Of course, there is no excuse for the crew running this test without proper training. You don’t just run an airliner on full power on a whim.
But the fact that the aircraft would release the brakes without a command from the pilot is also disturbing.
The pilot had already informed the plane it was in the air (!) so everything from then on was a Cluster Frag waiting to happen.
A flight team not reading the manual - that’s disturbing! Can’t blame Airbus if the Carrier allows their plane to be used in a roller derby.
The French version of the NTSB investigated this accident and produced a report. This re-telling of it is wrong. The crew didn’t pull any breakers. The nine people onboard were a mixture of Airbus and ADAT personnel.
They were doing engine run-ups on that brand-new A340-600 *with the wheels unchocked.* At some point, as the plane burned off fuel, it got light enough to begin dragging the wheels (or possibly it had enough thrust to overcome the friction of the parking brake). The crew stepped on the main brakes (which did disengage the parking brake) but they didn’t have enough stopping power to hold it either. As it accelerated further, somebody tried to turn it away from the wall, which reduced hydraulic pressure, reducing braking effectiveness even further. It hit the wall doing about 30 knots (~35 mph), rode up over the wall, and broke its back.
Since then, Airbus has changed its testing procedures. There are extra checks to confirm that the landing gear wheels are chocked before a test like this, and no more than two engines (one per side) can be run up at the same time on an A340, not all four as in this case.
}:-)4
The only part of this story that was completely accurate, BTW—nobody pulled the throttles back. According to the French report, they had only 13 seconds between the A340 first started moving and the impact with the wall. In that time, nobody grabbed the throttles and yanked them back to idle.
}:-)4