Capt. Behnam UAL#1175 Fan Blade Out Event INTERVIEW

it's sunday the 28th of february my name is juan brown you're watching the blanco lyrio channel and it's time for an update we have a very special guest with us today the captain of united's flight 1175 that we just got done doing the ntsb report on last friday captain chris bannon [Music] [Music] still in there yeah probably what happened today and so here he is captain chris bennimore at his hanger here in auburn and chris this is your uh cessna cardinal yeah 177 rg she's a beautiful bird yeah brandon brand new engine brand new props paint glass cockpit super nice airframe we're having a lot of fun with it you're lucky to have a hanger here in auburn yes good to go we haven't set it up yet i'm gonna like to make it into a man cave but uh yeah it's a great airport great people here enjoying it great okay so let's go through this incident from the top there uh the right guy at the right time very highly experienced pilot at united airlines well let's do your background first you're a local guy you're northern california but you started where i grew up in the bay area we lived in san mateo and hayward went to sierra academy of aeronautics and after graduating from there became a flight instructor did charter work some cargo flying all in the bay area then joined western commuter in 1980 and worked there for three or four years and joined united in 1987. 87. and you've gone through a series of aircraft that united airlines you've been a captain for how many years at united uh about 27 years now wow and the different fleets of aircraft that you've flown at united uh i have flown the 727 uh 747 rope start or the the old classic we call it starter 757-767 um 737 747 400 and now the triple seven i was a czech airman for a number of years three years on this point 737 and uh over 15 years on a 75 and 767 and uh now on the triple seven czech airman yes and with this incident happened in 2018 february 2018 how many hours did you have on the triple seven at that time at that time i only had like 200 hours on the airplane that was pretty deodorant wow um well let's go through it from the beginning there uh there you were uh some 200 or so miles from honolulu at cruise altitude the flight originated out of san francisco to honolulu so that only required a crew of two pilots but the plane was so full you had a jump seater in the jump seat and and what was his um he was brand new to the triple seven as well wasn't he right so the flight was full coming out of san francisco beautiful day we uh the airplane carries 364 people but that day every seat was full plus we have number of young children under age of two and we call them lappers and their souls on board but they don't really count on weight manifest so we had 381 souls on board including the pilots and the flight tenant and uh we had a jump seater in gagarin who was commuting home to hawaii and ed finished triple seven ioe that morning in san fran so he was going home brand new out of school wow done with the training and i think god put him in that cockpit for a reason ah because as the story unfolds you'll see the important role that this third pilot played so uneventful flight uh etops obviously flight to hawaii and about 200 miles oh miles out you were you had just taken a restroom break i took your restroom break um we you know we had two guys in the cockpit so the flight tenants did not have to come to the cockpit at united you know when somebody leaves the cockpit you have to have another person in the cockpit so there was paul and ed in the cockpit i went to the bathroom came back sat down put my seatbelt on turned around to talk to paul to start doing the uh briefing for the approach and when all that worked yeah and then what so what happened uh there was a huge explosion followed by tremendous vibration violent vibration and you know you've like triple seven you know like when you're up there at mach 8 3 or 8 5 they ask you to slow down you bring the power back you feel a little pulling forward you know as the airplane decelerates we literally hit the glare shield i mean the impact was so severe that almost hit the glare shield and the autopilot disconnected and she rolled to about 45 degrees of bang at 36 000 feet mach 83 without any warning and so immediately you know i went into what i'm trained to do take care of the airplane first fly it and as i applied aileron left aileron my foot went in and for the left rudder and before i knew it i had full left deflection on the aileron and the rudder and she stopped kind of at 45 degrees hesitating and i asked paul that paul helped me push the nose over to break the angle of attack so she came back and throughout this whole confusion and you know being startled and not believing what's going on um i asked the other guys what's going on because both engine instruments were normal so here we are you know i have a airplane that is not behaving normal a full left deflection rudder my body is telling me to do one thing and my brain is looking at the icas the engine instruments and it's like both engines are normal so it was very confusing 30 seconds and both engines were normal because of the as we learned in the ntsb report the separation of the cowling took out the eec wiring and so ac lies dc dies so the the engine instruments for the right engine froze for what 15 or 30 seconds or so 30 seconds it was the longest 30 second of my life and so you got 30 seconds to contemplate things there as you're working through your startle factor there what were some of the other thoughts that you were thinking this could have possibly been well as i'm trying to process this you know obviously you're kind of in a shock we were not frightened or afraid but just trying to figure it out because your brain is telling you one thing by looking visually at the instruments and your body is telling you something different i do remember asking paul you know what's going on he says i don't know everything is normal ed sitting in the jump seat said hey maybe we had a mid-air collision but then again your brain is like okay i have a t-cast i'm a professional pilot there's a t-cap there's no r a there's no ta there was no intruder at 36 000 feet while you go through all this process all of a sudden the right engine just goes blank the right engine gauges just disappear disappeared so we didn't notice now we know that the reason for that was the information that was coming from the eec to the cockpit just froze so the last picture the state of my upper eye cast and that's why everything seemed normal but obviously it wasn't as soon as i saw the problem and noticed i said we have a severe engine damage let's run the checklist but the cockpit was shaking so violently literally so violently and the noise was so loud i think i told you it felt like you know the old movies you watched the submarine kind of goes silent and you start sinking into the creaking noises creaking that twisting metal noise i can't get that out of my head or or the metal building fallen that says kind of a sound we had and uh i do remember when i asked for severe engine damage checklist paul tried to reach paul tried to reach um the uh ecl that's the electronic checklist on the triple seven you don't use paper checklist right he tried to reach for that and he couldn't actually put his finger on so we went the old-fashioned way you know auto throttle off throttle back to idle and it was all verified and right engine shut down and from memory from memory item yes so after you know we shut the engine down the vibration didn't stop so just to tell the viewers the vibration felt like uh jokingly i say if you're driving a 18-wheeler with no shock absorber over the railroad track ah at 200 miles an hour that's the feeling we have yeah so after we shut the engine the vibration didn't stop i think in a scale of one to ten initially it was like 15. and ed sitting in the back just shouted shut the engine shut it down oh no i'm sorry pull the fire handle that's what he said we already shot the engine is a pull the fire handle but pulling the fire handle things went more towards normal so between i would say between level 1 to 10 initially was 15 and then it subsided to about level 7 and that's what the shaking you see on the end uh on the video and that stayed with us all the way through out until we landed and touched that a lot of shaking so we talked about in previous episodes about having we got pilot monitoring versus pilot flying whose leg was it on this one i gave the leg to paul so i told him paul there's a story behind okay paul was not based in san francisco he was based in washington dc so he tdy to sample just to fly to hawaii this was his second lecture to honolulu ever yeah oh man or at least on the triple so i said you can have the leg and when this incident happened up there you know and i just got hold of the control it just you know you go to your captain mode and all these years of flying whatever i mean i just grabbed that so this is not normal this is not your normal engine failure there's something seriously seriously wrong here so i said i've got it and if it's okay i'll go fly it and he says sure go ahead and you may you be you remain the pilot flying throughout this entire emergency because it took a lot of strength just to keep this thing upright right and you know when i do my briefing when i fly with the guys and say look uh even if it's my leg and something goes wrong because our pilots are so professionals like american delta you know we're trained so well so even if i have an emergency i initially take care of it then give you the airplane so i can have the big picture talk to dispatch talk to atc talk to the flight tenant talk to maintenance you know tom c and all of that but this was different this really took every answer my energy and concentration to fly the airplane she didn't want to fly she just was not flyable everything aerodynamically the wind was compromised and made it very difficult remember the diameter of a boeing triple seven engine is about as big around as an entire fuselage on a boeing 737 and it's the amount of flat plate area drag presented in this configuration that is making this aircraft so hard to control so once we knew what the problem was that it's the right engine i asked for a severe engine damage checklist paul ran through that i had already lowered the nose because my left eye was i was looking at the airspeed drum it was coming back and you know we know these airplanes are very powerful but you're not going to maintain 36 000 feet i'm one engine on one engine and i always knew it is like gotta be around mid-20s so i already lowered the nose because i saw the airspeed drum coming back i already turned directly to hon little and asked ed to give me direct honolulu you know verify put it execute put it in the left so i start heading because as you know as we come to a hon little you kind of turn left there left for yeah what's that gamble bamboo yeah and then that takes you to the right downwind by by us going direct i think we shaved about almost six or seven minutes of flight time and of course uh the autopilot kicked off the autopilot can't fly the airplane because it's so out of trim and so and you're unable to re-engage the autopilot i believe three times we tried to re-engage the autopilot so what happened is after the explosion we had numerous lights going on we we knew the most the biggest problem was securing the engine and then deal with the rest of it and i had my left hand on the yoke right hand on the throttle i had firewall the left engine because i saw the airspeeds coming back i'm already lowering the nose and i knew i have 200 miles to go so all these things go in my head that we're over the open ocean there's no runways here so it's not like okay let's go land here i looked at my distance to honolulu realized that we have a big problem here i have to baby this thing for almost 200 miles 40 minutes to honolulu at the same time we started descending we went imc at 33 000 feet so now i'm in the clouds no autopilot no auto throttle flying out disabled aircraft in imc condition and after the initial uh checklist which is severe engine damage i asked for uh drift dam and paul told me that um 23 000 feet for the altitude and 240 an ounce so as i'm slowing the airplane towards 240 about 242 for 243 should stop buffing and stalling so how do you recover from a stall now you're in test pilot mode you've got this battle damage your your all your data is out the window basically you have to sort it out to recover from a stall you know you gotta max thrust i'm already as max thrust lower the nose i lower the nose to gain more air speed and she started coming down like 4 000 feet per minute and i could just see the runway going up and we're coming down here so that wasn't gonna make it so literally like you said i became a test fighter i had to create a new envelope at 265 knots it felt like she's going to fall apart there was so much vibration too much vibration from the windmilling engine yeah the faster we went the worse it got yep slower i couldn't maintain you know flight characteristic or stay in the envelope at 240. so i literally created a new window 245 to 255 knots i kept it within that window at 10 knots and i think i've said this in many other um uh interviews that it literally felt on like having a plate on the fingertips with a ball bearing in the middle and trying to balance that huh for 40 minutes hand flying and of course the triple seven has a attack or a uh a rudder assist program that helps with engine out situations but that's in op also i believe in this case yeah the attack wasn't inoperative uh for thruster symmetry control that was uh enough uh autopilot was enough out of throttle was enough and we also lost a cars all the communication to dispatch was out too we did get dispatch on satcom and the only time you know i never took my hands off the control it just they got me set up i told dispatch what happened what's going on please notify honolulu we are going to hondura have the equipment standby um in fact you were so busy hand flying the aircraft that the jump seat or somebody else had to get you strapped in for the landing yeah i remember that head reached over my shoulders and you know strapped me in because i just i wasn't going to take my hat off that you couldn't yeah just roll right back up on you and you didn't really break out of the weather solid vfr all the way down to what about 2 000 feet so you know uh honolulu was was best runway not only in time and distance but our comfort level i've been going to honduras for almost 30 years ed was is from honduras he was with the coast guard out of hong kong base um so we come then the the deck was about two thousand feet and they have three runways in honolulu runway eight left which was closed four right was too short for the condition you know having an engine at hydraulic set and all of that so only runway available to us was eight drive but doesn't have an ils so we had to shoot an rnav approach imc into a drive wow but you're able to use precision approach guidance on the rnav approach and capture a glide slope a good glide slope in for that runway just to the elena non-precision approach so you're flying the aircraft uh how did you go about coordinating with the flight attendants well uh one of the things that faa and ntsb gave us an attaboy was my command leadership resource management clr which i put it to best use i delegated the communication with atc and the flight attendants to ed initially so he declared the emergency may they made they made it with hcf while i'm flying the airplane and paul and i start wanted to work on the checklist but it was just too much so it literally became a three-man cockpit put it this way and ed is the jump seater in the the brand new guy in the jumpsuit so ed communicated with atc and told them how many souls on board how much fuel we had on board and we going direct and we had emergency aircraft leaving 360. and he also communicated with the flight in it and told them you know we'll get back to them we had everybody as be seated initially and after that i asked ed to work with paul on checklist because it was just too much for one person and i said guys i'm just going to focus on the instrument keep the blue side up and fly towards honolulu and uh you guys deal with the atc and the flight tenants and run the checklist so that part was great and one thing the guys did really compliment and i told the faa and the company was that every seven or eight minutes i would turn around and tell the guys forget what just happened let's just focus going forward because you know we as pilots or yeah like on a check ride or something yeah you you think you made a mistake just put it behind you just put it behind you as a matter of fact they use that as a theme for training you know some of our training with united is done with cbt cockpit um computer-based training so they put that in so one of the syllabus is focus forward and so that was very helpful and about 15 minutes into this incident i asked ed to go back there because even after we did the checklist the vibration and shaking was still there and the noise level was really high so i asked if he can't go back take his ipad and videotape whatever is going on so we have a visual and that's when he came back with that engine shaking and did that help clear things up right away in your mind you were dealing with yes that once i saw that i knew what are we dealing with and i wasn't sure at that time if anything has hit the tail or stabilizer because just looking how much almost a thousand pounds of material vacated the aircraft at 36 000 feet and thank god now we know that another single item hit the tail as you know you know even a 10 pound at 500 knots would have been equivalent to uh you know having the shot at with the cannonball so now you're getting ready for the approach first off were you did you think you could even maintain altitude with the present situation at any altitude well the fact that i had firewall the left engine we had 90 000 pounds of thrust putting on the left and on the right side it felt like i'm flying a four-story building through the air because just every smallest adjustment on the thrust she wanted to roll again and since we almost installed at 33 000 feet i just didn't want to risk anything at lower altitude so we just i kept thinking you know altitude air speed distance altitude airspeed distance to the runway and in my mind created the cdap you know um three to one sort of three to one and constant descent angle approach you know just coming in and doing a curve a right turn on an arc to run by two eight right because by runway eight right because by then we knew that we only have one shot at this and having max thrust just to maintain 1200 feet per minute clean we all believe that once we dirty up the airplane she's not going to be able to go around so there is no go around today i mean definitely we just had one shot to put in on the runway and so how did you configure for this approach come well first off you you did crunch some numbers to come up with a runway landing distance in the emergency and those numbers came up good yeah so it had been as sharp as he was rushing out of training right yeah he's just uh fired up the ipad again and went to the irregular runway distance uh for that condition calculation came up with like 79.60 that's how much we needed because normally your company you would get this through the a cars but the eight cars was busted oh exactly so you'd have to just dive into the box push your button you just put eight right and you push one button it's all there magic happens but not today not today yeah not today and that's why again having a third man in the cockpit was very very very important that the extremely important so mentally what i did was and i told the guys that i'm gonna come high and fast because altitude and air speeds are my friend altitude up to a certain point but once you get on the glideslope or three degree glycerol i mean you got to lose the altitude but speed is always your friend so we came 250 knots about 12 dme and i brought the power back slightly put the flaps to one we got green light you know it was a big sigh of it because you had no idea if the flaps were even going to work or not and you were kind of planning on if you had to a no flap landing no flap landing you know and the next thing was get the gear down so we put the gear down and we got the green lights so now here we are like okay at least we got a flap swamp and i was doing about a 220 with the gear down a thousand feet we put flaps five and came down the three degree glycerol by that time we were visual but i was on the instruments the guy was just giving me vectors turn left five turn right five stop turn your other crew members were doing this for you other crew members not atc yeah other crew members it's just like the old par asr approach right and you know they said captain you just stay on the instruments and uh we'll really get you down there we'll get you down there so um we came down the flaps of five at 200 knots at about 200 feet uh we went flaps 20 and held 180 to touch that because i knew the numbers were compromised so the book numbers in the book um were not going to really help us and at the same time i had ed had talked about this previously that do brace brace brace and it happened to be a very smooth landing and we go that we got off the runway at romeo golf off of aid right and the fire trucks were standing by and started communication with the fire marshal and as you the throttle to come on into land there was that buffeting did not return to the airplane it with the flaps down she still handled okay at that speed now that you're back down to sea level now yes yeah as we got to a denser air yeah things got a little stiffer on the control you know up there was really mushy yep the powder was really mushy and just got more solid but more like an airplane feel to it yeah and i don't think i really was paying at much attention i mean i was just glued on that runway on the numbers and looking at the instruments he just went flaps tony and i didn't even have to touch the power because the speed just start coming backwards so so you called the for the brace command uh on short finally or on final air but it's somewhere during this interim you invited one of the flight attendants up to the cockpit right after uh we shut down and secured the uh airplane uh no i'm talking about back when you were coming well you were still coming into honolulu did you have a flight attendant how did did you personally brief a flight attendant yes i did so after ed came to the cockpit with a picture i asked cecilia our chief purser to come and i explained the situation i said well obviously we have a big problem here the right engine is totally destroyed we have that part under control but we have controllability problem so we are not sure that we can drag the you know take the airplane to honolulu for another 25 minutes or so this is like 50 minutes after the incident happened so go ahead and prep the cabin for possible ditching will keep it will keep you informed and because their checklist is very long it takes them about a good 20 minutes or so to go through the whole checklist for possible ditching the aircraft yeah but you did obviously a good smooth landing and you're rolling out now now what are you going to do with all the people they went through the brace thing and uh you got to make a decision about what to do with the passengers yeah but what was communicating downstairs that paul was i think with a fire marshal and then he would turn around and make sure that i'm here in the conversation um the marshal said that there is no fire on the right engine but there's fluid coming down we didn't know it was a hydraulic at that time or was its fuel so i said ask him if they think if if there's no fire uh i would like to taxi the airplane to the gate and not add more fuel to the fire per se by you know putting the uh opening the doors and uh having the slides and maybe somebody would get hurt so far we've been very fortunate so yeah and everybody agreed uh three of us agreed with the fire marshal and they escorted us and we went to the gate and shut the engine down taxi tax back to the gate yeah so you get back to the gate and one of the pilots leans over and tells you what does he tell you about hanging on to the oh actually actually it wasn't the gate was right when we got them from romeo golf okay and we set the parking brake and we looked at each other and a big sigh of relief and paul tapped me on the shoulder and said captain you can let go now and that's when i realized that my left hand was glued on the yoke at the right head of the throttle and he said for the last 40 minutes i kept looking at you fighting this thing and i was wondering when your body is going to give up the shaking and just it's literally manhandling the airplane for 40 minutes because that vibration of that windmilling engine because we've lost one blade 34 pounds plus a good section of the other blade 10 more pounds is shaking the thing so much and that's transmitted all the way through to the yoke to the yolk and you can see them on the side of the aircraft on that video that's shaking was you know i was feeling it on the yoke the whole 40 minutes yeah so now back to the gate uh you decide to come back and step out of the cockpit and and say goodbye to everybody that's got to be just overcome with emotions uh you know you know there's a lot of things that that it goes through your mind and i do remember two things very clearly and one was when i told ed to declare emergency and he goes and says may they may they made a united 1175 you know experience engine failure or catastrophic failure vacating three six zero there was a big pause on the atc or at least to me but because it was a big puzzle you wanted to jump on right away and it's like the guy's probably thinking oh my god i mean you never hear the triple seven declaring virgins over open ocean right so that was in my mind and the other thing was that um when they asked ed how many souls on board you know how much fuel he said like you know we have like hour worth of fuel and uh 381 souls and all of a sudden something happened you know it just felt like somebody poured cold water ice water down my back of my neck uh yeah 381 souls i mean that's the small town i was responsible for their safety and i made one decision that morning and right then that you know i can't fail them i can't betray their trust and today is not going to be the day that you know we die and that one decision i think changed a lot of things for me because the next day paul and i over breakfast started talking about what happened and he asked me can i ask you a question i said sure it's a personal question i said sure and he said um when this happened do you think this was that do you think we're going to buy the farm and this is it i said to be honest with you when she rolled to 45 degrees of bank which is really a sight to see on a triple sec yeah at mark a3 and i was struggling to bring it back you know it went through my mind initially that maybe i should do a battle role bring it back because you've had some aerobatic training i have had that experience yes but the vibration kind of scared me that i don't know what's going on with this jet she might not make it through the road and maybe will fall apart and come apart and that's another thing that i want to tell you about the blade hitting their fuselage in a second so are you thinking you think you're going to buy the farm you're ever going to buy the farm i said i really thought yes we are and so i answered that question and then he threw another question on me yeah and was like were you okay with it ah uh-huh all of a sudden i mean just your whole thinking and body language everything changes and i thought for a second i said you know what yeah i was okay with it lived a good life done good and i was okay with it the only thing is that you know the first 30 seconds of this happening my whole life went through in front of my eyes just like the slow motion yeah my children's being born yeah you know their smiles and you know the things we did i mean the whole my life just went through uh right in front of me and one thing that my dad was very sick he was in hospital and uh i said to myself that not today this is just not not today this is not going to happen but you had some unfinished business i finished business i said i haven't said my goodbyes that was enough for me to um just literally you know i everything i've done in my life one i've always go the extra mile and today i really had to go the extra mile to make this not an option yeah yeah so after we landed um i told the guys let's go stand by the front door uh door one left as passenger disembarking and uh thank him for their courage thank him for you know uh being with us and we are very thankful that we could get everybody down safely and there was a lot of emotion there there was a lot of emotion that's when it started hurt you know hitting you and watching it right there yeah the women with the babies that they had no clue what's going on and i never forget there was a little girl i think she was six or seven years old she had blonde hair pigtail and you know a lot of you know some guys are trying to be tough and mothers are crying i'm getting the emotion at this point she comes up to me they said that was cool she likes all that roller coaster ride yeah it's just disney important and helps break the ice a bit yeah and then we went downstairs to evaluate to see what's going on so i have a few pictures i can share with you that shows the magnitude of the problem and one thing we didn't know so i think you and i talked about it you know i come up with something i call it the five stars that lined up yeah what were the yeah yeah so basically um we didn't know at that time that the blade actually separated from the engine and hit the fuselage so it was technically an uncontained engine failure in this case technically yes it was uncontained and after the incident is over and we get home and you know a few nights i'd never had nightmares i was never afraid of uh going back to the cockpit but i kept thinking you know the what-ifs yeah because everything is just new right you walked away from it what if over and over and over in your mind what if something had hit the fuselage what if something had hit the tail what if if we weren't 200 miles and we were at pet point of equal time or cp right uh all of that questions were going to my head and i knew the answer is going to come either by myself by thinking about it or you know as the faa and ntsb and the company do their investigation so more and more i thought about this i came up with this theory or philosophy in my head that you know we are put on this earth for a reason there is a purpose a defining moment for each one of us right so i think my purpose that day was or my defining moment was that 40 minutes to be in that spot at that day because i've done certain things in my life not only flying jets but i'm a third degree black belt in karate i do meditation i like to balance rocks for fun i do love to sail i've been saving for 35 years so it's all about balance right so all of that came handy and to to fly that airplane and keep it in that envelope and stay cool and make sure the other guys are like because the biggest fear we had was it wasn't like making it to honolulu it was like can we stay airborne for another thousand feet or another 2 000 feet because the shaking was really bad so the five star that lined up and i share those with you yeah yeah the first one was uh i always say to my friends and family that the five stars lined up that day for us to make that successful landing and the man upstairs had a lot to do with this yeah uh first one was that three minutes before this happened i was in the bathroom you know out of the cockpit i come down sit down put my seatbelt on turn around to politics do the briefing and boom the explosion happens number two we had a well-qualified united triple seven pilot as a omc or jump seater in the cockpit he was phenomenal as a matter of fact when we were asked to go to washington dc for a superior airmanship award i made sure that ed was included in that because literally that was a three-man cockpit that day number three we were only 200 miles out at 40 minutes when they took their flight data recorder and fed it into the computer they said captain if you were three or four hundred miles out or an hour at this would have been a controlled descent with full power um to the water it's just like where we were what the airport was when this happened we're able we were able to manage it number four started lined up that day was that almost a thousand pounds of material came off that engine at 500 knots at 36 000 feet and not a single item hit the fuselage or the tail hit the tail yeah that's correct hit the tail even you know 10 pounds at 500 knots it could have been catastrophic and could have taken a tail off and number five which we didn't know at the time that the blade actually separated from the engine and hit the fuselage and i'll send you that picture but it hit the stringer so the ribs where the wing attaches to the fuselage and it was below the it was just below a window too yeah about three inches of below and when did the analysis uh they told me captain if this had been three or four inches higher or further back it would already broke the window which would have been really bad for that person initially and maybe others or if you had hit three or four inches forward now you would have a rapid depressurization problem and that would have put you below the glide path that would have got you back to honolulu potentially if you had done an emergency that and also if there was a crack on the fuselage with all that shaking going on it could have just opened the can uh you could have ended up with the in-flight breakup so at that point doesn't matter even if you're a chuck jagger yeah you know you cannot control it so these are the five stars that line down for us to make a successful landing that day six weeks later we got a call five weeks later we got a call that in about a week time we're going to have an interview with the faa and ntsb they had about 30 questions that they asked me first then the co-pilot and then the jump seater and at the end the faa guy says captain everything you guys said is identical to what we heard on a cockpit voice recorder and by the way a really nice job and uh they said they're satisfied the investigation is going to continue it's going to take a long time probably a year as a matter of fact it took almost two years and you know the ntsb released their findings eventually yeah a few months ago and so we were told to expect a call from the alpha rep only whether we're going to denver for some training or we're going to be released to the chief pilot zero or zero you're gonna get themselves right zero zero that's a good one yeah yeah so two weeks goes by and this is kind of interesting and we get a call from the apple rep which by the way says um guys i'm not the only one on this call we have the ntsb faa and the company board oh it's wrong other call out i'm like okay but he said immediately there is no need for concern they are here to tell you to congratulate you guys uh what a job about that wow and to hearing that that was really really important so that was really a high point of this and the ntsb gentleman says captain i really want to thank you for saving this airplane you have no idea what the relief it is to talk to a live pilot rather than picking up the pieces from the bottom of the ocean and trying to sort it out sort it out and put it together and the other highlight was that you know after i got released from the investigation i got a call from the chief pilot and uh he says welcome back you're going back to work right back to work first flight san francisco yeah we got it you got 15 minutes right back to the old route yes first flight san francisco back to honduras yeah and uh the chief party in san fran he threw a little party he invited me to his office all the other managers came he introduced me to the managers who i am what i did and then we went outside at the small cake and uh he gave me the floor they were like 40 50 60 united you know heavy jet captains we were right around the bank where everybody's taking off to go around the world right so he gave me the floor and i talked for two three minutes and then i got a standing ovation ah good to me getting the respect of your peers that's that means everything that is everything yeah so good ending wow outstanding great story so as a result of this this was the beginning of a series of fan blade failures that we just saw play out here recently again in denver it's it's going to turn out to be a very close it's a very similarly related event the ntsb investigation revealed a bunch of the issues that pratt whitney has with dealing with these blades and so they got to get to the bottom of that there were there are three other recommendations that you came up with or that that came out of this incident for you that uh yeah they asked us uh you know what would we recommend and i am um always i always encourage the pilots whether i'm flying with captains on an ioe or co-pilots to hand fly the airplane you know these things become so sophisticated and we um get in an environment that is so comfortable and so cozy you know you use the automation a lot that day we didn't have that option you know for things to go bad at the level they did that day if i wasn't on my game if i didn't go to my old-fashioned run sticking around second rather type of flying who knows what the outcome would have been so as a result they are asking the guys in the simulators when they go for their proficiency check to hand fly the airplane whether it's a visual approach or doing an ios approach more and more emphasis on a hand flying and i think that kind of if you go back that was that asiana correct yeah yep vfr hand flying somebody said to me but that was the experienced pilot i said well let's talk about that for a second was he he has ten thousand hours right their sop is like 800 feet you push the autopilot down at 1200 feet you click it off yeah so 800 feet is like three minutes yeah 1200 feet is four minutes and the flight's 16 hours long well you do the number 10 000 hours yeah each out i mean each flight of 15 16 hours you find five or six minutes i don't think you're proficient right to be honest every time i go back for uh landings currencies in the sim one of the landings is a is a fallout from this aqp do you hand fly the takeoff approach and landing yeah by hand yeah i mean for us is like actually the engine app profile so when you're coming in you can use the automation or downward on the base thing but before you can get to the market you've got to show hand for single engine approach and go around you know ifr imc so that was one of the thing that they implemented that and they're doing that and before this incident we didn't have opposite recovery maneuver in the syllabus very important now they have that in there too you know that unusual attitude recoveries where the sim operator puts the simulator in an unusual attitude very unfavorable condition and you just have to grab the control you know um try the airplane recover the airplane roll the bank it pitch yeah and then the third thing to come out of all this was well the third recommendation was regarding etops if this incident had happened close to point of equal time or a cp um yeah i don't think we would have such a favorable outcome but then again that's up to the company and the faa to think to talk about it because nothing like this has ever happened in the past hopefully never will happen again and as we know uh proud whitney we know what the problem is 4 000 experienced the same problem last week out of colorado fortunately those guys were just on the initial climb stage and they had the runway right behind them and thank god you know they did a superb job again their training kicked in and they went back to the airport and landed the airplane safely with saving everybody outstanding and so you did receive the award what was the name of that award again uh we received the superior airmanship award we were invited by alpha and the united mec to go to washington dc and they did an awesome job the kids came along the girlfriend came along they treated us wonderful and put us in a nice hotel it was a great ceremony and the mec czech air mec chairman captain todd insler took the stage he explained about what happened up there there was a short video put together by alpa that you know explained it explained everything and then they gave me the podium and i spoke for a few minutes thanking the pilots and thanking the flight attendants and also thanking the passengers for their courage i did say one thing in that speech and i don't call us pilots i think to me a pilot is the guy that pushes a barge down the mississippi river really yeah i think we are aviators you know we get to that level we are aviators and i always promote safety i always encourage the guy to become the best they can in in anything they do obviously but even in flying and you know never forget your skills of stick and rudder always hand fly it obviously if you're really in complex airspace that things not going wrong and not going right and you have thunderstorms or windshear yes use the automation but you know you're flying somewhere beautiful like hawaii or coming out of sanford france just fly it just treat it like be comfortable with handling like this one yeah enjoy it yeah yeah that's it enjoy it enjoy it all right captain chris benham thanks so much for the debrief on thanks united's flight 1175. thank you thank you fantastic you do an awesome job and i watch all your videos it's such an honor to meet you in person are you kidding this is a historic first for the blancolario channel to have the actual pilot of an incident that we're talking about on this channel come up and tell the whole story and we happen to live only about what 30 40 yeah just right up the hill here yep so i'm glad you worked out yeah i hope your viewers enjoy this and you know if the more information comes up and i i can share with you i'll be more than happy to do that excellent and you do public speaking on this too now or yes yeah i do a leadership seminars and we started quite a few before before the pandemic actually i had my schedule all fall through july but unfortunately everything is on hold and i do have just like you a youtube channel and uh instagram and uh channel uh captain mena persian and uh also um i do motivational seminars you know for the young kids you know especially high school kids i just try to do goal-setting workshop with them encourage them to go after the goals of dreams and you know whatever ambition they have whatever they want to do there are tools out there to get it done so encourage them to do that and there's a book coming out you know and a movie too maybe i don't know but there's definitely something huh definitely a book coming up yes okay you guys can go ahead and start typecasting all the different role members of this movie here in the comments section below and we'll put all of chris's contact information in in the comments or in the description below thanks so much for watching we'll see you here thank you thanks chris all right that was fun yeah that was a good one man [Music] [Music] you

Channel: blancolirio

Views: 210,854

Rating: 4.9804506 out of 5

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Id: J7_lzeY23dI

Length: 54min 29sec (3269 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 02 2021

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Background: A United Boeing 777-200, registration N773UA performing flight UA-1175 from San Francisco,CA to Honolulu,HI (USA) with 363 passengers and 10 crew, was enroute at FL360 over the Pacific Ocean about 45 miutes prior to estimated landing in Honolulu when it suffered a catastrophic right hand engine(PW4077) failure. The aircraft continued to Honolulu for a safe landing on runway 08R about 45 minutes later.

In the video linked, Captain Behnam really showcases the true extent of this emergency which I personally didn't think of much before.

He also talks of the 5 points which could have severely altered the safe outcome.

The video is nearly a hour long but watching these two professionals go through the incident makes it an enjoyable one for an aviation enthusiast.

The pilots, United Airlines Capts. Christopher Behnam and Paul Ayers and First Officer Ed Gagarin were honoured with the prestigious ALPA Superior Airmanship Award for their efforts in handling the incident.