Men Who Killed Qantas - Matthew Benns [87]
Meanwhile, in the cockpit the captain was frantically pulling back on the joystick to arrest the sudden plunge, while the second officer activated the fasten seatbelts sign and made a public announcement for people to return to their seats and buckle up. The control panels were flashing with warnings. After clearing the navigation fault they were faced with a PRIM 3 FAULT warning, which meant the flight control primary computer was not working. They turned it off for five seconds and then turned it on again. A few seconds later the aircraft suddenly pitched down once more, this time dropping 400 feet before the captain’s pressure on the joystick arrested the descent and the plane returned to the normal cruising altitude. The first officer scrambled back to the flight deck and the three flight officers discussed what to do. ‘They were not confident that further pitch-down events would not occur,’ said the ATSB preliminary report into the incident.6
The crew decided to land the plane as soon as possible and made an emergency priority broadcast (PAN) to air traffic control for permission to land at Learmouth, over 1000 kilometres north of Perth. Meanwhile, the cockpit was filled with warning chimes as fault messages scrolled wildly over the main screen. The crew could not stop the flickering messages or the regular warnings that the plane was about to stall. The captain could not trust the information being displayed so he switched to the standby flight instruments, trimmed the plane manually because the automatic elevator trim was not working, and disconnected the autothrust to enable him to fly the plane manually.
Later, a close friend of the captain, who had previously been a Mirage fighter pilot, said: ‘It would have been tense, no two ways about it. But I know the captain – he would have been very calm.’7 Michael Glynn, fellow A330 pilot and then acting president of the Australian and International Pilots’ Association, added: ‘I believe the situations he was faced with have not been seen before. But that’s one of the things we are trained to prepare for – when things crop up that you’ve not seen or thought up before and you have to … get the aircraft to ground safely.’8 Captain Glynn said the QF72 captain’s calmness in trying to solve the problem of what was happening to the plane would have been vital. ‘Sometimes the best thing to do as a pilot in that situation is to sit back and get a sense of what’s going on, instead of leaping in and trying to fix it without understanding what’s going on.’
But at the heart of the problem was the plane itself. ‘The thing to remember about Airbus is the flight control computer is always flying the plane – even when you’re controlling it by hand, you’re controlling it through the flight control computer.’9 And the flight control computer was not making any sense at all.
The crew contacted the operator’s maintenance watch unit by satphone to seek assistance. The technicians confirmed the faults by datalink but could offer no cure other than to turn off the faulty computer, which the crew did. The fluctuating warning messages just kept on flashing. In the meantime, the cabin crew advised the flight crew that there were extensive injuries, including a broken leg. The crew radioed a MAYDAY and told the air traffic controllers they had several injuries on board. On the ground at Learmouth, emergency services prepared to meet the disaster-stricken plane.
As the jet approached Learmouth, the flight crew found they could not enter the GPS coordinates for the landing into the flight management computer. The captain brought it in on a straight visual approach to runway 36 and the plane landed without further incident. The passengers applauded delightedly when the wheels touched the tarmac.
Worst hurt were those at the middle and