Thursday, November 04, 2010

"Qantas. Qantas never crashed." "Qantas?" "Never crashed."

A big thumbs up to the level-headed crew from Qantas who managed to land their massive Scarebus after an engine apparently exploded.

After the plane touched down in Singapore, the engine closest to the fuselage on the left wing had visible burn marks and was missing a plate section that would have been painted with the red kangaroo logo of the airline. The upper part of the left wing also appeared damaged.

One passenger, Rosemary Hegardy, 60, of Sydney, told The Associated Press that she heard two bangs and saw yellow flames from her window.

"There was flames — yellow flames came out, and debris came off. ... You could see black things shooting through the smoke, like bits of debris," she said.

Although it was nearly 90 minutes from the time of the explosion to the plane landing, there was no panic inside the aircraft, she said.

The captain addressed the passengers immediately by saying "'I'm sure you realize there's a problem. We have to find out what the problem is,'" she said. Shortly after that, the captain explained that an engine had failed and needed to dump fuel before landing.

3 comments:

  1. To be fair, this is more Rolls-Royce's problem than Airbus's. At the same time, I recall a passage from Joe Sutter's memoirs where he talks about refusing the RB211, ancestor of the Trent engines on the A380, as an engine option on the original 747. (RR didn't provide him with the hard performance data he wanted.) The RB211 had to be reworked with different materials and wound up bankrupting RR....

    ReplyDelete

Be reasonably civil. Ire alloyed with reason is fine. But slagging the host gets you the banhammer.

The Secret to Thriving during the Eastern Great Lent.

A couple secrets, actually. The first is Lebanese and Syrian cooking. At our new Melkite parish, the Divine Liturgy has been followed by Len...