aircraft being used is a 7 year old boeing 757 200 which had at the time about 26 000 hours on the airframe now the boeing 757 is one of my absolute favorites it is a beautiful wide-body swept wing jet aircraft with two jet engines now there are a few things that you guys need to understand about the boeing 757 technically in order to understand what's about to unfold the first thing is that the majority of the electronic control units and electronic components is housed in something called the mec the main electronic center now this main electronic center is situated under the floorboards just off just behind the snowscare wheelwell bay the second thing is that the demand controls that comes from the pilots in the cockpit out to the engines and to the flight controls are transmitted through tensioned cables and pulleys that runs in a large majority on the the cabin floor through the floor beams through pre-drilled holes out to their respective components now because the cockpit is situated also very close to the nose wheel bay a large concentration of these cables also goes through just overhead the nose wheel well bay in the cockpit on this evening flight is a very experienced captain he's 57 years old he's got 16 hundred hours and three thousand five hundred and sixty two hours flown on the boeing 757. he's also type rated on the boeing 767 and the uh boeing 737 200 aircraft and also some minor general aviation aircraft to get with him is a 33 year old first officer he is flying the 757 as his first jet aircraft and he's got 1494 hours in total of which 1145 is flown on the 757 the pilots report for duty at time 1845 and they start going through their pre-flight preparation which includes checking for no tums that's if there's anything wrong on route or at the airport or alternates that they're going through but crucially also looking at the weather and they realize quite quickly that the weather in geronia is not great during the whole time that they're supposed to be there there is something called a temple group of heavy thunderstorms and rain now a temple group basically means that throughout the period for a maximum duration of about one hour there might be these thunderstorms moving through now i am based in yorona and i know that during the summer month these temple groups tend to be indirona almost all the time and that's because girona is situated very close to the pyrenees and there's a lot of humid air coming in from the mediterranean and the combination of that tend to lead to these really heavy thunderstorms towards the afternoon and evening but in this case that's not what causing these thunderstorms in this case it's actually a cold front that's moving in from the west towards the east and it's bringing with it a front of these big thunderstorms that is moving slowly towards the east the significance of that is that normally these thunderstorms tend to be very local and easy to avoid however when you have a front moving through then you can expect much more thunderstorm activity when they looked at the weather they realized that this temper group for thunderstorms was there both for their destination girona but also their alternate barcelona second alternate rios but toulouse which is situated in france and a little bit more to the east had the thunderstorms coming in much later so the captain decides that it's probably a good idea to take a little bit of extra fuel here in case we have to do some holding so he decides to upload 15 minutes of extra fuel said and done the crew goes out they brief their cabin crew they go out to the aircraft and the first officer is going to be the one who's going to be pilot flying for this first leg at time 1940 the boeing 757 takes off from cardiff and starts moving down towards girona in spain on board there are 236 passengers two pilots and seven cabin crew the climb and the cruise phase is completely normal and as the aircraft starts getting closer towards gerona the first officers pilot flying starts preparing for the approach and they're planning on doing a instrument landing system approach an ils approach in frontward 2-0 now geronimo is a little bit of a complicated airport to fly into if you're not used to it it's situated quite close to the pyrenees there are mountains terrain to the north and to the west of the airport and a little bit to the east as well and there's only an ils available from the north going in from the 2-0 from the south there is a vor approach instead with a slightly higher glide angle which makes it a bit more complicated to fly anyway as they're getting closer they're now taking the weather and the as soon as they get into contact with girona tower they get the latest weather information now the weather turns out to be a bit complicated the wind is reported to be from the north at 10 knots the qnh that's in the air pressure is one zero one zero visibility is five kilometers in thunderstorms and rain with scattered clouds at eighteen hundred feet and broken clouds cumulonimbus at three thousand five hundred accumulating nimbus is thunderstorm cloud temperature twenty and dew point also twenty and if you watched my episode about the air morocc incident you know that when the temperature and the dew point are close to each other it means that the air humidity is very very high the tower also reported that the main thunderstorm cell was situated to the south west of the airfield when the crew received this weather they quite quickly realized that with that wind northerly at 10 knots if they were going to shoot an approach in from where 2-0 they're going to have almost 10 knots of tailwind and on top of that runway 2-0 has a bit of a down slope and it's wet all of that basically means that it's harder to get the aircraft to stop with those kind of conditions so the captain elects to try to come in for runway zero two instead the opposite runway which has that slightly more complicated vor approach and because that approach is a bit more complicated he decides to take controls and to fly the approach as he is now starting to set up for the approach the first officer contacts the cabin crew and tells them that it's going to be a quite bumpy arrival in quite a lot of turbulence to tell them to start stowing everything and preparing the cabin for landing and he also makes a pa to the passengers telling them that it's very likely that the approach and landing is going to be quite turbulent now during the descent in towards girona there is an increasing amount of thunderstorm activity and at one point the cabin crew actually caught them up and tells them that she noticed that they likely had a lightning strike on the left-hand side of the aircraft the crew checks for any indication of anything wrong but there's nothing everything looks like it's working normally but it's starting to get more and more turbulent at time 2118 as the aircraft is now approaching the goal of romeo november vr to start the full procedure vr approach the captain realizes that they're a little bit high still so he likes to extend the speed brakes now the standard operating procedures whenever you're using speed brakes is that you keep your hand on them the speed brake is only really supposed to be used for a limited amount of time to rectify either you being high or having a high speed and therefore when you don't need it anymore you're supposed to store it but it's likely that the workload has now started to creep up on the captain and he forgets the speed brake in the extended position at time 2122 the aircraft arrives overhead the gold from november vr at 7200 feet descending down to 5000 feet and the way that a full procedure vr approach works is that you first establish yourself into a hold and then once you are established inbound towards the vr you can start the racetrack procedure to actually initiate the descent for final approach now as the aircraft is descending outbound from the first passage over the vor the turbulence is getting worse and worse there's loads of lightning outside of the aircraft and as the aircraft is turning right inbound towards the vor the turbulence actually dislodges the approach plates that the captain has clipped onto his yoke he cannot find the approach plate it disappears under him in the cockpit so from this point onward he's asking the first officer to read out the information from his approach plate about what's supposed to happen next on the approach but this is also likely increasing the workload at time 2126 the aircraft once again pauses overhead the goal for romeo november vr to start the race track procedure as they're turning outbound now they select flaps one and flaps five remember the speed brake is still extended at this point and they're burning more fuel than they would normally as they're maintaining 5000 feet initially and then once they're outbound can start descending down to 3 400 feet to turn final the crew now gets the latest weather information from yorona tower and it's not getting better okay the tower now says that the visibility is four kilometers in heavy rain thunderstorms and that the thunderstorm is now over the airfield this is not great news for the crew okay but they're checking their weather radar and according to the weather radar they should be okay to continue the approach however they're starting to look at their fuel and they realize that on this point as they're turning inbound towards final approach towards the vr they have about 3600 kilos of fuel remaining now the minimum diversion fuel to go to their primary alternate barcelona is 2 800. so the crew starts talking to each other about this and they say that if we have to go around from this approach then we will just head straight towards barcelona they are now established on final approaching to watch the runway and they complete the landing checklist and the selected landing flaps flaps 30 and it's when they read through the landing checklist they realize that the speed break has been extended this whole time so they put the speed brake down they arm it so that it's available for landing and they continue their approach during the final approach after the landing check is complete there are several calls from the first officer of bug minus 10 which basically indicate that the indicated speed they're supposed to have that they're dropping below that with 10 knots and this is indicative of the kind of turbulence that they're flying through at time 2133 the tower controller sees the aircraft and gives them the latest wind before landing now the wind has shifted 180 degrees around so it's now 200 degrees at 12 knots which is more than the maximum tailwind that they're allowed to land with the tower tells them that they can if they want to do a visual circuit to run for runway 2-0 or do a circling approach but this is not something that the crew has prepared for nor have they briefed it so instead the crew elects to go around now these kind of wind reversals i have to say is very common for girona especially when there is thunderstorm activity because as the thunderstorm moves over the field there's a lot of wind actually being blown out from the base of the cloud so as it's moving so will the wind and that is it's a really really tricky thing for us as pilots to kind of foresee because we always want to land into the wind and with these kind of changing winds we might not have the possibility to do so and this is what happened to these guys so they went around which is the correct call to make when the crew completes the missed approach procedure remember they had previously discussed that they were going to divert straight to barcelona in case they couldn't land now they're getting the latest weather from barcelona and it turns out that weather in barcelona is good right there are no cbs around so it's wide open for them but they've also just seen the runway and they have had the latest wind which is straight down for runway 2-0 the first officer has already briefed for an eyeless approach so the crew decides to do one more approach this time going in for an instrument landing system an ils approach from where to sit up which is less complicated and they they don't do a new briefing from a 2-0 since it's already been briefed and it just goes straight into it they help they are discussing the fuel at this point as well they realize that they are going to have potentially 200 kilos less than the company decided minimum diversion fuel which is not good it could render them in a position where they have to call a mayday fuel if they do have to divert but given the current conditions in yoruna they are quite confident that they can commit to iran and come in and land the captain at this point also scans the weather radar for last time he sees there's still thunderstorms activity in the area but he is quite happy about the approach path so he turns off the wet radar why that is done i don't really know and it's not really explained either in the final report as the crew is turning on to final firmware two sido they get their first insufficient fuel warning from the fmc cdu but since they have already discussed this this is not something that worries them however you can kind of feel how the urgency of getting the aircraft down on the ground is starting to build up now during the approach there is a conversation going between the captain and first officer where the captain basically says that you stay on the instruments i will stay and look outside for visual cues at time 2145 the aircraft is completely established on the glide slope with the landing flaps out and the landing checklist complete they've also received the landing clearance from yorona tower and at this point the captain calls out lights inside now that normally indicates that we see the approach lights but not the full runway yet so they continue to descend and at 500 feet above ground the captain calls contact which is what we call when we see the runway at this point the tower controller also can see the aircraft on final approach so she gives them the final approach wind which is 150 degrees at six knots now the aircraft passes through the minimum they continue and at about 250 feet above the ground the captain disconnects the autopilot and out of throttle and from this point onwards things are now going to happen really quickly because as he disconnects he suddenly starts getting high on approach we don't really know the reason for that we do see on the flight data recorder that there was quite a lot of inputs on the controls which might indicate that he felt a little bit of turbulence but in any case they're going higher and higher on the glide slope at 110 feet first of the calls out full scale fly down which indicates that he is looking at his ils instrument and it's now showing that they are well above the glide slope the captain reacts by checking down on his own instruments and he also pushes almost fully forward on the nose which initiates a fairly rapid descent rate and when the captain looks up from his instrumentation it's all black he can't see anything the runway has disappeared now remember that this is happening at 110 feet they are now inputting forward pitch which means the aircraft is increasing its descent rate almost a thousand feet per minute which the first officer is just about to call out one thousand down and the captain doesn't know what's going on he doesn't know or understand why he suddenly cannot see the runway that was just there this is really quickly followed by the ground proximity warning system calling out sink rate stink rate and then 10. now normally the gpws calls out 50 40 30 20 10 in order to aid us pilots to judge our flare but if the gpws feels that the descent rate and the closure rate of the ground is too high well then it will prioritize the sink rate call above those call outs so this now means that the captain is sitting there he doesn't understand why he doesn't see anything the aircraft is descending quickly down towards the ground he gets two sink rate warnings to which he does not react he hears ten and then the aircraft lands the aircraft touches down with both the nose skier and the main landing gears at the same time the touchdown with the descent rate of about 840 feet per minute which produces 3.3 g's now to put that into context in the case of the 757 if they land with more than 1.8 gs they have to do a hard landing inspection so this is a very hard landing the aircraft immediately bounces up quickly enough for the air ground sensing not to sense that are on the ground so there is no extension of the speed brakes of the spoilers what follows after this is a little bit hard to explain because on the flight data recorder there is an indication of the trust levels being momentarily and partially moved forward and the pitch being pushed fully forward however the captain couldn't really account for why this happened it is fully likely that they were not prepared for the touchdown at all when the touchdown came it came as a complete shock and he might have actually been pushed forward by the touchdown hence pushing the control forward anyway the result of this is not good this means that the nose of the aircraft is now being pushed downwards and 1.9 seconds after the first touchdown the second touchdown occurred this time on the nose wheel initially as soon as the nose gear hits the ground strange things start to happen the first thing that happens is that all electrical power is immediately removed from the aircraft so this means that it goes completely black the only lighting available inside of the passenger cabin would be the emergency lighting because the electrical power disappeared the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder stops recording also things like the flight spoilers are disengaged the signals that would govern the outer brake system disappears same with the anti-skid system so from now on everything is going to be calculated on outside visual cues after the accident happened the second thing that happens is that the aircraft now starts accelerating uncommanded the first officer calls out speed brake when he realizes that it's not extending they try to extend it it doesn't work the captain now tries to apply max manual tool brakes but it doesn't work either instead the aircraft continues to accelerate down the runway center line about 1000 meters after the second touchdown the aircraft starts veering out towards the right it goes out to the side of the runway and at the far side of the runway from round two zero in girona there is an earth mound basically a small hill the aircraft now starts climbing with the right main landing gear up the side of this hill and because it is coming in at a very shallow angle the aircraft can actually withstand the loads that comes with this it is estimated that when the aircraft left the runway they did so at a speed between 140 to 190 knots and they touched down with 140 knots so as the aircraft is now climbing up this mound it's actually trajecting it forward and upwards this throws the aircraft back up into the air and the nose landing gear which is still turning even though it is pushed back into the uh the structure of the aircraft gets tangled with the airport perimeter fence and gets ripped off at this point the aircraft is now partially flying partially being thrown past and through a couple of trees before it falls down onto a field which is below the aircraft level about 10 meters below when it hits the field both engines are torn off the wings and the aircraft keeps sliding down into the mud and breaks in two places but finally it comes to a stop the captain hits his head as the aircraft is departing the airport perimeter and he's knocked unconscious but he wakes up a few seconds after the aircraft comes to a complete stop once the aircraft had come to a complete stop the cabin crew immediately initiated the evacuation of the aircraft they did a great job and managed to open most of the emergency exits some of them were at an angle where they were just too heavy to kind of open but most of them were open immediately the problem though was that the aircraft was now lying flat on its belly so when the emergency exits opened and the slides inflated the slides were basically lying on the ground horizontally i remember it was still pouring with rain outside and the rain started to fill up this emergency exit slides quickly so the poor passengers now had to evacuate and in some cases wade through a lot of water on the slide to get out onto the field outside and once they get out on the field it was completely pitched black the only light they had was the emergency light system from the aircraft and some lighting from the thunderstorm that was still passing over the field now in the tower the tower controller very quickly understood that something was wrong she hit the emergency button and she told the emergency crew to start looking for the aircraft because she had only seen it on final and then it just disappeared the emergency firefighters and the rescue crew went up and down runway 2-0 but there was no sign of the aircraft and it actually took them about 20 minutes to locate where the aircraft was and another 10 minutes to reach and start helping the passengers and during that time actually one of the passengers had climbed back through the way that the aircraft had flown out walked past the runway and into the terminal building to start pointing the rescue crew in the right direction but before we go any further i just want to point out the real miracle of this story which is that even though this aircraft had accelerated down the runway uncontrollably basically on its nose exited the runway and got catapulted off the airport down the slope 10 meters down below the airport level and a couple of hundred meters into a field where it broke into three parts all 236 passengers and nine crew managed to evacuate the aircraft safely there were two serious injuries and i think around 40 passengers that had to go to the hospital and unfortunately one of those passengers died five days after the accident from internal injuries that they had sustained but that was undetected at the hospital so this was considered a fatal accident where one passenger died but given the circumstances i still think that the outcome was quite miraculous but what actually happened here guys how come that the captain lost visual contact of the runway that close to the airport even though he'd seen the lights from far out and how come that after the second touchdown all the electrics disappeared and the aircraft started uncontrollably accelerating down the runway well after this short message from my sponsor i will tell you all about it i want to take this opportunity right now to just thank the sponsor of this episode which is curiosity stream and i love to have them on the sponsors because i know that you guys are watching this episode because you just like me love nerding out into a great documentary or a non-fictional story and that's exactly what curiosity stream is all about they are a subscription streaming service with thousands of high quality non-fictional stories or documentaries from some of the best filmmakers in the world now i am watching right now something called hurricane the anatomy it's a mini-series and i had no idea that i knew so little about hurricanes if this sounds interesting to you then go to curiositystream.com mentor pilot use the coupon code mentor pilot and that will give you a whopping 25 of the yearly fee and that comes down to wait for it 14.99 per year which is just insanely cheap for what you get so if that sounds interesting go down click the link support me by supporting my sponsors and enjoy the investigation team now started looking into this accident and they started by looking at the weather at the planning stage for the crew they saw and recognized that the captain had decided to take 15 minutes of extra fuel but given the intensity of the thunderstorm and the amount of thunderstorms at the destination they thought that it would probably have been prudent to take a little bit more in this case this was further compounded by the fact that during the descent in towards girona they left the speed brake out which likely burned up quite a bit more fuel that they could have used later on and this would have then built up on the workload that was sent by the crew when it came to how the crew had been working together they thought that the crm was largely efficient the first officer did a good job and done many many call outs when it came to speed and deviations from the uh from the flight parameters but that the workload management in the crew was not great the captain had taken on way too much responsibility and was taken on way too much workload and when they continued to look into the actual weather at jerome airport they realized that the thunderstorms had actually been so severe that they had caused multiple power outs in the area around jeroen airport now jerome airport in itself has backup generators and they are certified to work within 15 seconds of a power cut so if the power disappears within 15 seconds the emergency power has to become back online and that would feed for example approach and runway lights when this system was tested it actually showed that it started up within 11 seconds so it's way within the criteria for that type of airport the tower however is running on both backup power and battery so if you were in the tower you wouldn't have noticed a power cut to the rest of the airport and it's very likely that during that crucial second just before touchdown when the captain was looking inside on his instruments one of these power cuts might have occurred and those 11 seconds it would have taken to come back online during that time period the entire airport would have been completely black so when the captain looked up he couldn't see anything it was just heavy rain no lights in front of him nothing left of the visual picture of the runway that he'd seen just a few seconds before when he looked inside and this in turn could have caused such a spike in workloads such a startle effect to the captain that as he looked outside and couldn't get his situation awareness back couldn't understand where the aircraft was what the pitch was or anything that that inhibited him from actually taking the correct decision at this point which would have been to go around this was then further compounded by the fact that it was so close to the runway when this happened and that the captain was correcting from a high position on the glide slope the ground proximity warning system and the way that that was designed to overrule the 50 40 30 20 10 calls with sink rate calls further made it hard for the flight crew to understand the relation between the aircraft and the runway when the aircraft first impacted the runway that would have come as a complete surprise to the flight crew they then bounced like i said initially they don't know if there was voluntarily input by the captain to actually push the nose forward and the thrust a little bit forward or if that happened because he was just pushed against the controls there was no way of positively finding that out but what happened from the second touchdown as the nose landing gear was slammed into the ground was that the support structure for the north landing gear assembly was never designed to take that kind of forces so the entire doghouse structure as in the box that contains the gear as it's being retracted was pushed up through the aircraft structure and when it was pushed up remember that the mec the main electronic center was situated just behind the nose wheel well well it's very likely that this is what caused the power outage in the aircraft and the effect it had on other systems as well and on top of that to make things even worse as the dog house was now being pushed up through the aircraft structure it started interfering with the control cables to both flight controls but crucially the engines and by cutting some of those cables and actually putting extra tension on the remaining ones it likely caused the engines to start spooling up causing the forward acceleration of the aircraft once this had happened there was very little that the pilots could have done in order to control the aircraft because their control of their brakes their nose wheel steering their flight controls their engine control all of this would have been disrupted by the impact of the nose wheel the final report came with the following causes of the accident it is considered that the most probable cause of the accident was the destabilization of the approach below decision height with loss of external visual references and automatic height call-outs immediately before landing resulting in a touchdown with excessive descent rate in a nose-down attitude the resulting displacement of the north landing gear support structure caused disruption to aircraft systems that led to an uncommanded forward trust increase and other effects that severely aggravated the consequences of the initial events contributory factors were the impairment of runway visual environment as a result of darkness and torrential rain and the extinguishing of runway lights immediately before landing suppression of the automatic heights call out by the gpws sync rate audio caution the effect of shock and mental incapacitation on the pilot flying at the failure of the runway light which may have inhibited him from making a decision to go around the absence of specific flight crew training in flight simulators to initiate go around one below decision height now this was a little bit surprising but apparently prior to this event britannia airways pilots were not trained in the simulator to execute a go-around below the decision altitude for for any particular reason this is the type of training that we do quite often in the simulator nowadays where we you know see the runway at minimums and then something unexpected like a runway incursion happens and we are taught to go around but this type of training was not available at the time and lastly insufficient evaluation of the weather conditions particularly the moment and severity of the storm affecting the destination airport there were several recommendations that came out of this investigation there was a recommendation for boeing to start looking into a design change of the boeing 757 to make sure that it wasn't as susceptible to this type of disruption of the system in case there was a failure of the nose landing gear system this was actually not the first time this has happened it happened on another 757 which had similar results there was also a recommendation to implement training for pilots to make sure that they were trained to go around if a approach got destabilized below minimums there were several other recommendations that came out of this accident as well including a recommendation for girona airport to improve the training for its search and rescue personnel in order to improve the timing of finding crashed aircraft close proximity of the airport so as always guys i hope that you found this video interesting and if you did i hope that you've subscribed to the channel and that you've highlighted a little notification bell now if you want to see more of these type of videos there is a playlist up here that you can check out i've done quite a few of them now and if you want to buy this t-shirt or any of my other t-shirts that have available then check out the link to my teespring store in the description or i think there are actually links to some of my t-shirts here below the video have an absolutely fantastic day wherever you are and i'll see you next time [Music] bye [Music] you

Channel: Mentour Pilot

Views: 151,615

Rating: 4.9568992 out of 5

Keywords: Britannia Airways, Britannia Airways flight 226A, Boeing 757-200, Boeing 757, Girona Airport, Cardiff, Aircrash, air crash investigation, air crash, air crash disaster, aviation accidents, aviation accidents documentary, aviation accident clips, aviation accident investigations, aviation accidents explained, mentour pilot 737 max, mentour pilot turbulence, mentour pilot crash, Fear of flying, nervous passenger, aviation explained, pilot life, Runway excursion, human factor

Id: dMxvw2yfinA

Length: 35min 58sec (2158 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 12 2021