Crash Imminent!
Hi,
Well I’m a wannabe by night but by day I’m an operations manager with the London Ambulance service, and based in west London am one of the managers responsible for responding to LHR.
Today my current job and my dream one collided at the moment that I received a pager message to tell me that there was a full emergency at LHR. Now this in itself isn’t unusual as we respond to a number of aircraft incidents each day at Heathrow, however they are almost always stood down very quickly.
The adrenaline started to flow with the second message I received telling me that the cause of the emergency was hydraulic failure / no flaps / very heavy landing expected, however I still expected the next message to be the one telling me that the incident had been stood down Wrong….
The third one was this one ‘Crash Imminent’!
Ok so you can imagine that this one got my attention!
So 18 minutes later after a blue light run from Fulham I and my colleagues found ourselves across from the runway at RVP North awaiting the arrival of an Air Mauritius Airbus scheduled for 19:25.
Ultimately the flight arrived safely and seemed to land flawlessly, to a collective sigh of relief.
Anyway just incase the flight crew happen to read this forum I thought I’d pass on the thanks of the emergency services for a job well done. You gave us all a bit of a fright there for a moment
Regards,
Damo