The TRUE story behind “The Miracle in the Cornfield” - Ural Flight 178

[Music] professional Pilots train their entire career to make sure that they're ready if the worst should happen then if it does and they Prevail the pilots are often held as Heroes but what if the outcome was actually not there doing what if the miracle happened despite the effort of those Heroes stay tuned seagulls are fascinating creatures and often much bigger than most people think with wingspans reaching over one and A2 M and with weights of around 1 and 1/2 kilo there are several subspecies of Seagulls in Europe but around the Moscow area the most common ones are the European hering GS or the Caspian GS the nesting period of these birds is between mid April to Mid July and after that the young birds called fledglings will start to move away from the nesting areas in search for new places to feed you can imagine them as teenage Birds roaming the skies without much life experience at all making their flock movement very unpredictable during the Early Autumn these seagull often look for large open areas without too much trees and buildings to rest for the night which as you might imagine means that airports are often perfect for this especially when the tarmac is nice and warm after a day of sunshine this can pose a huge threat to air traffic so there are a lot of different counter measures and rules stipulated to deal with it and that was also the case at shukovsky ruman skawa airport situated about 40 km southeast of Moscow in Russia for years the airport Authority had battled with this reoccurring bird problem but without much success which likely had to do with the fact that several Elite legal waste dumps were present in the immediate vicinity of the airport acting as perfect feeding grounds for the birds now back in 2019 when this story took place there was legislation in place which prohibited any kind of activity that could permanently attract birds within a radius of about 15 km from an active airport but even though the airport complained and filed suits against these illegal dump sites nothing was ever really done about it this meant that the airport had been forced to come up with other ways of scaring off the birds which included things like propane cannons and other acoustic devices spaced out along the main Runway now those things did work initially but the problem with seagulls is that they are really smart so they quickly figured out that those devices didn't actually pose any real danger to them especially since the devices were programmed to activate on a regular scheduled interval and not just when they were needed meaning that they soon just became like an annoying background sound for the birds now bird Hazard is not something that was unique to this particular airport in fact most Airport have this problem and especially during the migration seasons in the spring and Autumn birds are something that we Pilots always try to keep in mind if large flocks of birds are observed at an airport Air Traffic Control normally includes information about this on the automatic terminal information service broadcast the 80s and and it will then form part of the threat briefing that we Pilots do before an approach or takeoff but in August of 2019 the 8S information stating bird Hazard had been almost continuously transmitted for month at shovsky airport which meant that the pilots had become almost as desensitized to it as the birds had become to the scaring equipment on the 15th of August 2019 at around s 4:30 in the morning local time and Airbus a321 from Ural Airlines was on Final Approach to rway one two at shikovski airport it was early Twilight and when the pilots landed and started texting into their parking stand nothing looked out of the ordinary it was a perfectly normal day once they had parked the aircraft they disembarked the passengers and then closed up the doors as this was their last flight for the day and the next crew would not turn up for another hour or so inside the airport the morning crew had just arrived and were going through their medical checks before departure which is a common procedure in Russia when that was completed the two pilots started going through their pre-flight preparation for their upcoming flight from shikovski airport down toward sop on the Russian occupied Crea Peninsula the weather looked generally okay for the flight a frontal system with thunderstorms had pused during the night causing some significant rainfall over the Moscow area but it had now moved further to the East and would not be an issue for their flight it was still cloudy outside but with good overall visibility and some light winds from the south East so they were planning for Runway 1 two to be in use for the departure all the notm significant weather charts and flight plans also looked okay so the pilot soon decided to uplift 16 tons of fuel called that into the dispatcher and then walked over to their five cabin crew members to brief them about the upcoming flight so who were the pilots that were going to operate this flight then well the captain was 42 years old and had worked for eural Airlines during the last 6 years where he had started off as a first officer straight from Flight School at the time of this flight he had a total time of 4,275 hours of which the vast majority 4,125 hours had been flown on the Airbus A320 family his training record was fine with no major issues noted and he had recently passed his licensed proficiency check where he had been successfully tested on things like rejected takeoff and engine failure of the takeoff but it is worth noting here that the captain had initially not been accepted into the airline back in in 2012 because of an unsuccessful psychological evaluation that test had shown reactionary Behavior combined with excitability impulsiveness tendency towards domination and the difficulty with authority combined with denial and displacement of negative information as defense mechanisms combined these factors could according to the psychologist lead to latent slow reactions and disorganized behavior if he was subjected to high stress now he was allowed to retake that test after six month and then he scored much better results which allowed him to start his training but a similar test that was then taken in 2018 before his command upgrade showed very similar Tendencies but that test was not deemed reliable because of the captain's perceived defense mechanisms during the test basically he had learned to say what the psychologist wanted to hear which rendered the test basically useless now none of these traits had invisible in the captain's execution of his duty during the years he had worked but like I said in the beginning very few of those Pilots are ever put into a really challenging situation and it's only when we do that these type of traits might reveal themselves the first officer was very young 23 years old and had only been working for the airline for a little under a year he had a total time of 780 hours of which 624 had been flown on the Airbus A320 family meaning that he was basically brand new in his role his training record was also fine but his psychological evaluation had shown similar Tendencies as the captains but with the additive of immaturity impulsiveness and competitiveness something that could lead to violations in purpose and disorganization when under stress now you might be wondering with these kind of evaluations why were these Pilots approved in the first place and the answer to that is that we all probably would get at least some of this type of negative evaluations when being subjected to these forms of tests we all have weaknesses and the challenge for Aviation psychologist is to find where to draw the line of what's acceptable and not both of these Pilots were found to be above that line overall but it's interesting to keep these personality traits in mind as we continue this story once the briefings were completed the crew walked out to the aircraft that was waiting for them out on the apron is coming it was a fine looking 15-year-old Airbus a321 equipped with two cfm56 high bypass turbofan engines now we have looked at this version of the CFM 56 engines before in the episode about TAP Air Portugal flight 754 and in that episode I explained that these engines use four blocker doors on each engine to activate the reverse trusts each of those blocker doors have two separate locking mechanisms making sure that reverse thrust cannot be accidentally activated even if one lock would become damaged and that's worth remembering anyway the crew decided that the captain would be Pilot Flying for the flight and the first officer would therefore be pilot monitoring this meant that after the pilots had left their bags inside of the cockpits the first officer went outside to complete the walk around and the captain started looking through the tech log he soon found out to be completely clean with no malfunctions in the hold item list so he just put it aside and started preparing the cockpit for the departure the captain had also spoken with the previous captain in the crew room earlier who had told him that the aircraft was in very good condition meanwhile the cabin crew started welcoming the 226 passengers on board and when everyone was seated the aircraft was almost completely full as this was going on there was allegedly a Runway inspection being carried out where the runway was deemed clear of objects and birds and designated as wet with patches of water now I say allegedly because they were supposed to be such a check done and the person in charge claimed that it did it but there were no official records of such a check actually taking place and as it turns out there were a lot of birds present close to the runway as the picture in this article will show this is so annoying I had a great article that I wanted to show you but unfortunately that article just cannot be accessed here in Andora this happens quite a 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you Nord now where was I oh yeah when the first officer returned to the cockpit the captain was almost done with his pre-flight setup so as soon as the first officer had sat down and was ready the captain started his pre-flight briefing since this was the first flight of the day this included an emergency briefing covering in detail what they needed to do in case of an engine failure after takeoff this type of briefing is common in most Airlines since an engine failure just off the takeoff is considered as one of the most time critical failures that we might face and we therefore brief it every day to keep it fresh in our minds in case it would happen when that was done the captain then continued briefing the taxi routing and departure but it didn't discuss the threat of birds specifically now I don't find that particularly strange since this was a more or less latent threat at this particular airport and in the very worst scenario the emergency briefing that they had just done would cover what to do but since the 80s actually mentioned isolated Bird activity it could have been a good idea to at least point out so this is probably a good place to discuss what pilot should do in casee they think that birds might be a threat when we're on the ground prior to takeoff the choice is relatively easy if we see a flock of birds or big birds close to the runway we just tell a traffic control about it and they normally send out personnel with signal guns or something else to try and scare them away now that might take a few minutes to do but it's still much better than risking it but if we have started a takeoff roll when we notice the birds well then the decision becomes a bit trick here because the captain will now have to judge how big of a threat those birds actually are in the low speed regime which is below 80 knots on the Boeing that I fly but below 100 knots on certain Airbus aircraft the safest thing to do if a large flock of birds is identified is just to reject the takeoff at that point the speed is not high enough to cause a particularly violent maneuver and there is plenty of Runway left to stop on but if the speed is higher than that an immediate assessment of the risk has to be taken taken we normally only reject takeoffs in the highspeed regime due to engine failure fire predictive windsh warning or if the airplane is unsafe or unable to fly and in severe conditions the aircraft could be deemed unsafe to fly due to those birds but it's a much harder decision to make since a high-speed rejected takeoff is a much more violent maneuver with less Runway available because of this individual birds are normally ignored but flocks of large birds is a complete different ball game the engines of commercial aircraft have been certified to be able to operate after a bird strike without losing too much trust and still continue to function but that's after an impact of one big bird not multiple so a flock of birds is something potentially very dangerous now if this happens during the approach or Landing we have to make a similar judgment but it can be even trickier then we obviously always have the choice of going around but that decision must be taken at an early stage when it's reasonably obvious that we will be able to avoid the birds by doing so if there's any doubt it's actually better to continue the approach through the birds with the engine set at a relatively low power setting because that will minimize the damage from any impacts experience has shown that going around and then hitting the flock with the engine set at goore onrust could in the worst case scenario lead to much worse damage and potentially a loss of trust on both engines which could of course be catastrophic so this is why it's a good idea to at least mention that there might be birds around if the 80s highlights it but like I said in the beginning the 8S always said so at this particular airport so the pilots had likely just started ignoring it anyway once the briefings were done the pilots completed the takeoff performance calculations which gave them a decision V1 speed of 166 knots a rotation speed of 166 and a single engine climb speed V2 of 168 knots after the that they read the before start checklist and at time 0605 and 43 seconds Ural Airlines flight 178 received push back and startup clearance and began moving away from the stand the engines were started in sequence during the push back and as soon as the aircraft was facing Northwest on the apron the first officer requested taxi clearance a traffic control responded and told them to expect run with one two and to follow the follow me vehicle ahead of them onto taxiway Bravo 7 this was read back by the first officer and the aircraft started moving cross the apron so far so good the before takeoff checklist was completed down to the line and when the F me car left them on Bravo 7 the first officer switched over to the tower frequency and advised that they were ready to enter the runway when the tower controller heard this he bid them good morning and then cleared flight 178 to enter and line up Runway one two and he also gave him the surface wind of 1 13 Dees at 4 m/s and here something interesting happened because as the aircraft started taxiing out the captain suddenly said there are hardly any birds here no and the first officer confirmed yeah hardly no but it seems like the captain was definitely seeing something because he continued with hardly any but some kind of flock is flying over there to which the first officer said uh ah well there is something flying all of this indicates that the captain definitely saw a flock of birds that was large and close enough to draw his attention but he never relayed this concern over to the air traffic controller instead the aircraft continued taxing and backtracking the runway in order to get ready for takeoff and the conversation regarding Birds continued for the next couple of seconds as the aircraft began turning around lining up with Runway one two now before we get into the takeoff roll there are a few other things you need to know both about the runway they were now about to use and about the Airbus a321 you see Runway 12 in shovsky airport was absolutely enormous it was 70 M wide compared to the standard 40 5 and 4,600 M long making it about twice the length of a normal Runway this is important from a rejected takeoff perspective because it means that even with a high rejection speed there should be plenty of Runway left to slow down on the decision speed V1 is simultaneously calculated to be both the highest speed where a rejected takeoff can safely be accomplished and the lowest speed from where a safe takeoff can be made after a single engine failure but V1 can never be higher than VR the rotation speed this means that with an extremely long Runway the first definition of V1 as safe speed to stop could theoretically be significantly higher but it never is the other importance of this long Runway was that the pilots could use something known as Flex temperature on their engines this is similar to aumed temperature on Boeing aircraft and it's a technique used to reduce the take of thrust to the minimum possible for a safety takeoff this reduces engine wear noise and fuel burn and is therefore almost always used if the conditions and Runway allow on this particular takeoff the flex temperature selected was 49° which would result in a takeoff N1 setting of 83% which is quite a large reduction but completely understandable given that enormous Runway now when it comes to the Airbus itself it comes with a few technical peculiarities which are good to know about in order to understand what is soon about to happen first of all this is an aircraft that will try to assist the pilots as much as possible in case something unexpected would happen an example of this is that the aircraft will automatically input some Rudder towards the functioning engine in case of an engine failure of the takeoff enough for the pilots to more easily keep the aircraft under control it will however not be enough to completely cancel out the effect of the asymmetric trust so it is expected that the pilot will input more Roder once the situation has become clear how much Rudder is needed will be indicated on the slip and skid indicator on the primary flight display which will turn blue and become something known as a beta Target in case certain criterias are met now it's very important that the pet flying inputs enough rouder to Center this beta Target because if that's not done the aircraft will be banking towards the live engine something known as a side slip and this will cause more drag than is optimal for the best possible client performance now how to correctly handle an engine failure of the takeoff is practice and evaluate it on every single simulator check that the Airbus Pilots will do until it should become almost second nature an Airbus has also stipulated a procedure to follow in case one engine pH at V1 and that procedure stipulates that initially the pilot needs to use the Roder to maintain the center line and then once the rotation speed is reached the pilot needs to rotate the aircraft up to an initial attitude of 12.5 5° to make sure the aircraft gets properly Airborne once the aircraft is up with a sustained positive rate of climb the gear must be retracted and the pitch adjusted down to follow the flight directors they will indicate a pitch that will keep the aircraft flying at the speed of lowest V2 and highest v2+ 20 knots it's super important to focus on getting that aircraft safely flying during those first few seconds so no other actions should be taken below 400 ft other than canceling out any warnings and getting the landing gear retracted above 400 ft the pilot flying can then ask the pilot monitoring for any ecam actions or memory items to be completed but not below that but why is it so important to keep that V2 speed then well this is the speed that has been calculated for each weight where the aircraft will be subjected to minimum drag and therefore climb as efficiency as possible with only one engine if the speed is allowed to drop below V2 the aircraft would need to pitch up more to a higher angle of attack in order to keep the aircraft flying and that higher angle of attack will create more induced drag and subsequently need more trust to be sustained which the aircraft won't have because it only has one working engine this would then lead to an even lower speed requiring an even higher angle of attack leading to even more drag well you get the point so this is why keeping V2 speed is so important as we will soon see now while we're on the subject of angle of attack we should also mention the next fantastic safety system that the Airbus offers the angle of attack protections known as Alpha floor and Alpha Max I won't go into all of the details of these systems because they are many but what I need you to understand is that the aircraft if it's in normal control law will not allow the pilots to pitch up so much that the angle of attack would cause a stall meaning that the wings will essentially stop producing lift and the aircraft will fall or see needs to be controllable if the pilot would still try to pitch up when the speed is not high enough to support it the aircraft will just refuse and instead maintain the pitch at a level that holds the maximum allowable angle of attack remember that so with all of that in mind let's get back to Euro Airlines flight 178 and its pilots who were now getting ready to take off from Runway one to the before take of checklist below the line was completed and with that the pilots verifi that the flaps were set in configuration one the speeds were all set correctly and that the cabin was Secure for takeoff they also made some final remarks about birds but nothing that seemed to bother them very much so at time0 612 and 42 seconds they reported ready for takeoff at that point they had turned around about 320 M short of the threshold for Runway one two likely to save some time since they had more than enough Runway from that point the tower controller responded sedl 178 Runway one two cleared for takeoff isolated bird activ ity and the first officer read this back the captain now moved the trust levers forward to stabilize the engines and then moved them into the flex detent this caused both the engines to accelerate to 83% N1 and the aircraft started to slowly accelerate down the runway now for some reason the flight directors were turned off but that had little effect since they activated automatically as soon as the trust levels would move forward into the flex Dent just seconds into the take of roll the captain must have spotted some bird again because he suddenly exclaimed come on fly past bird bad which is a common Russian swear word at that point the speed was only around 60 knots far below their decision speed and firmly within the low speed regime but the threat must not have been very big because there was no attempt or even discussion about rejecting the takeoff the first officer soon called out 100 knots to which the captain responded check but only seconds later as the aircraft accelerated past 140 knots the first officer suddenly called out another Russian exploitive it's likely that he saw a flocker bird starting to move into their path here but again even though this was at a point where it was still technically possible to reject the takeoff that didn't happen the aircraft continued to accelerate and when it passed 166 knots the first offer called out B1 rotate and the captain started slowly rotating the aircraft so slowly in fact that the speed was allowed to accelerate up to 181 knots before they left the runway significantly above the V2 of 168 knots this slow rotation could be a sign that the captain wanted to deliberately avoid something that he saw in front of him but whatever that was he wasn't successful within seconds of liftoff sounds of multiple bird impacts could be heard on the cockpit voice recorder as the aircraft slides through a flock of 15 to 20 large seagull the birds in impacted various parts of the aircraft and at least three got sucked into the left engine and one into the right this had immediate and terrible consequences the indicated core vibrations of both engin went up to the maximum within 1 second the left engine and within 4 seconds on the right the bird that flew into the right engine likely initially got thrown into the engine cowling causing a small bleed air leak just in front of the T12 sensor which is used my m other things to help calculate the engine's thrust settings this caused the right engine to immediately drop the N1 with about three% or so part of that bird then likely got sucked into the core of the engine where it caused some damage to the highpressure compressor blades but on the left side though things were much much worse out of the estimated three birds that got sucked in at least one of them would have been characterized as large meaning that the engine was now subjected to more burn ingestion than it had been certified for this led to multiple damages to fan blades and internal components enough for the N1 to rapidly decrease back to close to idle and for the engine to essentially stop producing forward trust in other words the pilots were now experiencing a real engine failure of the takeoff which is what they had previously briefed for and also practiced so many times in the simulator but this was not like anything that they had seen before the main difference was that because both engines were involved the trust had now dropped below the performance values calculated for an engine failure after takeoff with flex 49 selected and on top of that one of the birds on the left side had likely impacted one of the reverser lock rods on its way through the engine and this had caused an erroneous reverser unlocked engine number one ecam warning to appear together with a master caution and the single chime something that would have definitely drawn the Pilot's attention what this meant was that this failure didn't behave or mirror what the pilots were expecting and sometimes when things start to happen out of sequence that's enough for Pilots to start missing things the aircraft now automatically started inputting Rod towards the right to keep it flying straight ahead and because of that the beta Target soon appeared showing the captain that more right rodder was needed at the time the first officer called out climb which was probably supposed to be positive climb a prompt for the captain to ask for the gear to be retracted but the captain now was looking down on his ecam display which showed that omnus reverser unlocked warning and since the first officer's phrase was just slightly different than it should be it didn't trigger the captain to call for the gear now in a situation like this it is up to the pilot monitoring in this case the first officer who has a lower workload to try and help the pilot flying by prioritizing the most important items but he was very inexperienced and likely just as surprised and overloaded by this situation as the captain was so he never repeated The Prompt which meant that the gear was simply forgotten the captain now mechanically started following the engine failure of the take off procedure by pitching the aircraft up to 12 1 12° but remember that pitch was only supposed to be used to get the aircraft Airborne as they were now climbing that pitch was way too high and he should have been following the flight directors instead but since he didn't this and the fact that the gear was still not retracted meant that the speed now started to decelerate at an altitude of around 170 ft the captain started to input right rod to try and minimize the drag but he now also desperately wanted to reduce his own workload and the best way to do that was to engage the outop pilot now the Airbus procedures does suggests that the pilot does this as soon as possible but they are also very clear about the fact that when the autopilot is engaged the aircraft must be properly trimmed out which includes the rudder trim so when the captain now reached over and engaged the outop pilot while still inputting right R manually and without trimming it away he violated a part of that engagement criteria still the aop pilot did engage which the captain called out but it's likely that this also caused him to relax a bit and his right pedal input now gradually started to decrease with that out of the way he now also called out ecam action a direct order for the first officer to start executing the ecam checklist but it did this at an altitude of less than 300 ft well below the 400 ft that they had briefed earlier the first officer immediately complied and started actioning the items on the screen and that likely removed the last chance of him remembering that the landing gear had still not been retracted now when it was engaged the autopilot immediately realized that the pitch was way too high and because of that pitched the nose down to follow the flight directors instead and this slowed down the climb and stabilize the speed at least for a short while now before we continue let me clear up a few things here first of all I am sure that there are going to be people out there who will be asking couldn't they have just decided to reject the takeoff even if this happened off we W now that is a fair question and since this happened just off the rotation on a huge Runway they still had about 2 kilm left of runway in front of them in fact the Russian investigation team actually asked this very question in the report and they even included this as a recommendation but the reality is no they shouldn't have the aviation world have spent decades drilling into Pilots to never reject a takeoff of the V1 and that's for very good reasons V1 has been carefully calculated to satisfy both the safety requirement of a rejected takeoff before and a safe climb out on one engine after and in the vast majority of cases the outcome of a rejected takeoff after getting Airborne would be truly catastrophic in this case the pilot still likely had not even realized that the right engine was also having problems so it wouldn't have even occurred to them to try and reject even if in this specific case it might have worked the second thing that I want to point out has to do with the Pilot's performance here now I know that I highlighted the pilot psychological profiles before but the truth is that all of what I have just told you up until now took place within the space of about 20 seconds an impossibly short time frame my experience of checking pilots in the simulators has shown that if Pilots are subjected to a completely unexpected failure and they have enough capacity to just fall back onto their train procedures well then they will generally do fine but if the procedures are disrupted like it was in this case by an incorrect call out which led them to forget racing the gear well then there are very limited further prompts to lead the pilots back to realizing that Omission so the fact that these Pilots didn't catch that they had forgotten the gear is not that surprising at least not to me now if you ever find yourself in a situation like that and you can't figure out why things are going wrong my suggestion is to revert back to the beginning of the procedure you're following and go forward through it step by step to see if you have missed something this is by the way exactly the kind of extra info that I love discussing with my patrons over on my patreon hangouts anyway as the first officer read out the first ecam action for Eng one reverser unlocked trust lever and number one idle the aircraft reached its maximum height of 3133 ft when it read out confirmed trust to make sure that it was moving the correct trust lever the captain responded check but they were now suddenly interrupted by the autopilot disc connecting what had happened was that the captain had now removed all of the rudder input from his right pedal and since it wasn't trimmed out this change in manual input exceeded the maximum allowed by the autopilot which caused it to disengage with the associated oral cly charge warning erupting in the cockpit the first officer was likely so startled by this sudden warning that he didn't continue with the ecam actions in fact after this the first officer didn't do much more at all for quite long period the aircraft now started gently descending and the captain quickly took back manual control but even though he initially also started inputting right Rudder again this input almost immediately started gradually decreasing which meant that the aircraft soon again found itself in a side slip with spoilers deflected on its wings this together with the low available thrust and the still extended gear was now enough to force the aircraft to also start slowing down seconds later the ground proximity limited warning system recognized the aircra was descending and called out its first of many don't think warnings things were now starting to become more and more chaotic with the combinations of vibrations ecam warnings M cautions gpws warnings and the continuous autopilot disconnect cabal charge all sounding together so trying to think rationally in this circumstances would have been very very hard getting rid of at least the out the pallet warning would have been veryy easy just a single push on the disconnect button on the captain's side stick but the fact that he didn't do that was likely a sign that the captain was now starting to become completely overwhelmed he now reacted to the gpws warning by pulling back on his side stick which initially stopped The Descent but also caused the angle of attack to increase further increasing the drag and further reducing the speed at the same time he also keyed his mic and called out a p p p p p p s l on the frequency but didn't get much further than that and the controller who might not have even heard this call and definitely didn't know who called it just didn't answer the right engine now started overheating due to the damages it had sustained but that warning was likely never seen by the crew as there was so many other ecam warnings ahead of that one on the screen which hadn't yet been actioned the panicked captain could now also see how the air speed kept decreasing and how his aircraft resumed its shallow descent and he knew that there were only two things he could do to fix this add trust or decrease drag but since they still hadn't realized that the gear was still hanging out he went for the first option and pushed both thrust levers forward into the toga detent now the left engine was too badly damaged to respond to this but the right engine tried to as more fuel entered into its combustion chamber the damaged compressure blades in the high pressure compressor could wouldn't sustain the demand to push more air backward so instead pressure started building up which soon surged forward into the low press compressor this is something commonly known as a compressor stall and it's a cyclical event that comes and goes as the pressure keeps building up and releasing and what this meant was that instead of getting more trust the captain now found himself with a perception of an even worse damaged aircraft jerking and pushing from side to side as the surges continued there are memory items for this and they include reducing the Trust on the affected engine until the seches stops remember the engine had worked relatively fine before the captain pushed it into toga but that never happened instead the chaos just continued and the aircraft kept descending now the captain did reduce the Trust on the left engine possibly to keep following the ecam instructions but this obviously did nothing and he soon called out watch speed to his first officer who didn't respond he was likely still to shocked to be of any help at this stage as the aircraft was now getting closer and closer to the ground the captain again called out a panan message on to the tower frequency and this time he included the nature of the emergency and their call sign and this time the tower controller actually also answered the captain barked to his first officer to please ask the controller to return back to the airport which seemed to have brought the first officer out of his days because he now started complying and also got that clearance to return from the controller but at this point they were only 240 ft over the fields below and with a speed of 15 152 knots well below V2 the left trust lever was finally brought all the way back to idle in accordance with the ecam instruction but this was of very little help the only thing that could have possibly helped them here would have been to get that gear retracted but that still wasn't happening at this point the first officer called out altitude altitude as he saw the ground was getting closer and closer but that just caused the captain to pull the side stick even further back with the low speed that they now had this meant that the aircraft's alpha floor protection finally activated keeping the nose from rising any higher had this been another type of aircraft these type of inputs would have caused a fullon stall which from this altitude would have likely been catastrophic but because of these fantastic safety features the aircraft now instead ended up just gently gliding down down towards the vast corn fields below they were now only seconds away from Impact but without ever discussing this as a possibility nor preparing for it the captain was instead still trying desperately to keep the aircraft away from the ground in any way he could as the gpws now started calling out terrain ahead pull up in a last moment of desperation the captain now likely looked down and realized that the gear was still extended and immediately reached over and retracted it in later interviews he would state that he did this because he knew that the ground was wet and that he was afraid that the gear would dig into the mod causing the aircraft to cartwheel over but that explanation is highly unlikely a reasoning like that would have meant that he had loads of spare capacity to take informed decisions but inside the chaos that the crew now found themselves at that point it's way more likely that he just realized their mistake and tried to correct it in order to keep the aircraft flying all guidance available for forced landing on Solid Ground includes an extended landing gear which will absorb a lot of the impact forces and if their intention had been an emergency landing they should have instead spent their time worrying about getting more flaps out and controlling their descent rate but here they were still with the flaps in position one as they had had during takeoff the right engine still giving as much trust as it could possibly give and the gear now slowly retracting as the aircraft started its final 12 20 ft of descent there were no words spoken between the pilots no briefings or discussions no brace call made to the cabin crew and passengers who were thankfully all still strapped in as the aircraft descended through 90 ft the captain pulled the Sid stick fully back which now finally activated the alpha Max protection and an angle of attack of about 15.5 de the trajectory for the 90 seconds long flight had been largely straight ahead with only a slight left turn so when the aircraft finally touched down it did so at a heading of 094° and a speed of roughly 136 knots the right engine was still operating at close to maximum available trust at that point which could be clearly seen by the ways that the corn stalk was being bent away from the direction of the aircraft almost immediately after the touchdown the flight data and cockit voice recorder stopped working likely because of the loss of electrical power as the engine started ingesting dirt corn stalks and mud the aircraft lid on its belly across the field with its landing gear door still partially open and it soon jumped over a waterfill ditch in the middle of the field before coming to a complete stop all in one piece the pilots quickly turned off the engine start levers and then after a days few seconds initiated the evacuation which by all accounts were well executed by the cabin crew since the aircraft still had battery power the pilots then radio their position to air traffic control who immediately sent out the emergency Rescue Services to W the down aircraft and when they arrived they were amazed of what they saw a completely intact aircraft just sitting there on its belly in the middle of a corn field with all passengers and crew safely outside waiting for them some of the passengers were allegedly even eager to be taken back to the airport to presumably catch the next available flight to their destination all in all 32 of the 233 passengers on board received minor injuries and out of those 2 three got hurt during the impact and four during the evacuation only three people suffered injuries that were classified as serious within hours the story about this fantastic outcome started spreading across the world helped Along by the Russian authorities who wanted nothing else than a positive story to tell about their battered aviation industry comparisons were immediately made with the famous Miracle on the Hudson event and President Vladimir Putin had within a day of the accident announced that he would be awarding the two pilots the honor title of hero of the Russian Federation Russia's highest civilian order was the cabin crew would receive the order of Courage but this was all done before the investigators even had a chance to really start their work and when they did this very different story that I have just told you started emerging this was a story where the pilots had after the initial bird strike made several mistakes which ultimately led to the accident and where the aircraft itself was the actual hero their investig ation showed that had the landing gear been retracted the remaining engine was producing enough trust for the aircraft to continue to climb even though it should be said that it was also quite badly damaged so there was no telling how long it would continue to work from what I can tell the investigation of this accident was actually handled in a very professional and impartial way which might be why it was never officially released I have based this video on a leaked final report available only in Russian which started circulating on telegram back in 2022 and was then painstakingly translated by Admiral cloudberg last year I will link to her report and her work below the final report concluded that the accident was caused by the Collis with birds something that was clear from the very first hours of the investigation but it also came with several observations as to why this was the case together with sharp recommendations to both the airport the airline and the Russian Aviation authorities M the entity in charge of the investigation found that the pilot contributed to the accident by not fully appreciating the threat of the birds at the airport not following the engan failure of the takeoff profile correctly and not understanding how to minimize the drag once the damage was done this led to further recommendations on pilot training and pilot selection but given the fact that the final report was never officially released this report is unlikely to lead to many improvements but I guess at least we now know a little bit more about the miracle in the cornon if you have questions about this or just want to discuss aviation in general then join my Patron crew before the next Zoom hangout I do those a couple of times every month where I spend a few hours just discussing anything that my patrons might have questions about and it's really really fun and really great it's like sitting down with a group of friends having coffee I definitely recommend it and if you want to join there is a link here somewhere on the screen or in the description below I would love to see you there have an absolutely fantastic day wherever you are and I'll see you next time bye-bye

Channel: Mentour Pilot

Views: 709,268

Keywords: mentour pilot, aviation stories, trending, mentour, full episode, Mentour Pilot, Mentour Now, pilot, cockpit, plane crash, crash, ural178, ural crash, plane crash in field, plane crashes on runway, plane crash survivors, hero pilots, russian plane crash, air crash investigation, plane crash investigation, ural flight 178, what happened

Id: -sTLigmJz4I

Length: 45min 37sec (2737 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 04 2024