A hero's stress fracture (pilot who saved hundreds after Airbus explosion)

Sunday Telegraph (Sydney) ^ | 22nd July 2012 | Jennifer Sexton

[naturalman1975]

The pilot who saved the lives of hundreds on a crippled jet should have felt elated but, as he tells Jennifer Sexton, he descended into grief and self-doubt in the months that followed

Richard Champion de Crespigny was about to turn off the Airbus's seatbelt sign on the climb out of Singapore when engine two on QF32 blew up like a cluster bomb. In his hands were the lives of 469 Sydney-bound passengers and crew.

The former RAAF pilot of 35 years' experience then captained a four-hour nightmare on board a catastrophically damaged Qantas plane. The 55-year-old not only brought the A380 named Nancy-Bird Walton to safety with a wing ripped open like a sardine can, its massive belly and 600 electrical wires shredded, but also manually cushioned it into the runway in a near-perfect landing.

Everyone walked off unscathed.

But back at his hotel room at 2am, the emotional scars began to form for de Crespigny.

"After the incident I think I was so shell-shocked," he tells Agenda in a revealing interview to mark the release of QF32, his gripping book on the incident. "You're running on adrenalin and cortisol and that keeps you active."

Two hours in the air was like getting hammered into the ground under a pole driver, he recalled.

But it got worse. On the tarmac the electrics failed, there was no airconditioning in the midday sun at Changi Airport. Fuel had gushed from the plane and engine one was roaring and whirring and refusing to stop. He ordered everyone to stay on board as it was safer than the runway. It would be another two hours before the last passenger could disembark.

"We had a debrief in the hotel with the cabin crew that went until midnight (the bar tab was $4000),"

[Mind-numbed Robot]

Richard Champion de Crespigny was about to turn off the Airbus's seatbelt sign on the climb out of Singapore when engine two on QF32 blew up like a cluster bomb. In his hands were the lives of 469 Sydney-bound passengers and crew.

Why didn't he rturn to Singapore instead of continuing on a four hour flight?

[Moonman62]

The engine falling off of the DC-10 was due to the maintenance crew cutting corners in how they removed engines, not a design flaw.

That wasn't the only problem with the DC-10. A contributing factor in that accident was key instruments weren't duplicated on both sides of the cockpit. The DC-10 also had major cargo door problems among other things.

The MD-11 will crash and burn if you land it too hard on one of the gears in a crosswind. The gear will puncture the fuel tank and shear the wing off the aircraft. That's happened to one passenger jet and Fedex has done it twice.

[Trailerpark Badass]

Burning off fuel?