Unforgivable!! The Tragic tale of Air Algérie Flight 6289

[Music] as a pilot you train your entire career for that one moment that one time when fate circumstance and bad luck comes together to force you to save the day don't think but what happens if you in that moment haven't prepared at all and instead is completely caught off guard stay tuned on the 6th of March 2003 an air algerie crew consisting of two pilots and four cabin crew were preparing for two-leg domestic flag starting in tamaras Algeria and then continuing via a short stop in Garda to their final destination algers the flight had been delayed almost 3 hours due to a problem with a system B hydraulic pump but the boy 77200 that they were going to fly was in an otherwise seemingly good technical shape it was a reasonably old old bird which had been delivered new to air algerie back in December of 1983 meaning that it was almost 20 years old but it was maintained according to the maintenance handbook and had no open defects on the day of the flight it was equipped with two JTA delta-7 Alpha ducted low bypass turbofan engines which were both also in check but had a lot of time on them with the left engine having clogged over 30,000 hours and the ride close to 23,000 and the state of that left engine will come to play a really important role in this story anyway because of that delay the captain had not turned up to the briefing along with the rest of the crew instead he would arrive a little bit later when the issue with the hydraulic pump had been solved this meant that the first officer who had turned up on time was left to complete all of the pre-flight preparations by herself this included checking the weather for the two flights which was fine but the temperature was steadily getting higher and since T Andra at airport was situated quite high up at an altitude of around 4,500 ft the density altitude was now becoming a factor density altitude is the altitude the aircraft performance is calculated on corrected for temperature and it can have a major impact on for example the climb or takeoff performance as well as the landing distance required because since air with higher temperature has less density it means that effectively there's less air molecules moving around the wings as well as through the engines causing less lift at a given speed as well as less trust this means that the aircraft in hot weather will need to accelerate to a higher speed using less available thrust before it can take off which will mean a longer takeoff distance or less ability to carry weight with a delay the aircraft would now depart around 1,400 which was the hottest time of the day with temperatures around 25° C now that might not sound like much but at this higher airport altitude it can actually make a big difference especially with the heavy aircraft but these calculations would have to be checked before departure anyway and if the aircraft was too heavy well then there was always the possibility of just offloading some bags or cargo so the first officer wasn't too worried about that she instead continued to look through the briefing material and there was nothing in the Nots of flight plans that stood out to her the first officer was 44 years old at the time of this flight and had had amassed a total flying time of 5,219 hours of which 1,292 had been flown on the 7372 200 the captain that she was now waiting for was 48 years old and had 10,760 hours but he had only been a captain on the 737 for around 1,100 hours so he actually had less experience on the type than the first officer did and curiously he was also operating as a first officer on the Boing 767 within the same company and had been flying around 31 hours on that type during the 30 days before this flight the first officer and the cabin crew eventually started walking out to the aircraft and also started preparing it for departure naturally since she was the only pilot there the first officer prepared herself to operate as pilot flying for the first flight and completed all of the initial setup and walk around by herself she also asked the fueler to uplift 4.6 tons of fuel bringing the departure fuel up to close to 10 tons and this fuel together with the 97 passengers would bring the aircraft up to a takeoff weight of 4878 kilos which was only about 800 kilos away from the aircraft Maximum take of weight that's worth keeping in mind eventually the captain turned up and agreed to allow the first officer to fly the first leg and while she continue to prepare everything instead of helping out he instead started talking to the male Purser about some other unrelated stuff the purer had by the way called home a bit earlier and told his 17-year-old son that he would be home late due to some technical issues they were having with the aircraft and this call would later be very misinterpreted by the local press anyway eventually the maintenance team had completed the work on the hydraulic pump and the cabin crew started boarding the 97 passengers who were scheduled for the flight in reality there had actually been 100 passengers booked but three of them had encountered some type of document issues during the checkin process and had therefore been denied to travel among the passengers who were allowed to board were a 28-year-old conscript who had been assigned a seat in the very last row in front of the AFT Galley he was not paying much attention to the safety briefing that the cabin crew were giving and instead decided to just relax without fastening his seat belt something that will have profound consequences for him later on in the cockpit the first officer had now completed the setup and the performance calculations as well when the load sheet arrived she had spotted several mistakes including a one ton discrepancy between the calculated and actual fuel as well as some passenger number mistakes but that had now been corrected since everything was now done she started the departure brief by calling out the takeoff speeds which included a V1 decision speed of 144 knots a rotation speed of 146 knots and the single engine climb speed V2 of 15 50 knots now these were quite high speeds for a 73700 but like I mentioned before that was due to both the high density altitude and weight of the aircraft because of this she also briefed the captain that they would need to use an engine pressure ratio epr of 2.18 which basically meant full thrust after she had called that out she tried to continue the brief but was interrupted by the captain who wasn't interested in hearing the rest at all and instead he just continued his conversation that he was having with a person who was still present in the cockpit for some reason this meant that the rest of the briefing was never done and instead the before start checks was eventually completed and the first officer called up the tower to advice that they were now ready for push and start and at some point around here the captain had also decided that he wanted his friend the Purser to stay in the cockpit for the takeoff so that they could continue their conversation this meant that the person would now be occupying the middle jump seat in the cockpit instead of his cabin jump seat as the aircraft started taxiing out now those of you who are frequent viewers of my videos because you have subscribed to the channel are probably starting to squirm a bit in your seats now and that's for very good reasons and I'll tell you all about them after this I don't like the feeling of being spy on and I don't think that anyone really does but the sad reality is that your personal information is likely being sold to someone online right now and that's because companies known as data Brokers can scoop up everything about you including your personal address email contact details family members and even your financial information and then sell it to the highest bidder which tend to be some really nasty people the good news is that you have the right to tell these companies to delete all the 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point for Runway 02 the surface wind was reported as 330° at 12 knots meaning a slight cross from from the left but otherwise the weather was absolutely perfect as the aircraft started taxing out the first officer continued to try and follow the standard operating procedures but the captain and the perser were seemingly not interested in that at all and this just makes my blood boil because first of all in a boing 737 there are four cabin crew members for a reason the idea is that they should guard all of the main emergency exits in case of an evacuation and also to help organizing and deal with any issues that might arise in the cabin the one in charge of that work is the purer who is the most senior cabin crew and he's also the number three in the chain of command after the captain and the first officer so for the person to choose to stay in the cockpit during one of the most critical phases of any flight is just completely unacceptable and secondly from the start of the pre-flight briefing and until we Pilots complete the last shutdown checklist of the day our Focus must be solely on the safety of the flight now can we chat a little bit about unrelated stuff during the flight well of course we can especially up in the cruise but during the briefing and during the sterile phases of flight absolutely not and there are very good reasons for this if we look at what happened so far in this example the fact that the departure briefing was interrupted by the captain indicates that he didn't see that briefing as having any great significance but the problem is no matter how used you might be with flying a specific departure dealing with an airport The Briefing forms a hugely important role in providing focus and facilitating crew Resource Management during the first light of the day we tend to always conduct an emergency brief and touch drill all of the items that needs to be done in case something goes wrong this will wake up the muscle memory and bring any Rusty procedures back into focus and it will clarify the roles of each crew member in in case something unexpected happens this emergency briefing is then repeated again in a shortened form during the taxi out to make sure that this is the last briefing that we hear before departure and on top of all of that there is also often special engine failure procedures that differ between each airport and must be followed in case an engine failure occurs these can be either company specific or airport defined then in case of tamaras at airport the procedure from Ram 2 was to climb straight ahead to the Tango Mike Sierra VR and then turn left to a heading of 239° and climb to above the minimum sector altitude of 5,036 Ft none of that had been briefed prior to the engan start and as the aircraft was now taxing out toward the holding point the captain and the purer again ignored it and instead just continued their private chat obviously we don't know what the first officer was thinking at this point as the aircraft was taxing out but I doubt that she was very impressed with it and even if she was mentally briefing herself about how to fly the departure and what to do in case of an emergency this would be of little help if the captain who was the pet in command was not prepared and we will see what I mean by that very soon eventually the aircraft reached the holding point and at time 1412 and 30 seconds the first officer called up the tower and advised them that they were now ready for departure the tower controller responded that they were cleared to line up and take off from wio 2 with a surface wind of 330° at 12 knots and as soon as this was heard the crew verified that flaps one was set for takeoff and the first officer read back the clearance as they started lining up on the runway now what no one knew at this stage was that inside of the left engine a big problem had already started developing several small cracks had started to form on the blades of the high press turbine situated just behind the combustion Chambers these cracks had been for ing due to termal fatigue and had been covered with a layer of old Coke which is a type of black solid residue formed when oil oxidizes and breaks down from extreme temperatures and this had allowed the cracks to go unnoticed and it is possible that they had started to form after the last engine overall no one will ever really know in any case the pilots knew nothing about that and the captain now finished lining up the aircraft with the center line and moved Mo the engan trust levels up to around 1.2 epr to stabilize them the first officer called out stabilized which prompted the captain to that set take of trust and the two engines now roared into full trust at the first off they called out I have controls the aircraft started accelerating down the runway and initially everything looked completely normal the captain called out you have a 90 uh 100 and then a few seconds later V1 rotate the first officer responded by rotating the aircraft nice and slowly with around 3° per second up to an initial attitude of around 18° the aircraft had accelerated to a speed of 160 knots at this point and about 5 seconds into the flight the first officer asked for gear up but almost exactly at the same time as she did that several of the blades inside of the left number one engine high-press turbine suddenly fractured when they did so it led to an immediate loss of trust from engine number one as the turbo turbine slow down dramatically this also meant that the second stage turbine blades behind the first sustained severe damage from the debris and since there was now no first stage to push the air out the second stage received all of the hot air coming directly out of the combustion chamber with now nowhere to go without the normal cooling from the Airstream those blades now started melting down from the incredible heat and this whole process all happened within a few seconds now this was not great but it was far from catastrophic either the failure was contained inside of the left engine and there was no fire and the right engine was still providing full take of trust this is a scenario that all Pilots train to handle every 6 month and although extremely rare it is well within the performance of the aircraft as long as it's handled promptly and in the correct way but here the results of the crew's poor preparation would start to really show its true effects as the engine failure happened the aircraft veered about 12° to the left due to the effect of asymmetric trust from the still working right engine and the now dead left engine the first officer reacted to this by pushing right Rudder and correct the aircraft back to the right again and remember she had already called for the gear to be retracted just a second before the engine failure occurred but the captain had either missed this completely or become so surprised by the sudden loud bang and the Y that he completely forgot about it the first officer let out a few exclamations as she was now struggling with the crippled aircraft and she also called what's going on now in a functioning cockpit this failure is supposed to be followed by some very defined actions the pilot flying needs to concentrate on flying the aircraft and getting it climbing safely away from the ground the pilot monitoring on the other hand should be making sure that the aircraft is climbing safely and then support the P of flying by retracting the gear once a positive rate of climb has been confirmed and then cancel any warnings who might be distracting the first 400 ft of the takeoff should be dedicated to only fly the aircraft and making sure that the configuration is correct and that the aircraft is climbing safely once above 400 ft the P Flying should call for heading select and state the malfunction while still concentrating on handling the aircraft the pet monitoring should then start trying to diagnose the failure and do any memory items that might need to be done in a quick but controlled way whilst also verifying these actions with his colleague this case is actually a great example of why we have memory items as a severe damage like this where the engine is essentially melting down can be stopped from getting worse by moving the Indian start lever to cut out to stop the flow of fuel but did this happen you think no unfortunately it did not instead the captain only 5 seconds after the failure occurred took controls from the first officer and continued to pitch up towards 18° so here some of you might think that this would be a logic thing to do by the captain after all he is the pilot in command so it is his prerogative to take controls especially if the first officer is struggling but it is important to remember a few things first number one the captain had no idea at this point what was actually causing the handling problems for the first officer now he'd heard a bang and felt a yoke but he had not had enough time to actually assess the situation number two the first officer was asking what was going on was actually handling the situation according to her training and in a quite good way it is profoundly hard to take controls during an emergency which is including handling difficulties when you haven't been handling the aircraft from the very beginning an engine failure or flight control problems can manifest themselves in very different ways depending on what's causing them so trying to shift controls at a very low altitude can be hard even if you know what's going on and this Captain did not know that the aircraft was still climbing at this point and the first officer had called for gear up so the best thing to do here would have been for the captain to follow the procedures who had been created for exactly this scenario but unfortunately as we know these procedures had not been briefed earlier so the captain now found themselves themselves in control of a situation he had not mentally prepared for flying an aircraft with an unknown fault at an altitude of only 300 ft he just continued pitching for the normal takeoff attitude which with a failed engine and a fully loaded aircraft with the gear still hanging out meant that the speed now started decreasing rapidly during the next few seconds the captain shouted to the first officer several times to let go of the controls which she read back that she had already done she also offered to retract the landing gear but got no reply from the captain who was likely now so deep down into the stress Coe that he didn't didn't even hear her this meant that the gear was never retracted and with the configuration they were now in they would have needed to pitch down substantially to keep the speed and to still climb the normal pitch attitude after an engine failure once the gear is up would be around 12° but the aircraft was still maintaining around 18° at this point now even with the gear out the performance of the aircraft would have allowed for a climb of around 150 ft per minute if the speed was capped at V2 this would have increased to around 450 ft per minute if the gear was actually reected but unfortunately there was now also another issue because at some point during the initial seconds after the failure the Trust on the remaining engine on the right side had also been reduced we don't know if this happened when the captain took over the controls or if it was a knee-jerk reaction to the jaw by the first officer but the combined effect of the fully loaded aircraft with one failed engine and the other other working below full trust and the gear still hanging out was that this aircra was Now quickly approaching a stall the captain continued the call for the first officer to remove her hand which she responded that she had already done now it is possible that he felt some resistance in the controls and assumed that this was caused by impost from the first officer or she might have just instinctively kept her hands on the Yol we we don't really know but we do know that the first officer now took up her hand mic and called Air Traffic Control saying we have a small problem and only 1 second after that call the first stick Shaker activation could be heard on the cockpit voice recorder lasting for about 1 second now the first officer should not have concentrated on communicating with air traffic control at this point instead she should have been monitoring and calling out the speeds and altitude tendencies that she could see from her instruments but the fact that she had been turned from pallot flying to pallot monitoring without any type of formal Handover had likely disoriented her and at least she was trying to do something by calling at traffic control and suggesting the gear to be retracted the aircraft reached its highest altitude of 390 ft about 12 seconds after the engine failure occurred and at that point the speed had degraded so much that the stick Shaker now started working continuously and it continued doing so for the rest of the flight the captain did not verb Iz this warning in any way he just continued to pitch with the same attitude as the aircraft now started descending rapidly towards the ground in the tower the controller had seen the initial y of the aircraft and had recognized that they were in some deep trouble he immediately pushed the accident alarm which alerted the airport firefighters who now started rushing out towards the runway end in the cockpit the stick Shaker was now also accompanied by a gpws don't syn warning and the right wing now started to slowly Dro likely due to the impending stall at time 145 and 18 seconds Air algerie flight 6289 touched down just beyond the end of Runway c 2 with the back of the aircraft and right wing hitting the ground first the huge amount of fuel inside of the wing was almost immediately ignited turning the aircraft into a fireball as it broke into several pieces sliding through an airport perimeter fence and over road before it finally came to a hold the majority of the aircraft was almost immediately consumed by the fire and there was not much the firefighters could do when they reached the wreckage only about 3 minutes after the alarm had been sounded out of 97 passengers and six crew members 102 of them perished immediately which meant that there was only one Survivor this was the 28-year-old conscript that I mentioned earlier because he hadn't fastened his seat belt he was ejected from the aircraft as it started break breaking apart and that likely saved his life he was still seriously injured and lay in a coma for several days before eventually waking up and that means that he and the three passengers who missed their flight should consider themselves very very lucky the investigation concluded that the accident was caused by a loss of engine thrust during a critical phase of flight followed by a failure to retract the landing gear and the captain taken controls without being properly prepared or having identified the problem the below stand that flight preparation the fact that the failure happened just as they were about to retract the gear and the non-existing CRM after the failure also contributed to the accident there were four different recommendations as a result including increased CRM training for all Pilots at air algerie more focus on Conformity of engine failure training as well as the implementation of a better flight safety program who could Monitor and analyze flight data to identify dangerous Trends and from a very personal note this is exact L why following and respecting standard operating procedures is so important you never know when they might save your life just like you will never know when I release my next video unless you have subscribed to the channel you can support me by supporting my sponsor getting an awesome t-shirt or joining my fantastic patreon crew have an absolutely fantastic day and I'll see you next time bye-bye

Channel: Mentour Pilot

Views: 3,375,146

Keywords: true crime, crime stoires, storytelling, mentour pilot, aviation stories, trending, viral, mentour, full episode, ALGERIA, Boeing 737-200, Air Algérie 6289, Tamanrasset Aguenar, crash, fatal, Ghardaïa, Algiers, engine failure, DAH 6289, compressor, maintenance, engine, failure, controls, autopilot

Id: 330h41yZo-Q

Length: 25min 23sec (1523 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 25 2023