Rainboe:
'I get the feeling you are a nervous flyer'
If you mean that I am afraid to fly : Yes! And I have to thank That Prudence if after
almost 40 years and 19000 hrs I'm still flying.
So you want me to shoot at a corpse.
Here you are.
Let's admit that it was permitted, legal, logical and economical not to dump fuel and go back to the departure airport, (after having ascertained that all, I say again 'ALL', resources on board were enough to keep flying). But how do you understand the:
'Land to the First Suitable Airport'?
They overflew so many perfectly organised airports and had so many alarm bells... They even ignored the one by 200 NM from Gander (last chance they had to land before facing the Atlantic): when they received the Oceanic Crossing Clearence with a lower Flight Level than the one they had planned/requested (were they allowed to fly a variable Mach Number according to a Long Range cruise?).
So much they were affected by 'Homitis' that they decided to continue.
And it was between 40 and 30 west that they were in the middle of nothing.
I suppose that they were almost 3 hours to the destination with circa 35000 Kgs of fuel left.
But they had rended many pages from the emergency/abnormal check list, in this sense: in case of one of those situation would have arisen they had to descent to a lower level with
F/F increasing to 200 Kg/min (correct me if I'm wrong, I flew DC-10 and MD-11 not the 74) instead of 150 having not many chances to arrive to an airport. I try to figure out some:
- A second engine failure
- Smoke/fire on board (electrical, from the air conditioning, in a toilet...)
- Depressurization
- One pack trip off
- Fuel temperature low
- Cracked Windshield
You name others.
Don't say that statistically nothing could happen to them, otherwise I tell you: "Why we let so many people bore us with all those numbers and diagrams to take into account an engine
failure in the worst moment of the Flight: V ONE?
And at the end of the Oceanic crossing they still ignored many others hospitable airports, one for all: Shannon.
And as a matter of fact the final bell rang after they declared May Day to Manchester:
2000 of 5000 Kg of fuel ramained trapped on tank number 2,
reducing the endurance to less than 30 minutes.
Do you imagine if they had had (in order of severity):
- Unstabilized approach (all of them were tired)
- Runway incursion
- Bad weather
- Some kind of Hydraulic failure
- Some kind of problem with flight controls or landing gear
In short if they had to go around or simply make a 360°?
After what I said I hope that somebody will extract honestly from this experience the best teachings and spread them among us modest Aviators.
Best Regards
DOVES
Last edited by DOVES; 19th Mar 2005 at 09:09.