Emergency landing Cathay A330-300
 

I read on a dutch aviation news site (www.luchtvaartnieuws.nl) that an airbus of Cathay made an emergency landing inbound from Surubaya at hong kong airport and some pax were wounded.. any info? the info on the site was very minimum.

Cathay plane makes emergency landing in Hong Kong

A lot of hits on google

Mannen jullie lopen vreselijk achter de feiten aan , kijk eens wat verder , fragrant harbour , zoek funktie misschien !

In english , just told the dutch 'aviators' to look around and use the search function !

Go to the "Fragrant Harbour" page for more details

On the beach

No. Dont go to the Fragrant Harbour page!

Did I go to the "Beiruit Beach" page or the "Polish Gossip" page recently?

This is global aviation news and nobody should need to scroll past "Aviation Food Providers"( no disrespect meant) to view news of this incident.

Post here or mods sort this out please.

Best,

SSS

Major
 

By all accounts this is another major incident which will give people from Toulouse and Derby lots of investigative work to do.

Latest from Fragrant Harbour page:

"From a very credible source:

A330 under question is B-HLL, Rolls Royce Engines.
Eng failure 10 min before landing in HKG. Other engine "stuck" at 70% N1 with no response from THR levers, subsequently shut down on final approach as per QRH.

High landing speed, use of parking brake resulting in brakes overheat, tyre burst and fire.

RAT (Ram Air Turbine) NOT deployed."

Got to say that I agree with SSS; this is a major incident; "double engine failure" definitely comes under the heading of "bad things" in the QRH, so it should be on the front page.

You can see the RAT deployed on the news pics. Apparently it was done manually.

Engine Roll Back!!! fancy term
 

This has happened now to a few Airbus with RR engines, even on Go Around in MAN with a middles east airline!

Engine Roll back is a fancy way of saying they stopped working when they should've been working!

jetjock330.....one engine was inop, we do not know the reason for this yet. The other engine was running. There have been no reports of a thrust "roll-back" from Cathay or any other source. A roll-back is failure to deliver the commanded power, it is not a shut down.

Let the engineering teams do the investigation work before jumping to conclusions.

Not according to this Equally interesting (to me) is that they lost the first engine shortly after departure yet elected to continue a 4 1/2 hour flight on the remaining one

Failure of one engine on a 4hr+ flight is, all other conditions being normal, a "landing at the nearest suitable airport" and not necessarily a cause for a turn-back or immediate diversion.

An airline's definition of "suitable" would vary with their OpsSpec Manual but would include such basic considerations as the available IFR approaches, runways, ATC facilities, appropriate maintenance facilities and CFR facilities and other considerations such as appropriate jetways or other means to deplane passengers, ground support equipment (electrical/pneumatic), appropriate tow-bar and tractor for push-back, company personnel, customs (where needed) and communications facilities for flight planning.

Not all of these would be available at every airport of course and circumstances vary so it is, as always, the captain's decision and responsibility to manage available resources in coordination with his or her First Officer, in-flight service people, (for duty day issues), the airline's flight dispatch, maintenance and customer service people.

PJ2

See pprune's fragrant harbour forum thread for specific details on this incident as well as the latest updates:

http://www.pprune.org/fragrant-harbo...vacuation.html

There has to be some mistake about flying on 1 engine from TOC to HK , there are plenty of suitable airports on the way , especially Singapore with multiple runways , and KL too.
I expect when the dust settles we will find that the engine problems occurred later in the flight .Otherwise there will be some explaining to do.
Anyway , well done for achieving the runway guys , and best wishes to anybody injured , get well soon.

I cannot believe for a moment this crew would continue on with one engine after losing one / shutting one down shortly after take off on a 4 hour flight.




The facts will come out.

amazing job by the Pilots from what I have read.

One question, this would appear to be similar to the BA038 incident, maybe the same engines ( I am unsure but believe both RR Trents ) and similar reported engine problems at a similar stage of flight.

My ignorance or potential connection?

Apparently only hong kong is considered a suitable airport for CX. WSSS and WMKK are not good enough for some reason.
These guys have shown some serious flying abilities during the last part of the flight. They might not have gotten in those circumstances if they landed at a nearest suitable airport three hours earlier???
Going to be an interesting one, this incident...

quote "Apparently only hong kong is considered a suitable airport for CX. WSSS and WMKK are not good enough for some reason."

I is not often I am shocked at the stupidity shown on these forums by some of the posters. I work for cx and can catagorically state this is pure b.s.

Neither are anywhere near the Surabaya to HK track.

If both engines failed no antiskid
 

If both engines were failed as some camments say, then the Emer Gen would be powered by the RAT, and therefore no antiskid to the brakes, so having tires go flat would not be surpirsing. All still speculation at this point.

@ Bereboot.

Kerel,
That's the reason for the remark:

Dont suppose the names of he pilots have been releasd? Just wondering if a skipper I know was involved?

The tires went flat because crossing the fence at 230 knots gives you hot brakes.

mrdeux,
WSSS, etc dosen't have to be on the track to HK. Nearest suitable airport just might require a heading change.:ugh:

What, you mean you can change headings? I didn't say that they weren't on the track. I said they were nowhere near it, and they aren't. They are far enough away that they wouldn't even be considered. Brunei, Saigon, and Manila are different animals.

As far as I am aware, going onto one engine on an Airbus causes a red ecam LAND ASAP. No mention of nearest SUITABLE which is always open to interpretation....

Bengerman,

That is incorrect, on an Airbus, if the ECAM indicates an ENG FIRE, then the LAND ASAP is in red. On an ENG FAIL, it indicates LAND ASAP in amber.

LAND ASAP Red as per FCOM 3, the pilot should land at the nearest suitable airport. LAND ASAP Amber, the crew should consider the seriousness of the situation, and select a suitable airport.

It seems stilton was right,
According to abc news in australia "Cathay Pacific said in a statement that the plane's left engine had shut down as the aircraft made its landing approach at Hong Kong's international airport on Tuesday with 309 passengers on a flight from Surabaya in Indonesia.
The right engine also began to "cut out inexplicably, leaving the [pilots] to cope with dips and surges in power and the prospect of the plane plunging into the sea short of [the airport]," the South China Morning Post reported."

Ravi30,

Can you please show me the fuel dump switches on the A330? Haven't found them after 10 years on this jet. Stick to your computer games clown.

Redcup,

we have fuel dump on all of ours, it is an option.

There are some extremely lazy posters on this tread who obviously can’t be bothered reading the thread on Fragrant Harbour or going to the Cathay Pacific web site. If you had you would soon realise that the failures didn’t materialise until top of descent into Hong Kong CLK. I can assure you though that no Cathay Pacific pilot would ever fly past a suitable airport in a twin if we had an engine shut down.

A330 Evac

CX Press Release Details

You bet me to it Titan.

Jim Henson would be proud to see so many muppets are still out there.

THAT is remarkable
 

After the usual disclaimer that I am only a SLF and reading the press release I may add that for me the crew seems to have handled it very well. What I find even more impressive though is this: "The company was now offering to refund all passengers tickets and offer them a free regional flight."
Can you imagine that here in the land of the free? From United or UsAir...? Well, I guess you get what you pay for.

Does it mean ENG 1 could not be shut down trough ENG MASTER ... and maybe relighted as soon after ... could it be possibly just another temporary computer whim ?

The arguments and opinions that I have been reading in this thread seem to be presumptious of the facts.

There is a difference between "an engine problem", an engine failure and an engine that needs to be shutdown. Part of this are engine out of limits ECAM warnings requiring a pilot action and/or discretionary action by the pilot to simply retard the throttle.

To divert or not divert has to consider what are the facts as the pilot sees them and not what the press says or we imagine.

To me it's a complete waste of time for us to second guess decisions when we don't have access to the DFDR.

Of course I'm still interested in whether this was a common fault, independant faults, engine performance faults or aircrat or engine electronic control functions.

Caution for readers: The following is a discussion point and is neither a theory nor a speculation.

I am sure that we will hear more after the results of the news conference which was supposed to be held Wednesday afternoon in Hong Kong, are made available.

CONF iture;
Well, computers don't have 'whims' but "what's it doing now?" is a familiar phrase... ;-)

I've been looking through some manuals. For the A320, do you recall an ENG THR LEVER FAULT QRH procedure? The same procedure is in the A330 QRH. From what has been released thus far, it seems that one engine was shut down and the other was stuck at an setting between IDLE and CLB. While there seems little in common between the A330 event and this fault it is the closest fault I can find on a quick inspection. There is another fault, ENG 1(2) EPR MODE FAULT, which requires the use of manual thrust but does not require an engine shutdown.

I think the software has long since been modified but one time this fault required an autoland with autothrust engaged so that the autoflight system could control the engine thrust. The QRH alternative was to shut the engine down. There are various thrust levels at which the engine is 'stuck' depending upon ground or flight, slats extended or retracted, thrust lever position, (TOGA, FLEX/MCT, CLB or somewhere between CLB and IDLE).

In the current QRH procedure, the autothrust is left engaged and it is stated that FADEC will control the engine thrust but in this case it seems that this was not possible and that apparently the only option was to shut the remaining engine down once the field was assured.

PJ2

PJ2, I believe you didn't get the chance to read the Cathay Pacific updates CX780 incident - 14 April 2010


It seems that the ENG THR LEVER FAULT is a ECAM procedure but not a QRH one.
Is it also possible that an engine frozen at a level of power won't trigger any kind of ECAM message ... the crew would have to improvise !?

Seems like an extremely good job by both the flight crew (for bringing it safely down), and the cabin crew alike (for evacuating in 2 minutes).

CONF iture;
Thanks - I was reading the abnormal from the FCOM and in my mind substituted/typed "QRH" - its in the paper version of the ECAM drills and does show up on the ECAM.
Well I think that depends upon the failure. As you know from your A320 FCOM/Vol.1/Abnormals/Power Plant there are many ENG abnormals; a few of them, such as the example offered, will freeze or limit thrust and yes, that would be, through the FWC, announced on the lower ECAM, and, This isn't an irrational airplane no more than we can say that the B777/B767/A310/MD11 are. Designers and engineers of software and hardware are good at what they do. The airplane isn't perfect but no airplane is, and if something is broken or the airplane is abused beyond its certification limits it will behave just as any engineered system would, within the laws of physics. So....engine thrust isn't frozen/limited without cause; just as the airplane is handed over to humans when it no longer has sufficient information upon which to guide/limit its flight, it is almost always because FADEC does not have sufficient information to govern/provide engine thrust. THR LK is another message which comes on in Alphaprot and requires active flight crew intervention.

All that said, it is an airplane and we are pilots. Where demanded by rare circumstances such as unanticipated/unwritten failures, flight crews can and clearly do, improvise; I suspect the guys who landed the JetBlue A320 with the cocked nosewheel 'improvised' because there is no ECAM for "Cocked Nosewheel". The QRH drill for dual engine failure is long but I suspect Sully and his F/O had to improvise in the three-plus minutes they had to ditch. In response to warnings, (which we later found out were false), with maintenance concurrence I have had to improvise in an A330 in order to prevent a far more serious situation from unfolding. So it can occur and improvisation, with knowledge/experience, may be required; this is aviation, after all, not a UAV...yet. In our case it was absolutely not due to the design of the warnings or engines or the airplane.

With regard to the ENG THR LEVER FAULT and the ENG THR LEVER DISAGREE the drill was either autoland the airplane or shut the engine down at 500ftRA because the moment the autopilot was disconnected the engine thrust would be commanded as if the thrust lever were in the CLB position, (depending of course, when the failure occurred). That is now changed and one does not need to autoland the airplane but must use the autothrust. It used to be a simulator favourite...

regards,

PJ2

230kt, :eek: , I'm happy I was not at that aircraft..