This is the story of Saudia flight 163, on
the 19th of august 1980 a saudia L1011 took off from Karachi pakistan. The plan for the day was to fly from karachi
to Riyadh and to then fly onto Jeddah, the flight from Karachi to Riyadh was uneventful
and at 4:06 pm local time the plane landed at Riyadh. Passengers were deboarded and their luggage
was taken out for immigration. After that a sea of activity engulfed the
plane, more luggage was put in the cargo hold, more fuel was added and more passengers boarded
the plane. By 5:50 pm the plane was ready to go, it now
had to make the short hop to jeddah. With 301 people onboard the plane lifted off
from Riyadh at 6:08 PM. Soon after takeoff they were cleared to their
cruising altitude of 35000 feet. The plane climbed into the desert sky. At 6:14 pm almost 7 minutes after take off
the crew were altered to a fire in the cargo hold. For the next 4 minutes the crew tried to identify
if the warning was accurate, the captain sent the flight engineer into the cabin to see
if he could spot any signs of a fire. He returned 36 seconds later, with bad news. The cabin was indeed on fire, The captain
immediately elected to turn back to Riyadh. They were now climbing through 22000 feet. the first officer gets in touch with ATC. He says “163, we are coming back to Riyadh”. He probably spoke as if nothing was wrong. Pilots have a way of staying calm under pressure. ATC wants to know why. The first officer says “We have fire in
the cabin please alert the fire trucks”. As they made their turn back to the airport
the fire trucks at Riyadh were on alert ready for anything. Riyadh ATC cleared them in and gave them priority
for landing. They ask flight 163 if their engine is on
fire, the first officer responds with “negative in the cabin”. The plane was now 78 miles out. At 6:21 pm the flight engineer ventured back
out into the cabin to see what damage the fire had done but on his second excursion
into the cabin all he saw was smoke. The flight engineer mentioned that the people
in the back were panicking. I mean you are stuck in a flaming aluminum
can that's travelling several hundred knots, miles up in the sky. The captain double checks with the first officer
about the fire trucks he is adamant that the fire trucks be there when they land. As the captain called for the preliminary
landing checklist another smoke warning went off. Saudia flight 163 was in trouble. At 6:24 Pm another smoke alarm goes off, To
his horror the captain now realised that engine number two was unresponsive to throttle inputs. Riyadh reassures the crew they have fire trucks
ready to go as soon as they land. A flight attendant enters the cockpit.She
says that there are passengers fighting in the aisles. The situation is growing more desperate by
the minute. At this point the CVR picked up announcements
from the cabin asking people to be calm, the announcements were in english and arabic and
went as follows “Please everybody sit down, move out of the way,everybody sitdown,move
out the aisle,there is no danger from the airplane,everybody should stay in their seats” The crew radio riyadh asking them to position
the firetrucks in a way that the fire trucks come up from behind the airplane. As the cabin filled with smoke the pilots
searched for riyadhs runway. The flight engineer suggests that they shut
engine number two down on final approach. The captain agrees, It's best not to have
a malfunctioning engine running on final approach. The smoke warnings kept going off, the CVR
picked up the muffled voices of the flight attendants trying to keep the passengers calm. A flight attendant asks the captain if they
should evacuate, He responds with what? She repeats her question and he says okay. The captain called for flaps 10 and the final
checklist. the runway was now in their sights. The flight attendant asks again if they should
evacuate the airplane. The captain asks her to take her position. He calls for flaps 18. Flight 163 asks ATC “We got the runway in
sight are we cleared to land”, Approach clears them in Affirmative you are number
one for approach, you can contact the tower 118.1” At 6:32 pm the captain shuts down
engine number 2. The first officer double checks with the tower
about the status of the fire trucks, The Tower tells the crew that they've been alerted. The captain calls for gear down. He lets the first officer know that a two
engined landing is the same as a three engined one, they were down one engine after all. Since its engine number two is the one on
the tail, they don't have to deal with thrust asymmetry. As the first officer did the final checklists
you could still hear the flight attendants trying their best to keep the passengers calm. The flight engineer tells the captain that
the cabin crew wanted to know if they should evacuate the aircraft, the captain does not
respond and orders flaps 33. The plane was at 500 feet the captain says
hydraulics and the flight engineer lets them know that they are low on pressure on the
number two hydraulic system. The fire was eating through their control
mechanisms. At 6:35 and 57 seconds the captain says “Tell
them, tell them not to evacuate”. the flight engineer was counting down their altitude,
50, 40, 30 and then silence the CVR stopped recording. The plane touched down at 6:36 and 24 seconds. Witnesses saw smoke from the back of the aircraft. The airplane used up the entire length of
the runway and it made a 180 degree turn at the end and stopped on the taxiway. They ask the tower if the tower could see
fire at the back of the plane. The tower says no after checking with the
fire trucks. Once on the taxiway flight 163 tells the tower
that they’re shutting down and evacuating. The tower and the fire trucks talk about how
the fire is growing and about how the crew needed to shut down their engines. At 6:40 and 33 seconds the tower lets the
crew know that they have a fire in the tail, and the crew tells the tower that they’re
evacuating. “Affirmative we are trying to evacuate now”
That was the last time anyone heard from Saudia flight 163. The engines were shut down three minutes after
the plane came to a stop, But the doors still didn't open, the firefighters noticed that
smoke was starting to bellow out from the top of the fuselage, near engine number two. The smoke was soon followed by flames. It took the fire fighters 23 minutes to get
a door open. They opened door number 2 on the right hand
side at 7:05 pm and by 7:08 pm the interior of flight 163 was engulfed in flames. All 301 people onboard had died. A few sentences ago I told you that it took
the firefighters 23 minutes to get the doors open, I did not misspeak it took them 23 minutes
to get the door open once the engines had been shut down. Talking to the firefighters at riyadh they
find a lot to be desired. Most of the firefighters had never fought
an actual fire or even a training fire.When questioned about the exits on airplanes and
in particular the L1011 it became clear that their knowledge was limited to nonexistent. Two saudia techs had shown the firefighters
how to open the doors on the L1011 but they were never allowed to actually try out the
procedure for themselves. No one even knew how many doors the L1011
had, Forget the L1011 they didn't even know how many doors other planes that use the airport
had. But that still doesn't explain why they couldn't
get the door open. What if the pilots had been incompacitated? That would mean that the airplane would still
be pressurized on the ground and that would make opening the doors far more difficult. But in the tests conducted post the fire,
the investigators found that the pressure difference between the airplane and the ambient
air was negligible, the pressurisation should not have played a part in getting the doors
open. But the question on everyone's lips is how
did the fire start, with the fire all but gutting the plane the investigators decide
to set various things that are found in the cabin on fire to see what most closely resembles
the fire on board saudia flight 163. They try setting fire to gasoline soaked carpets,
the ceiling, the cargo compartment liner, the cargo compartment itself. The FAA even did a full scale test to see
how a fire in a widebody aircraft would behave. During the course of them investigating the
fire, they can find no fault with the air craft the aircraft was all but functioning
in the hours before the fire. Engine number two went offline because the
fire burnt through its control cables. A hydraulic line was fractured but that was
due to the fire and did not cause the fire. They zero in on 4 areas that might have started
the deadly blaze. The passenger cabin, the area near the C3
cargo compartment , the area aft of the cargo compartment and the cargo compartment itself. One by one they eliminate each possibility
till one remains, its improbable that the fire started in the cabin as the fire warnings
did not come from the cabin, The fire didn't start near the cargo compartment as there
just isn't enough flammable material there to start a fire or to sustain one of this
magnitude, The fire could not have started aft of the c3 cargo compartment as that's
where the lavatories are and there were no reports of a lavatory fire, these reasons
are not exhaustive but you get the idea. That leaves us with a fire that started in
the cargo hold. Lets see how a fire in the cargo hold would
play out, Once the fire started the fire would make copious amounts of smoke, this would
set off the B smoke detector and then later on it would set off the A smoke detector,
This is what we saw on saudia flight 163, there were multiple warnings of fire in the
cockpit they were staggered, all the alarms did not go off at once. This is when the flight engineer was dispatched
to the cabin to ascertain the extent of the fire he reports “It's just smoke in the
aft”. This means that the fire had burned through
the top of the cargo container. This allows smoke to fill the space between
the cargo container and the floor floor of the cabin. There are grills in the floor of the cabin
that lets air pass between the cabin and the cargo hold. And you'd start to see smoke coming through
the grills in the floor. The captain then recognized that engine number
two was not responding, the cables that controlled engine number two were routed through the
ceiling of the cargo hold and if a fire were to break out in there that's where the flames
would be, the cables can withstand about 500F before they fail. The cabin crew then reported that they had
flames in the cabin, the flames till now were not able to penetrate the cabin floor and
its likely that the flames took the same path as the smoke. The full scale test that the FAA did showed
exactly this. And once the plane landed we have witnesses
that saw flames between the L4 and L3 doors and below the window line.All signs point
to a fire starting in the c3 cargo compartment. But for this theory to make sense the investigators
made an assumption, they assumed that whatever started the fire was itself fully consumed
by the fire. To quote the report “There is an extensive
history of fires originating in aircraft in cargo compartments where loose baggage and
cargo is stored”. If something in the C3 cargo compartment started
the fire it's unlikely that by the time the plane landed there would be anything left
of the material. So they were unable to pin point what started
the fire but they’re certain that it started in the c3 cargo compartment. Next we’ll look at the human side of things. According to saudia procedures when you get
a single or double fire warning you should consider diverting, Spurious warnings were
commonplace back in the day and so the crew had to confirm the fire first. It took them about three minutes to find the
proper procedures due to the fact that the emergency procedures had been split into three
sections: emergency, abnormal and additional, they should have been looking in the emergency
section and not the additional section. The flight crew's actions upto this stage
were acceptable but after this things began to fall apart. The captain was fully focused on flying the
plane he could have asked for help from the first officer and that would have lightened
the load for him. During the entire crisis the captain should
have made it clear to the cabin crew what he wanted them to do. He should have told them to evacuate when
on the ground, in fact the cabin crew asked the captain precisely this multiple times. The captain also should have instructed the
pilots to don their oxygen masks. In an environment like this, smoke inhalation
can cause physical and mental impairment. Once on the ground the captain should have
stopped the plane as soon as possible and began an evacuation but he wasted precious
minutes taxing. While landing the plane took up the entire
length of the runway. The plane was capable of max braking and had
the captain braked more aggressively they could have stopped sooner and saved two minutes,
those two minutes were crucial to the survivability of the crash. Once on the ground the captain kept the engines
running, the cabin crew had the authority to initiate an evacuation on their own but
since the engines were running there was no way that they could have evacuated the plane,
among the wreckage there were no signs that an evacuation was even attempted. The plane was not pressurized, the doors worked,
the investigators realized that the evacuation command may have never been given by the captain
to the cabin crew. By then it was too late the flash fire had
taken the plane over reducing it to rubble. I can’t help but compare saudia flight 163
to other similar crashes namely swiss air flight 111 and air canada flight 797 those
crews were in similar situations and they would have given anything to get to an airport
or to have a few extra seconds to get all their passengers off, flight 163 had both
and they fell at the last hurdle. This one sentence perhaps sums it all up the
best. Had the crew stopped the plane sooner, had
the captain shut the engines down had the firemen been trained properly, the passengers
of saudia flight 163 might have walked away from this.
Isn't this the flight where the pilots made mistakes and they had dyslexia?
This was so tragic. They almost made it..
The fact that Saudia hired those pilots tells you a lot about the airline... no one would hire them today
How did they successfully land and everyone died?