Men Who Killed Qantas - Matthew Benns [86]
Two thousand and eight had been a tough year for Qantas. In addition to all these incidents, the fuel bill was up by $1 billion, profits were expected to be down by 46 per cent to $750 million, and the share price had dropped by 53 per cent from $5.44 at the start of 2008 to $2.53 by the end. Surely things couldn’t get any worse. Could they?
ON THE FLIGHT deck of QF72 from Singapore to Perth on 7 October 2008 everything was normal. The weather was fine and crew noted there had been no turbulence for the entire flight. On board the modern Airbus A330 were 303 passengers, nine cabin crew and three flight crew. Just five years old, the French-built jet was one of the most modern aeroplanes in the Qantas fleet, featuring the latest fly-by-wire computer controls. Even when flown manually, the movements from the pilot were filtered through the on-board computers, which could override the pilot’s instructions if he went outside prescribed safe limits.
At 12.39 pm local time the experienced captain was at the controls, the first officer had just gone back to the galley on a scheduled rest break, and the second officer had moved over to sit in the right control seat. The autopilot and autothrust systems were engaged and the plane was cruising uneventfully at 37,000 feet to the west of Learmouth in Western Australia. In the main cabin, just over three hours into the flight, the meal service had finished and passengers were making their way to and from the toilets. Some noticed the plane climb slightly.
In the cockpit the autopilot had disengaged. The electronic centralised aircraft monitor warned AUTO FLT AP OFF (meaning the autopilot was off) and the master caution chimes sounded. The captain took manual control of the plane and unsuccessfully attempted to engage autopilot 2 and then autopilot 1. The plane climbed 200 feet and then returned to the normal cruising altitude. The pilot and second officer cleared the AUTO FLT warning message and then received one saying the navigation system was faulty. Other alarms were sounding, and the airspeed and altitude indicators on the captain’s primary flight display were fluctuating. The second officer got onto the cabin interphone to call the first officer back to the flight deck. Abruptly the plane pitched nose-down, at an angle of 8.4 degrees and, with a g-force of -0.80 g, the plane dropped 650 feet.
Back in the passenger cabin it was chaos. Ben Cave from Perth was not wearing his seatbelt and was slammed into the cabin roof. He feared for his life ‘and saw a bit of a flash before me. I hit the ceiling but I was OK.’1 Andrea Hutchins from Singapore said that as the plane dropped, some of the passengers were pinned to the ceiling and others were suspended in midair. ‘The plane was dropping quite quickly so they actually stayed in the air and then they came crashing down,’ she said. ‘The people who were wearing seatbelts, like myself, were OK. The people who were standing were the ones who got hurt the most.’2 Englishman Henry Bishop, on his first trip to Australia with wife Doreen, said: ‘Unfortunately some people who were walking back to the seats were the ones who copped it, as it were, when the overhead [lockers] came down on them.’3
One of those returning to his seat from the bathroom was 69-year-old Yip How Wong. ‘All of a sudden there was a big bang boom and I found myself up in the ceiling for a second or two and then I fell. [Passengers] were screaming because all of a sudden there was a drop. I couldn’t get up,’ he said.4 Sitting in the middle row with his seatbelt on, 22-year-old Tim Ellett