G-ARPI - The Trident Tragedy: 40 years ago today
 

Today is the 40th anniversary of the crash of G-ARPI, the BEA Trident which crashed shortly after takeoff from Heathrow, apparently because the "droop" was raised too soon after takeoff, causing it to stall.

The crash cost the lives of all 118 on board, including Capt Key and FOs Ticehurst and Keighley.

One of the major outcomes of this crash was that CVRs were mandated afterwards; the lack of cockpit voice recorders made the inquiry significantly more difficult.

Yes, that is how humans learn. Trial and Error. It is good that CVRs were made law. That and, if I recall correctly, the CRM issues on the flight deck are real gifts to the future.

I was in the tower at Glasgow when we received word of this tragedy within minutes of it happening. The thing that got me was the report on the TV news that 'only one garbled transmission was made'. When they played it, it was so clear I could even recognise who the controller was from his voice.

I recall that one of the first on the scene of this disaster was a passing nurse, who to her very great credit managed to gain access to the broken fuselage to see if she could use her nursing experience to help those trapped inside. Sadly, it transpired that the "super-stall" impact, which occurred over an area little bigger than the aircraft's planform due to the low horizontal velocity, was not survivable.

I thought at the time how noble her action was, at potentially great risk to her own life if a fire had broken out in the fully-fuelled aircraft, and in the highest traditions of her calling. I wonder whether some official recognition of her bravery was subsequently made.

603DX. Very, very brave of her, and a serious fire DID break out, whilst the rescue services were there. There is video somewhere of people running from the scene. Sad, sad day.

Remembering Jerry today.

An impossible situation, which terrified me when re-enacted in the sim.

No-one will ever know what happened, but my goodness the total lack of CRM in '72 was dreadful. Never flew with Key, but some of those BEA captains were difficult, to say the least.

My late father was one of the first handful of Police Officers to reach the scene. It was his second air crash scene he'd attended as a PO, having been an early arrival at the scene of the Viking crash at Southall some 14 years earlier. Both were pretty much the only events in 30 years of service, he never really spoke of afterwards.
My mother still vividly recalls the state of his torn, and kerosene soaked uniform when he arrived home late that night after the Trident crash.

Now that I've read this thread I wonder if the TV coverage of the crash is one of my first memories? I'm 42 now so the time frame fits with how a toddler develops. The memory I have is of an image being shown on TV of what I presume was main landing gear laying in a field of grass but I can't recall anything else.

So long ago but still in the memory bank not only for those who died , but the worry and stress of those ground engineers who serviced that aircraft the previous night .

Yes, I remember this crash very well. See this video on You Tube:

British European Airways Flight 548 Crash of a Trident airliner - YouTube

603DX, The nurse was on BBC London News this evening recalling how two boys came to get her as the plane had crashed nearby. Apparently she was awarded an MBE.

I cleared it for take-off. Low cloud, not very good vis. ATC new little about it until the landlord of the Crooked Billet rang up! Dreadful.

i was a 15 year old school boy that day & saw it go down behind the trees, i was drawn away from my homework by the unusual engine noise, despite feeling the thump my parents said its a lorry passing, had to drag my dad out of the house to prove it & it was only when a neighbour from the house behind came running round because his children in the garden were screaming a planes crashed he believed me and i was despatched to a bridge to get a look , all i could see through the trees was what looked like an intact part of cabin over the wing, by the time i ran/climbed fences the 500 metre's or so to the site police were already on the scene & bodies were being laid out under what i think were tarpualins, my lasting memory was all the blue flashing lights i saw through my bedroom curtains all night and the fact we had to put furniture on our drives to stop the 'ghouls' using it as a car park! next day i cycled down during lunch break & a policeman let us in to take some photo's.

Plenty of stress for other BEA flight crew wondering just what had happened. As a 14 year old I recall many many sad days with a very concerned father spending many hours trying to go through what might have happened; then spending days at the Inquiry listening to evidence. He didn't want his next Trident flight to end up the same way.

avionic type - it wasn't engineering. I am convinced this was flight-crew error.

If you were one of the guys looking after the Tridents, then I have the most profound respect for you. This accident was not the fault of any engineer. Three guys on that flight deck messed-up. Simple as that. One was a friend.

Hard to believe it was forty years ago. I too, have a personal interest in this accident. Simon Ticehurst was a friend of mine.

Aileron Drag, I disagree with you, it's not simple. A primary factor was the lack of an appropriate baulk mechanism to prevent premature droop retraction. I've often wondered why there were two separate levers, rather than a single flap/droop lever.

I've just discovered that there is a transcribed copy of the report here:

http://www.fss.aero/accident-reports...2-06-18-UK.pdf

But none of this was known until months after the accident. Avionic type's post concerned the engineers at the time - terrified that they had stuffed up the night before.

One other thing that sticks in my mind of the coverage at the time was the news reports that traffic chaos built up very quickly in the area with loads of ghouls converging on the scene.

Any engineer who has released an aircraft that subsequently crashed will tell you what it feels like - until it is proved otherwise there is a terrible feeling of 'what did I miss,what did I forget to do?'

Engineers do feel that way. Next week, I am taking the funeral of a retired US Army aeroengine, engineer who served in Vietnam. His widow told me how sometimes they were pressured to sign off a machine quickly but unless he had checked everything - no signature. He knew that if anything went wrong he would have to carry that for all of his life. Not to mention that they would present his signature as proof that the machine was ready.

He worried that newer and younger engineers would not be able to stand up to the pressure from above. Not much changes.

It's very rare for a prang to be 'simple'. If a light single goes in, it might be simple but something like G-ARPI was not simple.

I was told Papa India was the reason BA skipped G-EUPI when they got their A319s. Oddly enough the flight number is still active with flybe, BE548 NWI-EDI.

GroundloopI was not living in the UK when this happened (aged 14) and only know about it through PPRuNe references over the years.

From the report, linked in this thread:
So there might have been a number of people trying to see but they did not get in the way.

Fortunatly Aileron Drag for me I was on "Days Off" those days but I remember being told that all the people who worked on it that night had their Authorisations removed and they were in limbo until the pre lim report was made known and that too took quite a while, and the thought of " had something I'd done" caused all those deaths was uppermost in their minds . On the up side A few months later after the report was made public, a printout of the whole flight taken from the F.D.R.was shown to the Ground engineers and it was then we realised how good the evidence within the F.D.R.was, as it showed the whole flight from take off to crash including the flap and droop movements . This comprehensive system was fitted to the Trident so that it was an aid to getting the Auto Land System approved by the then A.R.B.

Papa India had been damaged in a previous accident when an Ambassador crashed into it on the ground at Heathrow. It had been repaired and returned to service. I believe this event had no bearing on the Staines crash which seems to have been down to crew error in a different era for CRM and systems fail-safes.
Tragic that lives were lost but the industry learned a good deal which has no doubt saved many lives since then.

I think I mentioned it before on pprune but about 18months after the Papa India crash I watched an Iraqi Trident start dropping from about 100ft after lifting off from RWY 10R at Heathrow. Pulled the wrong lever along with undercarriage retraction , I guess, and rectified just in time. The controller in the Tower noticed though, but only got a mumble from the pilot in response to 'Iraqixxx, are you OK?'

Yes, I believe that's the case, possibly as a result of criticism ten years previously when a second Whiskey Echo (a 767) was added to the fleet, the original WE (707) having been destroyed in a fatal accident at LHR about 4 years before the Trident disaster.

It wasn't a flight crew error per se.
It was definitely a management - training accident waiting to happen.
The noise abatement proceedure was contrary to the design, test pilot and BofT test pilot philosphies.
This led to the slat lever being unprotected.
The training was WRONG - P2 was taught to dump the push system as it often falsely operated - which generally was incorrect.
There wasn't a stick push proceedure in our manuals.
We weren't even legally qualified - read the argument in the report between the BofT and Holdstock and then ask why none of P2's group were called to the inquiry.
Ask why there is no reference to Davies being at the inquiry in the report -BofT test pilot and author of handling the big jets.
Eight aircraft were lost by the BEA group in six years, Papa India was the second and the first of four Tridents.
Several captains had tried to off load P2s group of co pilots because they rightly believed that they were not sufficiently trained and were threatened with dismissal.
Absolute shambles of a company and if it had not been publicly owned would have ceased to exist.

"Yes, I believe that's the case, possibly as a result of criticism ten years previously when a second Whiskey Echo (a 767) was added to the fleet, the original WE (707) having been destroyed in a fatal accident at LHR about 4 years before the Trident disaster."

Or, if you've got a longer memory, there was G-ALWE, a Viscount that crashed fatally at Manchester in 1957.

Proplinerman,

Did BA ever have another EE (Vanguard crash 1965)?

Yes, both Echo Echo and Echo Charlie (the other Vanguard that crashed in 1971) were re-used on 757s, registered around the same time as the aforesaid 767.

Scarier still, both were "papa echo charlie" and "papa echo echo" with identical last three.

At the time of the PI accident I was working in reservations. As General Sales Agents for BEA we were fielding a lot of telephone calls from locals who feared that friends or relatives might have been on board. Eventually we asked BEA to provide a pax list which they did. The time it took for that list to print out on one of those old teleprinters really brought home to us the magnitude of the tragedy.

I remember it because I had just arrived from Lisbon on another Trident, picked up a rental car and got caught in the traffic at Staines. My wife was waiting at a relative's house and heard about the crash well before I was able to contact her. Harold Wilson expressed his disgust at the legions of "ghouls". Those there were, but there were probably more just stuck in the traffic.

From my own reading, it seems that the traffic congestion was a combination of the relatively undeveloped state of the main roads in the area (mostly single carriageway and quite narrow) and the habit at the time that many families had of taking a drive on a Sunday.

Reading this thread has been very interesting, because despite considerable coverage of the G-ARPI crash in various books I had never before realised either the situation regarding suspicion of the ground engineering staff's actions or indeed that the low hours that Jeremy Keighley possessed on type were at all commonplace at the time.

My own first flight was on a Trident 3B in 1977, as a consequence I have read up on both the Staines and Zagreb incidents and as much else about the Trident as I can.

Did the droop lever on the early mark Tridents ever have a speed guard fitted? I know that there had been several incidents previous to G-ARPI's demise, at least one of which was described as "We just about managed to keep flying until droops were reselected!".

The droop lever was mechanically locked in the 'extend' position while the flap lever was in a 'flaps-selected' position. When the flaps were selected 'up', the droop-baulk was removed.

That was the only lock in place (no speed-lock), so the flaps on PI had been selected fully up before the droop was moved.

After the accident, the company painted the droop handle with red & white stripes (if memory serves), and we all became utterly paranoid about monitoring LE/TE selections!

I don't think there were many ghouls. Undoubtedly some but not in great numbers. Most simply couldn't help it.
The Trident came down just south of the A30, a road I used to use all the time. At that point the road had started to rise in preparation for a railway bridge ahead - although a dual carriageway, there were no laybys and the rise above ground level meant that any parking off the road was difficult. Thus one lane was blocked by emergency vehicles and everything stopped in the other, closely followed by the other carriageway. The view to the south was obscured by trees, so you couldn't see what was going on from a vehicle: over a short space of time the emergency services beat their own paths to the wreckage, so most of the response continued to be via the A30. This was a main route in/out of London - no M25, remember, that arrived a couple of miles away a few years later - so even then the traffic was quite heavy. From the opposite direction (inbound, or eastwards) you were up high enough that the wreckage was visible, although at a distance. The tail was the only recognisable piece: it seemed to be there for some months afterwards. Undamaged electricity cables and pylons virtually overhead bore witness to the steepness of the trajectory.

The fact that droop and flap had separate selectors moving in the same quadrant was undoubtedly a factor in the PI accident.
One of the more ludicrous "safety" features of the design was that they both had aerofoil shaped handles at the top of their levers - but the droop had a slight dip at the leading edge and the flap had a slight dip at the rear. How many actually examine the shape of a handle before they operate it?
On the Trident 1, the other lethal factor was that selection up of the leading edge device caused an immediate large increase in stalling speed. This was rectified for the later marks.

If the aircraft had been operated as designed, tested and certified it wouldn't have crashed.
Why pull off most of the power, whip the flaps up and climb at V2 + 10 at heights as low as 500 feet - bl@@dy stupid.
This left the aircraft wallowing about and the slat lever unprotected.
Rather than ommitting the foolish proceedure which didnt do much for noise abatement except spread it further BEA fitted a baulk and continued flying the same dumb NAB.
As to lack of experience P2 had more hours upon graduation from Hamble than a FO I recently met already checked out on a 737 and posted away from the main base - food for thought?
Crew were scapegoats as often happens.

With regards to the 'ghouls', see the quote from the report in my post of this thread #21. It tells us that the Prime Minister made a sweeping statement, based on poor evidence. Nothing changes then. :hmm:

The M25 was built in sections from 1973 onwards. As far as I can recall and establish (Wikipedia), the Western section including the A30 intersection was one of the last in 1985. I was able to use it for a new job that I had just moved to. The whole ring opened in 1986.

And the design capacity was exceeded almost immediately!

Regarding Blind Pew's comment, "Why pull off most of the power, whip the flaps up and climb at V2 + 10 at heights as low as 500 feet - bl@@dy stupid."

You speak a lot of sense, but in fairness the flaps were retracted and the power reduced at 90 seconds from start of roll. I know there was one departure which called for NA at 70 seconds (can you remember where?), but I don't recall it happening at 500feet.

Having said that, there was the infamous captain who used the flaps only to get into the air, then retraced them at 20feet or so in order to improve the climb-out gradient. Arghhh! Scary stuff.

Some of those guys were brilliant and brave ex-bomber pilots, but should never have been let loose on a swept-wing jet.