Landroger
I recall that, from much earlier in the investigation, data on 777 engine and aircraft handling was checked for many hundreds of thousands of flights (or was that flight hours? Not sure) and the parameters found for BA038 and G-YMMM's last journey were right down at the very tail of the distribution with the lowest rates of climb and hence the lowest incremental thrust/fuel flow, coupled with a very long flight at unusually cold OAT followed by an unusual uninterrupted continuous descent into LHR with only one power application above idle which rapidly resulted in the thrust reduction seen.
While I can see Phil Gollin's point about things that have been left out of the report, it is clear that such a weight of unusualness is bound to have effects that may never have been seen before.
I also think that the volume of "ice" - by which I mean some sort of semi-frozen ice/water/fuel mixture may well exceed that theorized by a simple consideration of the effect of freezing those 5.14 litres of water, but even then the crucial pipes are quite short so a little "ice" clearly didn't need to go such a long way.
But, clearly more to be learned.
The question is, can anyone be expected to have the strength of character required to investigate further and then, if the facts show it to be necessary, convince the industry to spend what could be a very large quantity of money to correct the behaviour of every fuel system on the planet?
Last edited by Feathers McGraw; 9th Feb 2010 at 22:13.
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