PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - Air Transat - "Panic in the Cockpit" recording
Old 1st Sep 2008, 15:47
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BeechNut
 
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I'm fluent in French (in fact do most of my radio work in French here in Quebec), so I'll take a crack at it. Here's a summary of the incident:

They took off from YQB with RVR of 1400 ft (given the date, I'd say another of the many snowstorms in YQB this past winter).

On initial climb, there was a panicked female voice in the cockpit saying "what's going on", and some sort of bell ringing; another male voice said "tabarnac" (Québecois slang expletive, based on a sacred religious object, but you can insert "sh!t" here and get the same effect), and also "what's going on?".

Then in French they declared a "pan pan pan", stating an airspeed indication problem, and asked for immediate clearance to a higher altitude (10,000 ft). On the way up they asked tower for a groundspeed and altitude readout.

By the time they reached 10k ft, they asked for another altitude check and they asked for a climb to FL220; they got 13k initially, then FL220. The problem seems to have sorted itself out and airspeed indication restored to normal and they canceled the Pan call and proceeded to YUL.

One assumes that the request for both altitude and speed readouts from the tower was to diagnose if it was the pitot or static port that was plugged.

Not a good situation to lose your instruments actually, they were in solid IMC.

Beech
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