This Almost Was Australia's Worst Air Crash | Emirates Flight 407

this is the story of emirates flight 407 on the night of the 20th of march 2009 an emirates a340 was to fly from melbourne to dubai with 275 people on board the flight was to depart at 10 25 pm local time and the flying time was 14 hours and 8 minutes going off topic for a second it feels kind of weird seeing an emirates slivery on a quad engine plane that's not the a380 i did not know that they used to operate the a340 did you as they prep for departure the pilots were busy in the cockpit getting the plane ready for departure the first officer was on a laptop known as the electronic flight bag he would be using this laptop to calculate the takeoff metrics for runway one six it's a simple process really you put in parameters like the wind direction takeoff weight altimeter settings temperature air conditioning flaps runway condition and a whole host of other data and it gives you the performance data for that takeoff what power settings to use their reference speeds that sort of thing with all of that calculated they copied that data onto the master flight plan as the crew discussed the instrument departure from melbourne the laptop was handed to the captain who typed the data into the plane's computers the first officer was in contact with the tower for the clearances that they needed the captain had finished entering the data into the flight management computer and he checked with the first officer and the master flight plan to make sure that everything had been done correctly they checked again the first officer read out the takeoff weight of the plane from the flight management system of the plane the takeoff weight was 361.9 tons but the first officer read it out as 326.9 tons he immediately corrected himself and stated 362.9 tons as their takeoff weight one ton was added to the takeoff weight to account for any last minute changes made to the plane at 10 18 pm the plane was pushed back from the gate seven minutes ahead of schedule at 10 30 pm it was at the northern end of runway 1-6 ready to take off a plane was on final and flight 407 was given the all clear to take off before it landed the pilots lined up and set the engines to take off power at 10 31 and 53 seconds they hit their calculated rotate speed the captain who was the pilot monitoring called that rotate the first officer pulled back on the stick but the nose barely budged the captain called out rotate again the first officer pulled back even more the nose rose up slowly but the plane did not take off it was still on the ground sensing that something was wrong the captain immediately pushed the throttles to toga or go around power the four rolls-royce trent engines reacted quickly as the plane accelerated and it ran out of runway it went through the stop way and a grassy part beyond the runway but three seconds after full power was commanded the plane was airborne it was a close call though so close in fact that the a340 had knocked out a light on the runway and the ils antenna for runway 1-6 runway 1-6 did not have ils anymore but they were airborne melbourne atc came on and told the pilots that they had just had a tail strike so the pilots decided to land to assess the damage they climbed to 7000 feet to dump some fuel so that they could have a safe landing the plane was fueled up for a 14 hour flight and as of right now it was too heavy for a landing as they climbed the relief first officer noted that the plane was not pressurizing the tail strike must have done some serious damage the captain immediately asked the relief first officer to pull up the checklist for a tail strike but he or she could not find it the captain declared a pan call and all four crew members decided to select 280 tons as the landing weight this was above the maximum landing weight but they decided to go with it just in case if they needed to make multiple approaches to the airport meanwhile the airport authorities were busy combing the runway for debris they knew that the damage to the tail would be bad with the crew and passengers briefed they started their descent from seven thousand feet as they passed through 6500 feet a strange rumbling sound was hurt the flight attendant in the back said that he or she could see and smell smoke the first officer led the atc know about a possible in-flight fire they needed to get this plane on the ground now atc cleared them down to 3000 feet and cleared them in for a landing on runway 3-4 firefighting vehicles stood by ready just in case if things took a turn for the worse one hour after plane had taken off it had landed the tail was inspected and since they found no sign of fire the plane was allowed to taxi to the terminal where people disembarked as they expected the plane did sustain some heavy damage in some places the skin was completely worn away and they found dirt and grass lodged in the skin of the tail a service panel was dislodged from the tail the rear pressure bulkhead also sustained some serious damage this explained the pressurization issues on the left main landing gear they saw a scuff mark where the tire hit the ils antenna for the runway this shows you how close the plane came to striking the ils antenna everything except for that one tire missed the antenna had the captain not commanded full power when he did this would have been very different the plane would have made a lot more contact with the antenna we can only speculate about the damage a plane at takeoff speed would sustain by striking long metal poles australian aviation officials have been quoted as saying as close as we have ever come to a major aviation catastrophe in australia flight 407 was inches away from disaster the next thing that they looked at was the fire they inspected the plane and they could not see any signs of fire so they concluded that what the flight attendant had seen was dust dislodged from the tail during the impact sequence after they had inspected the plane the plane was flown to toulouse in france for repair and on this flight it could not fly any more than twelve thousand feet now the million australian dollar question why was it so hard for the plane to take off as it turned out the first officer made a mistake while programming the electronic flight bag the computer that calculated the takeoff parameters the plane's takeoff weight was 361.9 tons and the first officer entered 262.9 tons into the computer that calculated the takeoff parameters the computer thought that the plane was 100 tons lighter than it actually was so when they punched in the numbers given by the electronic flight bag into the flight management computer it was the power setting for a plane that was way lighter than their plane it was quite a simple error just a slip of the finger we're all humans and we all make mistakes that's why there were three separate checks which gave them five opportunities to pick up on this error this error could have been found on the takeoff performance error check the takeoff data check and the load cheat confirmation procedure for the takeoff performance error check the captain would check the data put into the efb this was a silent check and after that the captain and the first officer would compare the takeoff weight in the efb against the data in the flight management and guidance system this was a verbal check and this was never done there were a lot of things going on in the cockpit at that time and they just didn't do it because they got distracted before we get into the other points let's talk about flex takeoffs or flexible takeoffs a plane in this case the a340 is capable of producing huge amounts of thrust usually if you have a long runway and if you're not hauling a lot of weight you don't need all that power asking all of that power from the engines for every single takeoff is just bad for the life of the engine so you take off at a reduced power setting or in other words a flex takeoff this reduced thrust is achieved in a very ingenious way before takeoff pilots will set a flex temperature which is usually pretty high now the computer that commands the power from the engine assumes that the ambient error is quite hot and so it commands less power from the engines to protect them during the takeoff performance error check you have to compare the flex takeoff weight and the weight in the fmgs this does not need a verbal check and so we really don't know if the pilots did this this would have been a great time to catch the error but it was not caught during the load cheat confirmation procedure the first officer had to read out the takeoff weights from the fmgs page and the master flight plan when he read out from the fmgs he read it out correctly 361 decimal nine tons whereas when he read it out from the flight plan he read 326 decimal 9 tons he immediately corrected himself and read out 362 decimal 9 tons the correct value remember that the value has one ton of weight added for leeway but on the master flight plan the value was 262 decimal 6 he just changed the weight on the flight plan to the correct value thinking that he had made a mistake writing it down had he thought that he had made a mistake he would have gone into the electronic flight back loaded up the program and see that he had incorrectly entered the weight of the plane in fact when he pulled out the efb to calculate the landing parameters during the emergency he spotted the error immediately and since the captain was comparing values that were spoken out by the first officer he could not spot the error either the last chance for them to spot the error was using the green dot speed the green dot speed is the best speed at which you can climb out in a clean configuration if you lose an engine now the important thing for us is that the electronic flight bag and the flight management computer gave the crew two different speeds the efb told them that the green dot speed was 225 knots and the flight management computer told them that the green dot speed was 265 knots if there was a difference of more than three knots that indicated a weight input discrepancy and it's something that the crew had to resolve but on flight 407 the captain just thought about it for a minute and then just said yes it is possible that the captain just compared the last number of both the values and may have concluded that they were close enough it is possible that his distractions in the cockpit may have gotten the best of him quote in summary the cruise non-detection of the erroneous takeoff weight in the efb was multifaceted and reduced the effectiveness of procedural checks that could individually have detected the error it is possible for errors to pass undetected through various checks which is why most procedures incorporate multiple independent checks to verify critical information end quote making matters worse it was hard for them to detect the lower acceleration of the plane we humans aren't good at that the airspeed indicator would be a bit slower but that's not something you'd notice unless you were specifically looking for that the crew felt that the plane accelerated like any other heavy a340 over the past few months the crew had seen a large variety of takeoff weights from 150 tons to 370 tons this is probably why the first officer did not bat an eye at the 262 ton value that he saw so why did all of this happen in short it's a mistake that we've all done before the first officer typed in the wrong value into the electronic flight bag it gave them the thrust settings for the incorrect weight that the first officer had put in i myself understand how this could have happened in fact while i wrote the script i did mistyped the weight once or twice then after that they had so many opportunities to figure out their mistake a long time ago i made a video about a 747 whose pilots made the exact same error i'll link that on the screen right now unlike flight 407 they weren't so lucky a long time ago all of these calculations were a very involved process you had to consult charts you had to do all the calculations yourself from that we moved to a hands-off approach that routineness made people susceptible to errors and people who designed the checklist knew that that's why they had so many chances to catch their error but unluckily they were distracted by their other duties or they just didn't think that what they were seeing was an issue and that was almost disastrous thank you for watching this episode of mini air crash investigation if you like the videos that i make do consider liking and subscribing it will really help the channel grow a big thank you to everyone who contributed footage to today's video i'll catch you guys next time stay safe

Channel: Mini Air Crash Investigation

Views: 859,887

Rating: 4.7596679 out of 5

Keywords: air crash investigation, mayday, air crash confidential, inches from diaster, A340, emirates crash, emergency landing emirates, emirates a340, emirates flight 407, melbourne crash, melbourne international airport, emergency landing at melbourne international airport, aurstralia's worst aircrash, australian aviation, A340 emrgency landing, airbus a340, airbus a340 runway incident, emirates a340 landing, emirates history, aviation history, avaition video, avgeek, emirates airline

Id: FgtvaylG37U

Length: 13min 15sec (795 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 20 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/TheDafuqGuy]

This incident is frequently quoted on our annual CRM refresher. No matter how silly or obvious the error looks, I can’t help but think of the fact how damn easy it is to miss it and repeat. Really lucky the runway was long enough.

[u/PC_Enthusiast_5353]

Will this possibly get its own episode in the future?