THROWN to the SEA like a PAPER AIRPLANE!

[Music] imagine that you're sitting as a passenger of a private jet maybe holding a drink looking out through the window down to the glistening sea below you when suddenly from out of nowhere it feels like a giant hand grips onto your aircraft turns it over several times and then throws it down towards the sea below you this has actually happened and what caused it is what we're gonna talk about today stay tuned [Music] this story took place on the 7th of january 2017. there were actually two different aircraft involved but the aircraft that we're going to spend most of our time focusing on is a bombardier cl604 that's a beautiful slick detailed business jet aircraft with two rear mounted engines the aircraft was configured to take a maximum of 10 passengers but on the accident day it was carrying only six in charge of the bombardier yet was a 39 year old captain with little over 5 300 hours of total time the majority of which had been flown on this particular type he was flying together with a 41 year old first officer who had around 1500 hours of total time and about a thousand hours on this type the other aircraft involved was a one-year-old airbus a380 because of the nature of what's about to happen we don't really know much about the crew or the passenger numbers onboard this aircraft but we do know that at the time of the accident this aircraft waived about 523 tons and that's going to become an important fact in what's about to happen the bombardier crew started their duty at zero 500 in malay in the maldives islands and they were due to fly over towards al bateen in the united arab emirates the pilots started their pre-flight preparation by looking through the flight plans and the no-tums and then they started looking into the weather and they saw that the weather at their departure airport was absolutely beautiful and the same went for their destination airport then they went in and they started looking into the significant weather chart along their route to see if there was any clear air turbulence or anything like that forecasted this is a standard thing that we always do during our preflight preparation because we need to know and prepare in case there are areas of clear air turbulence or thunderstorms or anything like that during the route so that we can either look at potentially re-routing or changing altitude and also so that we can breathe our cabin crew so they can plan their services because if there are areas of clear air turbulence they don't want to be in the middle of the cabin serving coffee when that hits clear air turbulence or cat is like the name suggests turbulence that occurs in clear air so outside of clouds and because there is no water vapor or any droplets involved and it means that we cannot see it on our weather radars we have to rely on forecasts in order to know when it might occur it is normally associated with things like jet streams that fast moving air and where the jet streams rub up against slower moving air it creates these small vortices that we will feel like turbulence it can also happen in the boundary layers between different air masses or over mountain ranges in this case there was no forecast of any clear air turbulence along the route so they proceeded to breathe their crabbing crew member and then they went out toward the aircraft to start greeting the passengers and make the aircraft ready for departure as this was happening the crew of the airbus a380 was doing almost exactly the same job over in their crew room in dubai they were planning a flight between dubai and sydney and it looked like it was going to be almost fully loaded which meant that they were going to be very heavy and because they were so heavy they had been planned to have an intermediate cruising altitude of flight level 350 that's about 35 000 feet they were then going to be burning off fuel as they were proceeding down towards sydney enabling them to climb higher at times 0 6 52 that's 11 52 local time the bombardier aircraft took off from runway 36 in malay and started climbing towards their destination the captain was pilot flying for the flight and he engaged the autopilot about one minute into the flight and the outer pilot stayed engaged all the way up until the accident about 28 minutes after departure the aircraft had reached its cruising altitude of 34 000 feet and about nine minutes after that they crossed into the mumbai fire and got into contact with mumbai air traffic controllers they cleared them to continue following the lima 984 airway up to an arnhem point called ketal according to their flight plan almost at the same time only two minutes apart the airbus a380 took off from dubai and started climbing up to their cruising altitude of flight level 350 in the opposite direction aircrafts are generally assigned their cruising levels based on something called the half circle rule this rule states that aircraft that are traveling in a predominantly westerly direction will be getting even flight levels so flight with three two zero flats for three four zero and three six zero and so on and aircraft that are traveling on a easterly route they will be getting the odd level so flight over three one zero three three zero three five zero and so on unless there are other rules that apply on specific airways for example another rule which is also worth knowing about in this case is something called reduced vertical separation minima or rvsm in rvsm airspace aircraft are allowed to get as close to each other as 1000 feet vertically when they meet each other rvsm airspace generally starts at flight level 280 and above and in order for an aircraft to be allowed to fly in that type of airspace it needs to have certain systems installed for example it needs to have an autopilot that can maintain an altitude and also certain altimeter alerting and indication systems and other technical systems as well but because most modern airliners are equipped to fly in rbsm airspace it's very common for us pilots to see other aircraft that close to each other so 1000 feet is about 300 meters and because our navigational equipments are generally so accurate now it is also very common that we cross the same r nav points at only 1 000 feet difference vertically and almost identically the same point horizontally and that is also going to have an impact on what's about to happen next the last thing that i have to explain in order for this story to make sense is something called wake turbulence so an aircraft wing will create lift based on two different principles the first one is newton's third law of physics which basically says that every action has an equal and opposite reaction and the second principle is something called bernoulli's theorem now bernoulli's theorem talks about fluid dynamics and it has to do with the shape of the wing because the top of the wing is slightly bent like this it means that oncoming air that flows past the wing have to accelerate across the top of the wing and it actually slows down a little bit at the bottom of the wing now bernoulli's theorem says that when this happens it creates differences in pressure so that below the wing there will be a slight positive pressure high pressure created and on top of the wing where the air is being accelerated there will be a low pressure formed and this will create a kind of suction top that also influences the lift that the wing can create but of course in nature anytime that there is a difference between pressure nature will try to equalize this pressure difference and this happens here as well but the air cannot escape from the high pressure at the bottom to the top over the leading edge of the wing just because of the way that the air is flowing so the only real way that the air can try to equalize this pressure is at the wing tips this creates a movement of the air span whites on the wings that then at the wingtips turns around and creates these vortices that you can actually see when if you're looking at aircraft that are landing for example sometimes with the air is very moist you can actually see these wing tipped vortices appearing now the heavier an aircraft is the more lift the wings need to produce and the more lifts they need to produce the bigger the pressure difference and the bigger these wingtips vortexes generally are this means that these wingtip vortices tend to be the worst during takeoff and landing when an aircraft needs to create a lot of lift with a relatively low airspeed because of this aircraft are divided into different wake turbulence categories depending on how bad brake turbulence they're actually creating you're either going to be in the heavy medium or the light category and generally speaking the heavier the aircraft is the heavier the wake turbulence will be these categories are then used in order to determine the separation between aircraft during takeoff and also during landing so if a heavy aircraft takes off a light aircraft coming in behind might have to wait as much as three minutes before they can take off because these wake turbulent vortices they will be falling down behind the departing aircraft and then they will be moving outwards and away with the wind and they will also dissipate become less severe but like i said this type of wake turbulence separation only really happens during takeoff and landing and that's because while we're on route there are more limiting separations in force and by the way this is why you might sometimes hear on an air traffic control frequency that one call sign refers to themselves as being heavy that's because they want to notify both air traffic control and other traffic around them that they are heavy and thus can create quite a lot of weight turbulence around them now even though the wake turbulence is the absolute worst during takeoff and landing aircraft do create wake turbulence when we're flying on route as well and we do have some mitigation strategies that we can employ if we for example is flying 2 000 feet below an aircraft that is on the same route flying just ahead of us if we think that there is a risk that we might encounter the weight turbulence from them we can employ something called slop which is strategical lateral offset procedure so that is a procedure where we can basically put into our flight management computer that we want to fly one or two nautical miles to the right or left of the intended track and by doing so we will avoid any wake turbulence that might be falling down now this is a procedure that a pilot can employ without telling air traffic control about it but it's only allowed on certain airways and the lima 984 that these two aircrafts are flying on is not one of them now before we get into the hair racing accident sequence in this video i just want to share this special deal that the sponsor of this episode is offering to you do you want to be the smartest person in class or at work 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description below which is brilliant.org mentor pilot it's completely free to go and check it out guys but the first 200 of you who uses that link will also get a whopping 20 off on the premium subscription so go down check it out now back to the video around time 8 to 35 the captain of the bombardier aircraft looked down onto his navigation display and saw that there was oncoming traffic one thousand feet above them within a few minutes both him and the first officer recognized the airbus a380 that was coming in the opposite direction and it's likely that they didn't think much of this in fact it's more than likely that they thought it was pretty cool to see this giant and majestic aircraft coming in such relative proximity at time eight thirty eight and zero seven seconds the giant airbus a380 passed almost exactly overhead the bombardier just slightly to the left and with a vertical separation of exactly 1000 feet initially everything looked normal but about one minute after the airbus had crossed overhead the wake turbulence hit this was initially felt like a light shrubber in the aircraft and then it started to roll slightly to the right before it made a snap roll towards the left and this was associated with the attitude going from one degree nose up that it was keeping to keep wings level to nine degrees nose up and then immediately as part of the roll to minus 20 degrees that immediately disconnected the autopilot and the aircraft g loading went from one g which is what we are all feeling right now to 1.6 g as the aircraft pitched up to 9 degrees that would have made the crew and the passengers feel like they were pushed down slightly into their seats and then as the attitude changed from plus 9 to -20 degrees as part of the roll it would have created a gut wrenching minus 3.2 gs that would have made anything that wasn't strapped down including crew and the passengers being thrown into the ceiling of the aircraft luckily both pilots were wearing their seat belts so they were strapped down the first officer even had his shoulder harness on but several other items in the cockpit including the quick reference handbook got thrown into the ceiling where it broke and strewed non-normal checklist pages all over the cockpit as the aircraft now rolled three times around its longitudinal axis and hurled down towards the sea below in the back of the cabin there was now complete mayhem the cabin crew was in the middle of the cabin preparing for meal service as this happened and both her and the passengers got thrown straight up into the ceiling of the aircraft and then as the aircraft started to roll they were thrown into the floor and into the seats basically the back of the cabin became like the inside of a giant washing machine in the cockpit things were now starting to get even more serious as the quick roll had caused both inertial reference systems to malfunction these systems provided the primary flight displays of the pilots with their aptitude information meaning that the pilots now didn't have anything to show them what was up and down except for the standby instrumentation and what they could see outside of the window but of course outside of the window there was blue sky and blue sea and knowing which was which was very hard in this situation the captain tried to use the few small cumulus clouds that he could see together with the information from his standby instrumentation to try to level the aircraft out as this was happening the speed went up to 330 knots which is above the maximum speed that the aircraft was certified for which is 318 knots the palace were now doing everything they could to get the aircraft out of the roll and the unusual attitude and back on to the right keel again they used quite a lot of opposite aileron a little bit of opposite rudder and some speed brake in order to achieve that eventually they managed to level the aircraft off but once they had done that they had lost eight thousand 700 feet they were down to flight level 240 or 24 000 feet and the speed was now finally starting to reduce back again but this ordeal was not over yet because this maneuver had caused a disruption of air flow into the left-hand engine and the number one so when the captain now looked down onto his engine instrumentation he saw that there was a big split with a n1 that was steadily reducing and then two that was slightly higher but an inter-turbine temperature as a temperature inside of the engine rising rapidly up to over a thousand degrees and it was blinking red because of this the pilots decided to immediately shut down engine number one to try to preserve it and make sure that it didn't get damaged they did so and now they were flying at 24 000 feet with only one engine but at least they had the aircraft under control the next thing they now had to do was try to get the inertial reference systems back up and operating again so that they could navigate and get back their primary flight displays but unfortunately remember that the quick reference handbook containing all of the normal checklists had been thrown into the ceiling and basically destroyed yeah that meant that the whole cockpit was now full of normal checklists and to try to find that specific non-normal checklist to get the irs's back up and run again was proven to be very difficult so the pilots had to try to do that checklist by memory which they succeeded with and this is just another reason for you guys to be studying your quick reference handbook checklist if you're pilots out there because you never know when you find yourself in a situation like this so they managed to get first one inertial reference system back and then the second one helping them to start navigating and to contact air traffic control to tell them where they were what had happened to them and declare a mayday an emergency call once this was done they managed to engage the autopilot and the captain got into contact with the cabin crew to see what was going on in the back of the aircraft the cabin crew informed him that things were not looking very well there was some severe injuries to the passengers there was a lot of bleeding going on and they needed to land as soon as possible the pilots now discussed that information that they received from the cabin crew and started to make a plan of what to do the problem was that they were still out of the sea miles away from any land but they looked at all of the different options they had and decided that they were going to divert towards muscat they informed their traffic control that this is what they wanted received the climb clearance up to 25 000 feet flat for 250 and then started heading straight towards muscat airport which was about 1 hour and 25 minutes away at time 1105 the bombardier aircraft landed safely in mukskat and taxed into the april there they were met by ambulances who took four out of the six passengers directly to hospital where it was found that several of them had suffered things like broken ribs they were bloody broken noses one had a broken vertebrae as well as other minor injuries the two pilots and two of the passengers were unharmed and the cabin crew had received minor injuries the aircraft was evaluated by representatives of the aircraft manufacturer bombardier and they decided that because it had been subjected to so many structural exceedances during this event it would not be possible to restore the aircraft to a flyable standard again so the aircraft was basically written off the airbus a380 and its crew was blissfully unaware of this accident happening so they just continued their flight down towards sydney where they landed uneventfully at time 1948. the investigation into this accident is as far as i know still ongoing because i had to base this video on the interim report even though this happened back in 2017. however the report does mention that there is a so-called steering group that was established back in 2003 and that was made to look into the dangers of wake turbulence that could be created by the airbus a380 and other aircraft of similar size that steering group comprised of members like the faa the gaa airbus and some other participants as well and they came with some recommendations that came out of this accident and some other incidents as well saying that they strongly recommended looking into the possibility of increasing separation between heavy vortex category aircraft and smaller aircraft whenever there was a risk of vortex encounter we pilots also have the opportunity to ask air traffic control if it would be okay for us to use strategic lateral offset procedures slot procedures if we see that a situation similar to this would be developing even if the airway that we're flying on might not be specifically approved for it anyway if you found this video fascinating and you want to see more then check out this video or this one if you want to support the work that i do here together with my wonderful team then consider becoming part of my wonderful patreon family or get yourself some merch have an absolutely fantastic day and i'll see you next time bye [Music]

Channel: Mentour Pilot

Views: 907,607

Keywords: true crime, crime stoires, storytelling, captain, mentour pilot, mentor pilot, crash investigation, full epsiodes, aviation, pilot, crash, air crash investigation, final report, boeing, airbus, piper, cessna, disaster, fatal crash, air incident, air disasters 2022, UAE, dubai, challenger, male, maldives, turbulence, a380, wake

Id: ZI9ZHBRc2yQ

Length: 21min 8sec (1268 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 30 2022