Biman RWY Excursion

[Dengue_Dude]

Engineer

Whilst I can understand your assertion about safety standards, I'm not really qualified to comment on all the incidents, despite being a lecturer in Flight Safety matters in another life.

I CAN comment about the DC10 incident as I was the operating flight engineer when the failure occurred.

At about 50 feet after take off the whole of #2 Hydraulic system dumped overboard.

We cleaned up the gear as it was already in transit. We then climbed away keeping the rest of our configuration. #2 system feeds (amongst other stuff) half the flaps.

We climbed to FL100 before considering our options, which were to continue to Jeddah, or to dump to max landing weight and return to Dhaka (or I suppose to land overweight with the attendant almost certain tyre deflation/brake overheat or fire and possible passenger evacuation - a non starter).

The aircraft would have been nailed to the ground in Jeddah therefore the decision was to dump to landing weight (some 54 tonnes at that time) and land for rectification.

I then carried out the Dump drill from the checklist (twice in fact) and was rewarded by no movement on the gauges. A visual check by the cabin crew confirmed that no dumping was happening from the left wing and only a trickle came from the right dump mast.

This was followed by both dump valve c/bs tripping - ie the valves had failed in closed/ almost closed position despite correct indications.

Note. In 30+ years I have dumped about 5 times - all in the military and some of that was AAR. Commercially I have never dumped fuel - that's how often this system is used (I might be wrong but I think these valves are only checked on a D Check).

This was unfortunate. We then had one choice, to burn off fuel to landing weight. When sufficient speed margin was available, we put the slats back out, went for max airbrake and dropped the gear. We descended to FL060 (Safety alt 2000) to increase the fuel flow.

Most of the pax were sleeping anyway but were fed before landing. After 4.00 flight or so we landed safely at max landing weight and didn't even heat the brakes above 200C.

I have flown with pilots of all nationalities and abilities and I must point out that I was proud to be on this particular flight deck. The whole incident was handled in a thoroughly professional manner with cool, sensible and well considered decisions by the captain and attentive and accurate flying by the copilot.

I would have no hesitation whatsoever in flying with this airline on the DC10 (indeed that's what I do for a living). As in all airlines there are people with less CRM and ability than was displayed on this flight but that is a factor of employing human beings and has little to do with race, creed, religion or anything else that makes us different from one another.

As regards the F28 incident, it WAS an overrun. After hospital scans the pilots whilst bruised had no broken bones and the captain was in fact injured on the head by the rescuers cutting her out.

As for the cause, that is still to be determined but in the company there has been concern with the braking action of that particular runway especially in the wet.

I propose to wait and see.

Hope that clarifies one or two points.

Edited phor spellin