747 Technical / Cockpit Question for a Travel Book I'm Writing
Hi,
I wondered if there are any 747 pilots on here that might be able to help me. I'm trying to write a travel book, and the first journey had a lot of incidents that all stemmed from our PIA 747 (the journey was in 1994) being unable to retract the flaps after take off. The pilots had to dump a lot of fuel over the North Sea and return to Heathrow.
I thought it might make the description of this a bit more interesting if I wrote the intro from the pilot's perspective (on a very basic level). Therefore, I was wondering if any 747 pilots could help me with a couple of questions:
1. At what stage after take-off would the pilots have first tried to retract the flaps (or stage(s) of flaps)?
2. When and how would they have realised that there was a fault with the flaps. Would there be a master caution light or a hydraulic warning light etc?
3. When we landed, we burst 7 of the tyres on the undercarriage. Would there be any other hazards associated with that?
Many thanks indeed for any help!