The following is an extract from a summary of press articles circulated by IACA yesterday
Report: Pilots' training deficient
British Airways pilots who carried on with a jumbo jet flight right across the Atlantic despite an engine failure, were not sufficiently knowledgeable about how the fuel system worked with only three engines operating, an accident report has said. The crew on the four-engined London-bound Boeing 747, which was carrying 352 passengers, had to shut down an engine after flames were seen coming from it immediately after take off from Los Angeles. The pilots decided not to return to Los Angeles but to carry on to London but, in the end, declared an emergency and diverted to Manchester, where the plane landed safely, a report from the Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB) said. The report said that in the latter stages of the February 2005 flight, the crew encountered difficulties in balancing the fuel quantities in the four main tanks. The AAIB said the crew became concerned that the contents of one tank might be unusable.
Those of us who have argued in pprune -and been soundly whacked around the head for doing so - that there's only one thing to do when an engine fails, and that is to land as soon as safely practicable, because human failings can always upset the statistics, might take some comfort from the fact that we are not alone. If the crew did not understand the fuel system, what else did they not understand?
And now to standby mode, to wait for the guys with computers telling me I just don't understand the B744 and should keep quiet. Well, maybe. I just know that there's only one place I want to be in an aircraft where something has gone seriously wrong, and that's on the ground, because the next thing to go wrong, probably through unpredictable and unpredicted human error, may kill me. The one after that certainly will.
Trip to Kegworth, anyone?