Biman. All 4 quit. I was in Dacca expecting a colleague to arrive on the flight. I called the Biman office to enquire on ETA. All I got was ----- ‘The passengers are alive and well’....click.
As 411 says,the crew had taken off with minimum fuel on board planning to re-fuel just up the road in Kualu Lumpur. On rotate the very light aircraft immediately went to a massive rate of climb, uncovered all fuel pumps and -------- deafening silence.
My colleague, also a neighbour and aircraft engineer, told a hilarious story of the next 40 minutes – which is how long it took the crash trucks to find a dead 707 lying on the airport grass! When the engines quit the aircraft was nosed over, gear was up by this time, and down they came. The only indication of terra firma was the grating sounds as the belly contacted the runway. Down the runway they slid and off onto the grass to the right.
The tower then cleared a Qantas 747 for take-off into the crystal clear night -----“Er..... tower, Qantas 01 here. Where’s the Biman ahead of us. We don’t see him’. Another Qantas 74, taxiing on the apron, chipped in. ‘He took-off and came down again. We think he’s still within the airfield.’ Someone in the tower heard this - hit the crash switch and sent the fire trucks to the second 747 where it took ten minutes to convince them they didn’t have a problem. I met the captain of this one in a Hong Kong bar some time later and ‘communications’ with the fire trucks was through the FE opening a door and, eventually, waving them away.
Meanwhile, back on the grass, neighbour had unbuckled himself in a totally silent and dark 707 – walked to the flight deck door and opened it. Empty - with both DV windows open. The flight crew had legged it! Five minutes later and he’s got everyone out of the aircraft and onto the grass, carrying the only casualty - a little old Bengali lady who’d twisted an ankle exiting the aircraft.
Twenty minutes later and still no one had turned up; so neighbour does his Moses trick, noticing that (at least) take-offs were seemingly suspended, and shepherds the passengers across the runway towards the terminal. He made it all the way across followed by 60+ Bengalis of various shapes and sizes, all with lots of cabin baggage, through an open emergency door, up two flights of stairs and into a coffee shop before someone with a uniform said, ‘Er............
There was a dark aspect to this whole thing. The FE 'fell' from a high rise hotel that night.