Extracts from the earlier thread:
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I had the pleasure of flying with the FO of that Hapag Lloyd flight the other day. He no longer flys for them but is on 747s with a different company now. No need to name our company. Interesting to get some first hand information. If I can condense his version into a few sentences it would go something like this:
Captain is seniority number one at the time and very company minded. Dispatch and maintenance put a lot of pressure on the crew to make it to Munich or Vienna (both have Airbus maintenance) According to the FO the Airbus FMC fuel page has a title that would lead one to believe that it uses actual fuel flow. This is what the captain based his decisions on. Despite the FO's best effort to convince the captain they were not going to make it he pushed on (the military has a nice phrase for that: "target fixation") The FO's saving grace was the fact that the voice recorder still had him on it, insisting that they head for Graz as they were not going to make it to Vienna. Shortly thereafter it went awefully silent.
As I say, a very interesting experience to speak with someone who saw the whole thing from the front row!
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I've got about five ACARS messages. I don't want to
put them in the public domain but what I can tell you is
that is is from "HLF Ops". I've got no idea who the
actual person was. It was a very interesting discussion though
because HLF keeps asking which airport he can reach.
The a/c responds first with airfields in central Germany and
than later during the flight they give alternate airfields
much more south. So they very well new that something
was wrong fuel wise!
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From the site that has the picture:
"Att haj please call us on HF 10069. We can't retract our left gear. Pushing on to MUC."
