Crippled Airbus A380, saved by Pros! | Qantas flight 32

hi everybody welcome to mentor and yet another video podcast as always i hope you're doing absolutely fantastic today on the video guys we're gonna be talking about a flight where things go really wrong really quickly we're gonna be talking about an uncontained engine failure that cascades into hundreds of different system anomalies and how the knowledge and crm and airmanship of the flight crew saves today we're going to be talking about qantas flight 32 so stay tuned one three one zero one six three one right third three one round this video is brought to you together with blinkist now i don't know about you but i love listening to podcasts and audiobooks when i'm driving to work or when i'm working out and i love listening to non-fictional books now blinkists have made that really easy for me because they have more than 3 000 non-fiction books in their library and the real genius with blinkist is that they take really really large works of non-fiction like hundreds of pages of books and they condense them down into the most important points which they call blinks that means that you can listen to a whole audiobook for maybe 20 minutes which means that you can listen to two books during a workout session which is absolutely great now a book that i'm listening to now is the history of almost everything by bill bryson and it's it's really good guys uh those of you who uses this link here below which is blinkist.com mentorpilot we get one week absolute for free so you can check out that i'm not lying to you and then you'll get 25 off the price if you choose to sign up so check it out all right my friends so last week i was reviewing the final report of the smart wings flight 1125 which was ending up flying across europe after they experienced an engine failure at 36 000 feet now that report was littered with very strange decision making and questionable crm so i thought today i want to talk about what actually happens in most of the cases out there which is where really professional well-trained flight crew actually saves the day when something happens so qantas flight 32 is an excellent example of both how good crm and how good system management and knowledge is crucial in order to achieve safer flight because sometimes your worst nightmares does happen sometimes you end up with system failures that you didn't think was even possible and when that happens you need all of that knowledge and all of that crm and utilizing all of the resources around you in order to get to the best possible outcome so flight 32 was a scheduled flight running from changi airport in singapore to sydney it was flown by an airbus a380 and it consisted of a quite different flight crew set up they had five pilots in the cockpit 24 cabin crew members and 440 passengers on board the reason there were five people in the cockpit was that this was a check flight so the flight crew was being checked but not only them the training captain who was doing the check was also being checked so you had a check captain and a senior check captain on board this happens sometimes when we check out new training captains it has to be done by a senior training captain so from time to time you end up with these kind of flight crew setups so in the 737 800 for example i have actually flown with four people in the cockpit which is very crammed for 737 less so in case of an airbus 380. but the thing that you need to understand when it comes to crm when you have a situation like this is that there's going to be a lot of nerves on the flight deck right people are going to be nervous because they're on the check and also there's going to be questions about what is the actual chain of command when you have three captains on board now this is where captain chris richard the chris pigney is showing the first sign what kind of leader he is because already in the um the bus in towards the airport and also before they departed he had a discussion with the other flight crew members about exactly this saying that this is the chain of command i am the pilot in command and then you have your first officer the second officer and the check pilots are just sitting there to observe the only reason they will be interfering is in case of a breach of safety which is how it works when we do line checks uh generally speaking but it was very very important that he made this clear because not only does that relax the cockpit atmosphere it also shows exactly who does what in case of failure and that's going to become really important very soon so the airbus a380 was now fully fueled to flight to sydney and they had a normal takeoff and they climbed out took up the landing gear took up the flaps and at about 7400 feet the flight crew heard two bangs very close to each other the aircraft started to yaw indicating a problem with one of the engines and the first e-cam message appeared now e-cam stands for electronic centralized aircraft monitoring system full disclosure here guys i am not rated on the airbus so you'll have to bear with me but if you think of the ecam messages as the kind of master caution system that we have on the boeing where ecamm instead of what we get which is just a general fault message ecam actually says what is wrong and what the flight crew should be doing so the actual action items as well the ecam message indicated an engine overheat on engine number two that's on the left hand side of the aircraft and that initiated the first response from the flight crew so the pallet flying was the captain he pressed altitude hold the aircraft leveled off and he was expecting the outer trust to start reducing trust because that's what it does in order to try to maintain the airspeed but here's where the indications of multiple failures started becoming obvious because the autocross did not work so the captain had to take off the trust manually and continue to fly meanwhile the first officer was pilot monitoring started handling the ecamm checklist and the ecom checklist included reducing trust on the indicated engine and then wait for 30 seconds to see what happened okay during those 30 seconds the first officer also made a pan pan call which is an urgency call to air traffic control to let them know that they need potential priority and to explain to air traffic control why the aircraft is not following the standard instrument departure right when this was done um the ecam messages shifted from an engine overheat to an engine fire for a couple of seconds and then back to an overheat because this is normally how the fire systems work okay there tends to be loops temperature measuring loops inside of the engines and the difference between an overheat and a fire is only a temperature difference so it went briefly into a fire and then back into overheat this led the flight crew to believe that there was probably a major fault with this engine and they decided to shut it down as they shut it down as expected they got the engine failure message of engine number two however this was not the only failure message that they got because unbeknown to the yeah the flight crew what had actually happened was that a um a faulty oil stop pipe inside of engine number two had ruptured and it had thrown oil into the intermediate pressure turbine where the oil had ignited and basically shuttered that part of the turbine which had then raked havoc inside of the engine it had broken through the engine so it's now an uncontained engine failure and shrapnel had flown in through about 20 different locations in the underside of the wing and in the underside of the fuselage that shrapnel had ruptured fuel lines it had ruptured fuel tanks it actually caused a fire in the fuel tank that went out by itself uh but also crucially two of the electronic main trunks of the uh of the airbus 380. so the airbus 380 has redundant electrical systems running to different kind of wire bundles throughout the um the aircraft and in this case this rapnel had managed to damage the two main ones and when you start to have electrical failures and electrical things going wrong there can be any number of system failures originating from that and this is what the flight crew started to see so instead of the only car message for an engine shot down and then you fail in this case they now had a barrage of ecam messages and why is this important then well the the thing here guys that you have to understand is that an aircraft is not smart okay an aircraft will just tell you what's wrong with it or in the 77 800 you'll just get loads of different warning lights and warning bells going off it doesn't tell you how to interpret a multiple failure scenario okay all of the checklist if you look at the 737 for example is built on the assumption that the failure checklist that you're reading is the only failure pressure not that you have multiple failures that can affect the same system and why is this well if you think about it it's kind of obvious like you cannot build checklists for every conceivable scenario you cannot have checklists that intertwine with each other so this means same for the airbus that you need to run through each single ecam checklist and then you need to use your system knowledge your situation awareness to build yourself a picture of what's wrong with your aircraft and this is exactly what this flight crew is doing not only now was he working together with his first officer and his second officer he was also using the help of the senior check captain and the czech captain so utilizing all available resources right if you've seen my video about piyosi you will now start to realize what these guys are doing they're trying to find out what the problem is they're then utilizing information from their ecam from cabin crew from pilots who are jump seating which we'll get to in a second and then as they have gathered the information they start selecting what different options they have so how are they going to you know deal with the failures themselves how they're going to fly the aircraft and how are they ultimately going to land the select option they execute and continuously evaluate so they're following the pi also model here to the letter all right anyway so just to give you an idea of the kind of failures that they were facing uh the ecam messages that we're getting included the green hydraulic system low fluid and low pressure the green hydraulic system on the airbus is one of the main hydraulic systems the yellow hydraulic system had engine number four pump error there was a failure of the electrical ac boss number one and two that was the indications that the uh the main electrical trunks had been partially severed um flight control in alternate law wing slap slats inoperative so the leading edge devices did not work reduced spoiler and aileron control so less possibility to actually handle the aircraft in role uh landing gear control and indicator warning so unsure if the aircraft is going to be able to land to lower its landing gear normally or not multiple brake failures including anti-skid system on some of the uh the landing gear pairs and that's going to be important when it comes to con to checking the landing distance later on multiple fuel system errors including crucially the ability to dump fuel so the electrical problems that they were getting stopped them from dumping fuel and of course this was just off the departure they were now carrying a lot of extra fuel which put the aircraft well above its maximum landing weight center of gravity messages there was fuel imbalances started to to build up both because of the engine failure now but also because of problems with moving the fuel from different tanks in order to keep the center of gravity where it was supposed to be outer throttle and outer land was inoperative and the ice systems were not working left wing pneumatic bleed leak that means that hot air from the pneumatic bleeds is leaking into the the left wing which could cause a fire and then avionic system overheat and when you have an avionics system overheat depending on how long that get you might start losing crucial instruments so this is a barrage of things going wrong now here captain richard does something that is really indicative of what kind of a leader he was so when faced with all of these tens or even hundreds of different failures instead of just focusing on what was not working he actually started running through the systems that were working so okay so what do we have what can we do how is the aircraft actually working how does it respond to control input how does the engines respond and so on and this is a crucial way of when you're faced with a multiple failure scenario to try to just increase your situational awareness understanding what do you have to work with and what can you do and this goes through his and the rest of the flight cruise handling of this entire crisis it's a cool focus on the mission to be done the objective what they're trying to achieve and what kind of tools they have at their avail so as they were now dealing with this failure air traffic control wanted them to go out to an established holding pattern um the flight crew looked at it and asked if they could go to to a holding pattern that was specially designed for them that was closer to the airport about 30 nautical miles for the airport and the reason they're doing this is most likely that richard the captain and the rest of the flight was thinking what if this turned into a real catastrophic scenario how quickly can we get this aircraft on the ground instead of being further away they wanted to be closer to the airport about 30 nautical miles is almost gliding distance into the airport while they were dealing with the the different ecam checklists and they were now flying towards this holding pattern they sent a second officer out into the cabin now the cabin crew had tried to to get a hold of them they used the emergency cord to try to get in contact with the flight crew and unfortunately that has been lost with all of the ecam ding messages that have been going on non-stop so flight crew hadn't heard the cabin crew but now they were able to communicate them and instruct them on what was going on as the second officer came out into the cabin he was flagged down by uh what looked like a passenger but turned out to actually be an off-duty pilot that was sitting in one of the passenger rooms and that pilot showed him on the in-flight entertainment system the um there's a camera in the back of the airbus a380 showing an overview of the aircraft and on that camera you could clearly see that there was liquid um that was kind of running down the left wing so that further indicated the kind of damage that the aircraft had um the second officer then went down to the lower part of the aircraft looked out in the wing and could clearly see that there were damage to the left-hand wing as well as to the engine so he came back with our information into the to the cockpit they conferred with each other and during this time both the captain and the senior czech captain made numerous pas telling the passengers what was going on that they had technical difficulties and also communicated with the cabin crew to let them know what was happening so you have continuous communication keeping everyone in the loop here which is lowering the anxiety level even though people are hearing that they have technical problems most of them could actually see that after the window anyway so it's much better to hear that yes the flight crew is aware of what's going on and they're dealing with it they're not getting any information at all and having rumors spreading because when you have 440 passengers there's bound to be panic breaking out unless this is handled in a good and efficient way so it took the flight crew a little over 50 minutes to run through all of the hundreds of ecam actions that they had to do and while they were doing this the second officer together with the senior czech captain was trying to calculate the required landing distance because remember they could not dump fuel this meant that they were all more they were over 50 tons overweight okay and just to get that into perspective a 737 empty weight is about 42-43 tons so they had they were carrying more than a 737 over their maximum landing weight together with the failures they had with not working uh slats with problems with the brake systems all of that you when they put that into the computer basically the computer couldn't come up with a figure but as they tweaked it a little bit and they took away the possibility of a wet runway because it was a nice day and it was dry they managed to come up with a figure that indicated that it would be able to stop the aircraft if they landed bang where they were supposed to be on speed with about 100 meters to spare okay so this indicated that they were able to land they now started to prepare for that and the preparation consisted of doing a number of flight control checks so they were slowing down the aircraft in the holding trying out the aircraft now you might wonder why would you do that and the key here is that you don't want to end up at low speed on final close to the ground finding out that part of your flight controls are not working so doing continuous flight control checks like this is yet another indication that this crew was really on top of things they asked for about a 20 nautical mile final which is a good 10 miles or almost twice the normal final line the aircraft up started to configure it with whatever flaps they could get out um they couldn't lower the landing gear with a normal system they had to use an alternate extension system in order to get the landing gear out but eventually the aircraft was lined up for landing the aircraft flew down they tried to use the outer pilot but the autopilot kept disengaging a couple of times so the captain just decided that no i'm just gonna hand fly this which is probably smart as well because then you get a little bit better kind of feel for how the aircraft is moving and after they were decelerating they continued to do these flight control checks because an aircraft might be flying great as you are with the flaps retracted and the landing gear retracted but then if it has to sustain damage as you're extending a leading edge device well in this case they couldn't but trailing edge devices for example if there are damage to them then all of a sudden you might get a problem with flight controls and as the speed is decreasing it's the same thing so they were continuously checking that yeah we have everything on the control asset now the sender down to watch the um the landing runway meanwhile the senior czech captain told the cabin crew to prepare the aircraft for a possible runway overrun and a possible evacuation so everyone was ready for that and they landed the aircraft perfectly what was supposed to initially the deceleration was really slow probably had to do with you know the lack of anti-skid on their some of the wheel pairs but eventually they manage with max manual braking to get the aircraft down to a complete stop about 150 meters before the end of the runway at this point since the air traffic control was well informed the all of the emergency equipment started coming up towards the aircraft and the the pilots started shutting the aircraft down they shut down all of the engines or at least they thought they shot down all the engines and when they shot down the last one the aircraft went into kind of a degraded electrical mode but before it did that they observed that the brake temperature on the left hand side was close to 900 degrees celsius and increasing so the brakes were extremely hot which was completely normal if you think about landing with 50 tons overweight but the problem of course was that they had seen that they were leaking fuel and indeed the fuel was dripping down very close to these white hot breaks and could at any given second have burst into a fire right they knew this okay the first officer asked the captain if he could tell the firefighters to start soaking the area below the brakes with firefighting foam in order to make sure that the fuel was covered with foam and couldn't reach the brakes the captain thought that was a great idea so he relayed the information to the firefighters which did that and that probably saved them from fire but now of course comes the dilemma should you evacuate the aircraft okay you have 440 people on board you have red-hot brakes and on top of this it turns out that one of the engines engine number one did not shut down no matter what the flight crew did the firefighters said that the engine was still running the flight crew did everything they could they they pulled the fire handle they shot the two fire bottles into the engine nothing stopped the engine from running so probably there was some kind of electrical fault in the communication to the engine the engine just kept running so now you have an engine running you have white hot brakes you have a few leak on the left hand side and you have passengers on board okay a less cool flight crew might have just initiated an evacuation to try to get everyone out as quickly as possible but these guys they stepped in and they discussed both with the firefighters and the monks themselves and said let's try to disembark the passengers on the right hand side using normal steps and that's what they did so they attached one set of steps in the front the passengers started to disembarking and that was after an hour of trying to to shut down the engine and trying to secure the aircraft down after landing it took a further hour to get all of the passengers off and away from the aircraft so this whole ordeal took over two hours from when they landed until everyone was off the aircraft meanwhile the cabin crew was ready to initiate an evacuation at any given point and the flight crew said that if we see that there's a chance of a fire or the fire is breaking out then we might initiate the emergency evacuation and you know just start evacuating as normal but i didn't have to and because i didn't have to no one was hurt so this whole incident with all of these multiple failures and everything from um from leading-edge devices not working from hydraulic failures from uncontained engine failures didn't lead to a single hurt human being okay part of the engine that had exploded fell down onto an island of bataam it fell down onto a couple of vehicles and onto a school but no one was seriously hurt and they managed to eventually stop the running engine by two firefighting trucks just pumping it full with firefighting foam and effectively smothering the engine and that's how they shut it down so what can we learn from this then well you can learn a lot of things first of all crm usage of all available resources all of the flight crew and the cabin crew and even some people that was that was deadheading with the aircraft was helping to get as much information as possible to to come up with the right decision to make keep yourself cool look at what the aircraft can do and not what it cannot do right you need to plan for the worst but you need to handle with what you have which is what they did they used a variation of piosi which i talked about in a previous video so check out that video if you're more interested and then once they had landed and everyone was down and safe the captain actually went in and talked to all of the passengers explaining what had happened how that happened and which led this from being a public relations disaster you know with social media everyone is filming everyone is sending it out on twitter now all of the passengers felt that the flight crew had done a great job the cabin crew were calm relaxed and they knew what they were doing and this is what were being sent out into the twitter sphere all right they were showering the flight crew and the cabin crew would praise and how it was being dealt with how they were getting information how they're being treated and something that was by all means should be a public relations disaster was actually turned into something fairly positive now um the final report is available and i have links to some of the reports down here and some of the articles that i've used to create this video um but all in all this is this is a brilliant example of what flight crew and cabin crew is doing every day out there because what you don't understand is that small failures does occur small things happen and if they're being left unchecked they can lead in to bigger things but they're not the reason you don't hear about these things is because trained flight crew and trained cabin crew and engineers out there are handling it the way that they're trained to handle it every single day so it doesn't become a headline okay and that's what i want you to take away from this this is what you should and can expect from your crew on board guys i'm betting that you have questions about this and i love having your response to my videos and also your suggestions about other videos that i should do about other events that have happened so if you have questions and you want to talk about it write in your your questions and suggestions here in the comments give me a like to the video share this with friends who might needs to see it and if you want to have more kind of in-depth discussions well in that case get the mentor aviation app it's completely free to download you have to download links down here and you can get in and you can have discussions together with me or other flight crew members or aviation enthusiasts you can also go to mentorpilot.com okay register yourself there doesn't cost you anything but it means that you'll get access to quizzes technical quizzes quizzes about everything aviation related and also you will know when i you know create new stuff like courses for example that will be coming on the website very soon and that's also where you can find links to my t-shirts mugs and other cool kind of merch that you might be interested in have an absolutely fantastic day take care of yourself guys and i'll see you next time bye bye alright guys i really hope that you liked that if you want more content like that more aviation content but then check this out i hope that you have subscribed to the channel and that you've highlighted a little notification belt see you inside of the mentor aviation app and have an absolutely fantastic day bye [Music]

Channel: Mentour Pilot

Views: 478,104

Rating: 4.9484353 out of 5

Keywords: Qantas 32, Qantas flight 32, aviation incident, engine failure, Airbus A380, Qantas A380, qantas a380 engine failure, Air crash investigation, aviation news, airbus a380, a380 landing, Mentour Pilot, mentour pilot engine failure, mentour pilot 737 max, mentour pilot turbulence, Fear of flying, nervous flyer, nervous flyer help, Breaking aviation news, uncontained engine failure, new flight simulator, aviation videos, fs 2020, aviation news latest, Boeing 737

Id: JSMe1wAdMdg

Length: 29min 45sec (1785 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 07 2020