Posted on 04/11/2009 11:38:54 PM PDT by naturalman1975
THE Emirates jet that dragged its tail along Melbourne Airport last month was centimetres from crashing, with 225 passengers on board.
Several aviation sources have described the accident on March 20 as the closest thing to a major aviation disaster Australia has ever experienced and say the passengers and crew are lucky to be alive.
"It was as close as we have ever come to a major aviation catastrophe in Australia," one senior official said.
The plane -- carrying up to 215,000 litres of highly flammable aviation fuel -- was less than 70cm off the ground when it crashed through lights almost 200m from the end of the runway.
The Australian Transport Safety Bureau has placed it in the most serious category of aircraft mishap available to it -- an accident, rather than an incident.
An ATSB investigation update shows the accident was labelled a "significant event" by investigators, who also listed damage to the aircraft as "substantial".
"During the take-off the aircraft's tail scraped the runway surface. Subsequently smoke was observed in the cabin," the report says.
A Sunday Herald Sun investigation has confirmed that the flight -- EK407 to Dubai -- almost failed to become airborne and barely made it over the airport perimeter fence, half a kilometre away.
Damage to the $220 million plane is so severe that the airline is considering writing it off rather than repairing it.
The fully-laden Airbus A340-500 was believed to have been travelling about 280km/h when it reached the end of the runway without becoming airborne.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.com.au ...
Sounds pretty bad
I almost caused a few guys their jobs and a couple million in damage one day...
Sydney International Airport (SYD/YSSY)
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ya mean pilots have to actually know what they are doing?
“ya mean pilots have to actually know what they are doing?”
Mostly.
This is a very scary story!
I’d really like to find out exactly why they had so much trouble getting airborne..plenty of runway and speed it sounds like.
Maybe it was the Airbust jet’s computers having a bad day.
Wow. Be interesting when they determine the causes of that accident.
THE plane used all of the 3657m-long runway 16, but failed to become airborne in time to take off.
Sure sounds like an overweight plane.Ever since the Air Florida crash into the Patomac River in a snowstorm, I have wondered why they didn't have a simple longitudinal accelerometer indication in the pit which could be calibrated in takeoff distance required. It should be simple to monitor that, and abort any marginal takeoff long before getting past the point of being committed to takeoff.
THE pilots -- who are not Australians -- were interviewed by investigators the day after the crash, but have now left Australia and have resigned from Emirates.
Seems like they must either have been ordered to take off overweight, or to take off at dangerously reduced power for noise abatement. But then, it's still surprising that they would have adhered to reduced power when it became clear that they were in danger of losing the plane on takeoff. That can ruin your whole day.
Nice and sensationalist! The MSM doesn’t let anyone down... pilots and conservatives! The more I read about this tailscrape, the more I believe the pilots. That said, these pilots will be fired in short order because they work for Emirates and they caused a news story. I dislike ALPA (my union), but in a situation like this, they would prove their worth.
Take off run for an A340-500 at maximum take-off weight is 3050m. Runway 16 at Sydney according to article is 3657m. That’s 652m of extra runway. So something boneheaded must have been done by somebody. Or, maybe there were a whole bunch of fat passengers who brought too much luggage.
A 18k gold faucet here, gold door handle there, pretty soon we’re beginning to talk about real weight.
Sure sounds like an overweight plane.
Or underpowered, or both.
The last time I was on an Airbus, a 333, on takeoff it appeared to be underpowered and the takeoff roll was much longer than it should have been.
LOL!
Maybe the fuel line was clogged.
What? They're burning regular gasoline these days or what? I thought jet A was fairly difficult to ignite. Silly me.
"The author, wearing highly flammable clothing while writing this, barely got off the unbelievability scale...."
Don't Airbus aircraft have a history of throttle and auto-throttle problems?
There was a demo at a commercial air show, once some years ago, I think in Paris, of an Airbust plane that had some kind of problem like that if memory serves -- I remember the plane scraping the tops of the trees past the runway. -- It wasn't an impressive sales demonstration.
Author is not a pilot.Runway 16 is a north-south runway and EK407 was taking off to the south, towards the suburb of Keilor, about 10.30pm, when the accident happened.
I don't even play one on TV, tho I did take a couple of lessons back in the day. And mostly, as a test engineer I had occasion to chat with a test pilot who loved to tell the occasional war story . . . in the course of one of which he explained as an aside that a runway number is just the heading of a takeoff or landing on that runway, expressed in tens of degrees.Only thus do I know that "Runway 16" is 20 degrees east of south, and that the same strip of asphalt would be known as "Runway 34" when/if airplanes use it to takeoff or land toward the NNW. Had I been writing the story, and thinking that my reader was probably no more aware of that system as I might be still but for hearing that pilot's tale, I would have wanted to slip that tidbit into it. But that's just me.
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