Men Who Killed Qantas - Matthew Benns [99]
By now, the ECAM system was lighting up like a discotheque on a Saturday night. Top of the list was that, on the four-engine plane, engine number two had failed, and engines number one and four were operating in a degraded mode, so the flight crew could not access all the usual data to see how they were running. Engine number three seemed fine. On top of that, the on-board computer informed them that the green hydraulic system, one of the two primary hydraulic systems on the A380, had low system pressure and a low fluid level, and the second yellow primary hydraulic system had errors on the pump attached to engine number four. Other warning lights told the pilots that the alternating current on the number one and two electrical systems had failed; the flight controls were only operating at reduced capacity; the wing slats were inoperative; there was reduced spoiler control, only partial aileron control and the auto-thrust and auto-land options were broken. Multiple warning lights were flashing about the landing gear, brakes, engine anti-ice, air data sensors, the fuel system including a fuel jettison fault, and problems with the plane’s centre of gravity. The number one engine generator drive had disconnected, the left wing had pneumatic bleed leaks and the avionics were overheating. There were more than 60 separate system failures.
The customer service manager attempted to contact the flight crew using the emergency setting on the interphone, which set off another horn on the flight deck. In the chaos, the crew turned off the horn without speaking to the alarmed crew member. The plane was still flying – the problem was to establish if enough of it was working to get it back on the ground safely.
The flight crew radioed the air-traffic controllers at Changi and advised them that the jet needed to be put into a holding pattern while they assessed the situation. They requested the plane remain within 30 nautical miles (56 kilometres) of the airport, in case they needed to land quickly. Captain de Crespigny wanted to be close enough to try to glide in the giant plane if he had to. It was that bad.
The controllers put the plane into a racetrack pattern over the sea and told the flight crew that reports were coming in that Indonesian residents on the island of Batam were reporting finding bits of aircraft all over the island. One woman, Yanestri, told the Daily Telegraph’s Jakarta correspondent that she had walked into her house after hanging out the washing when debris hit the ground exactly where she had just been standing. ‘I am very lucky. I was only three seconds from death,’ she said.3 Another lump of metal had destroyed her back fence. Six houses were damaged, two people injured and discoveries of at least 100 pieces of nearly new engine were reported from houses and shopping strips all over the island. Local media showed residents holding up parts of debris bearing the tail of the familiar red and white Qantas flying kangaroo logo. Others described hearing an explosion and seeing black and then white smoke pouring from the plane. State Elementary School No. 7 principal Sarifah Masnawati said: ‘We got all the children back into the school because there were pieces of metal falling in the grounds, the biggest one or two kilos. Thank God there were no victims.’4
On the flight deck, Captain de Crespigny was following the procedures drilled into pilots in the flight simulators at the Qantas training centre in Mascot: aviate, navigate, communicate. He had controlled the plane, put it into a safe holding pattern and communicated with the ground.