PDA

View Full Version : Thunderstruck


objordal
7th Feb 2008, 09:00
A Dash-8 Q300 (or.. Q200?) under the Norwegian airline Widerĝe from SVG to TRF a few weeks ago. The last weeks the eastern part of Norway had been hit by a lot of bad weather and snow. A friend of mine were on that flight. He' s not afraid of flying, really. This flight, though - was the worst he had ever had. He was TERRIFIED the entire flight, as the turboprop suffered heavy turbulence. So bad turbulence that the airplane moved between 10 degrees of bank each side, on the entire flight. During approach on TRF (Torp, Sandefjord, Norway) my friend was a bit scared about the landing, how it would be, and prepared himself for s harsh landing. When crossing (by what he said, even though he was in the cabin) approx. 10.000 - 7.000 feet, they suddenly heard a HUGE boom on the right side. By his window. He was sitting right behind the wings and no. 2 engine, and saw what caused the boom. A lightning hit the right wing, and the entire cabin noticed FLAMES and sparks from the engine and wing. At this point, even my buddy - a person who is not scared of flying at all, and has a certain knowledge to aviation - he has the PPL, thought they would all die.
The entire cabin started screaming. But when he saw out the window about a minute later, as he noticed that.. infact.. they weren't falling - he saw that nothing was on fire! He was delighted to see that, off course.
As the time passed, they heard absolutley nothing from nor the flight-attendant or the flight deck. The flight attendant was .. gone (fled of the aircraft at 6.000 in a hurry?:p), and they heard no sign of life from the intercom. my friend took this as a sign that something might have been wrong anyway. Engine no.2 was still running, but smoke was coming out of it. Not much, but more than normal exhaust-smoke. But that they didn't shut it down, was probably a good sign, he thought.

Well.. they landed 10-15 minutes later, in winds at 25 kts. A h*ll of a landing, but the pilots got a huge applause from the cabin as they landed.
I just wanted to thank the pilots on the flight - whatever was wrong, they did a great job. :D:D:D

:]