billythekid

At AFO.
Lands way short of the threshold hitting the banking and ripping the tail off.
Initial reports say everyone is off and alive.
Crazy - those 777s were built strong!

Oldun

There's a vid on youtube of the aftermath.

SirFozzalot

Reports of 2 dead now.

ALi-B

iTrader: (1)

Very lucky escape for alot of the passengers though.

Spooky similarities to the 777 crashing at Heathrow: No mayday called, so whatever happened was on the very last moments before landing.

Midlife......

iTrader: (2)

I'm not an expert on these things but two things intrigue me.......... how on earth could a modern plane miss the runway with all the autoland stuff and why did the cabin roof catch alight ?

Just seems wrong for a modern plane...........

Shaun

tony de wonderful

I noticed the top of the fuselage is burned out. I could never understand why they let passengers take on duty free hi proof alcohol. I wonder if any of this helped fuel the fire. Also in the pics some passengers were grabbing their hand luggage, in some cases those massive bags with wheels. How selfish and ****ing stupid!?

ALi-B

iTrader: (1)

If if its anything like the 777 crash at heathrow...that fell short because the engines suffered from sudden fuel starvation when power was required just before landing. Assuming it was a loss of engine power the Autoland will just request more power...but if the engines won't respond, then its going to be pretty useless at landing the plane.

The fire is not surprising but still worrying. Lots of insulation, lots of plastics. Lots of wires to short out if chaffed through. Strange place to start (Maybe started in the food galley/toilet and spread upwards and outwards through ducting/behind the plastic facias and insulation cavities). But what I find worse is that even at an airport, with it not being a fuel/engine related fire and with time for most of the passengers to exit the plane that fire fighting equipment was unable to put the fire out until half of the fuselage was melted and destroyed. To me that says the fire fighting equipment is either insufficient or the plastics and insulation are still far too flammable. If it was a manky old 747 you'd expect it, but on a 777? Hmmm.

tony de wonderful

The Instrument Landing System (ILS) was out for maintenance apparently. So it was a manual landing using the eye.

ALi-B

iTrader: (1)

Again, I'm not surprised.

Having been on a number of oriental flights where people are out of the seats before the plane has stopped, no doubt its the same type who'd be doing it in a emergency

IMO all overhead storage bins should be locked during take off and landing. That would stop most of them!

Rob_Impreza99

iTrader: (3)

One survivor said "the plane came in to land too fast and too low, but there was no warning of problems". I'm no expert on planes but i wouldn't say that was a fueling problem.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-23216587

Leslie

Apparently the first officer was doing the landing manually and he had not been fully trained to land the aircraft.

It appeared that his speed was too low in the final stages of the approach and the aircraft lost lift and hit the boundary wall on the landing approach with the wheels. Since the aircraft would have been virtually stalled the combination of the wheels hitting the wall and the aircraft sinking rapidly caused an effective crash and the subsequent large amount of damage and the injuries to the people on board. Highly incompetent flying of course. Certainly not the fault of the aircraft!

We used to watch the Chinese Airlines aircraft doing the tricky landing at Kai Tak Airport in Hong Kong since it was always entertaining and often a "tooth sucking" experience!

Les

RobsyUK

iTrader: (2)

Just recently on terrors in the sky a woman was saying she doesn't feel pilots are having nearly enough experience before taking passengers as companies are inpatient.

Well here are the results. Let's hope lessons are learnt from this. Sadly...

billythekid

NTSB report 4 seconds of stick shaker (stall warning) before impact.
Pilot had less than 50 hours on type.

Video of the crash shows it coming in really slow with high AoA.
She almost started to cartwheel - the pax were sooo lucky.

tony de wonderful

Sounds like they came in too slow and too low, engines at idle and thus not enough wiggle room to do a TOGA. Result = flew it into the ground. I wonder what they were thinking in the cockpit?

Nimbus

Video here. To be honest, it looks like they were lucky only 2 died...
http://www.geek.com/news/amateur-vid...cisco-1561287/

Petem95

Pretty shocking to hear one of the girls who died appears to have been run over by an emergency vehicle rushing to the plane. 2 injured passengers have paralysis.

Looks like pilot error basically, but quite how it got so low before they aborted is bizarre.

tony de wonderful

Fire was thought to come from the right engine that broke off, but was just a few feet from the fuselage in the final rested position.

The stuff on a plane is fire retardent but not resistant I think. There is plastics everywhere in the interior and they will combust eventually. Plus you also have a few tons of fuel left which was probably pissing everywhere.

Petem95

You've also got the overhead compartments full of duty free spirits, so once that goes up it's going to burn out the passenger compartment quite quickly.

Dr Hu

Only in A-merica........ **** yeah!! ()

So so lucky it didn't flip entirely - but it still cartwheeled quite high before dropping back down - probably spine compression for the poor paralyzed people

If the ILS at the airport was off - I bet the yanks lawyers hands are rubbing like Ray Mears's dry sticks..

warrenm2

It was a clear day, I think there is an expectation that a pilot can land a plane on his own without ILS in good weather....

The key to me seems to be the speed. Apparently the CVR indicates they were aware of the correct speed and confirmed that they were travelling at 137 knots. So maybe a ASI issue?

hodgy0_2

this was my understanding too

Skoobie Dhu

iTrader: (3)

Worth following this thread, usually the answers are somewhere amongst all the theories. I'd say the FLCH theory combined with the Asian tendency for late steep descents and possible unfamiliarity with the 777s no auto wake when in FLCH mode sounds a strong possibility.


http://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/5...ncisco-61.html

sunny1989

The F.O had over 10000 hours but only 43 on type, supposedly the ILS glideslope was out but localiser in place.

I've flown a few ILS approaches with the glideslope out before and they are a bit of a pain... end up much like a VOR approach once you revert to rate of decent to meet DME distances and applicable heights! and that was in a familiar aircraft.

So trying that while on a new type wouldn't be too easy, The captain should have been watching his approach closely and noticed the cockups. But if both ASI's were buggered they are just going off what they have with respect to the airspeed. still doesn't explain not making the applicable DME distances and matching heights for clearance..

Either way approach speed was too low and they were too low themselves, so by the time they applied power and the engines spooled it was just too late.. very fortunate more weren't injured or worse. Wait and see what the final report says before any blames cast though I think.

Leslie

The weather was good and he was able to make a visual approach. He would not need to use the ILS glidepath anyway and it is unlikely that it was not accurate. On a visual approach you fly by sight to the runway touchdown and one of the most important instrument indications is the air speed indicator. There are also "Visual Angle of Approach Slope Indicators" ( VASI's) all done by red and white lights on either side of the runway touchdown area.

It appears that he allowed the speed to drop in the final stages of the approach and combined that with allowing the main wheels to hit the boundary wall. This may have happened because of the low speed in the final stages of the approach caused the aircraft to sink to the height of the boundary wall. This would have nothing to do with the ILS glidepath indications since the aircraft was probably virtually stalled due to the low speed and would not climb back to the correct glidepath anyway.

Hitting the wall with the main wheels would be an enormous blow to the airframe and one can see that the mainwheels were broken off and lying on the ground. Takes a hell of a force to do that believe me. The aircraft would not be recoverable after that.

The force of the blow would slow the aircraft even more and it would have hit the ground very heavily, luckily it remained the right way up.

It would appear that the accident was caused by gross incompetence on the approach by the operating pilot. It is also worth asking why the aircraft Captain did not monitor the approach closely enough to be able to put the operating pilot right when it was obvious as it would have been that he was losing excessive speed in the final part of the approach. It is the non flying pilot's responsibility in a civil airliner to cross check that the operation pilot is not flying the aircraft in an unsafe manner. We flew in that manner all the time on the VC10.

There will be a large number of pertinent questions to be answered from the accident investigation board!

Les

tony de wonderful

http://deadspin.com/pranked-tv-stati...ium=socialflow

warrenm2

Oldun

That's a very informative avatar, good find.

Leslie

Interesting to see that,

Its pretty well how I decribed it above.

Les