PlasticPilot.net

A Qantas Boeing 747 flying the London - Hong-Kong - Melbourne route had to make an emergency landing in Manilla. The NTSB initial press release mentions: “The airplane, Qantas flight 30, a B747-400, en route to Melbourne, Australia from Hong Kong, landed safely in Manila at 11:15 am local time. There were no reported injuries among the 346 passengers and 19 crewmembers. The aircraft has a 5 foot hole in the cargo area forward of the right wing leading edge and there is also some wing damage.“.

The oxygen masks were released in the cabin, and the flight descended from Flight Level 290 (29′000 feet) to 10′000 feet and landed safely in Manilla. A video from the cabin is available on Reuters BBC websites (see link below), showing passengers wearing the masks, and the some pictures of the flight information screen displaying an altitude of 10′000 feet.

Some media reports talk about how the aircraft “plunged”. From a passenger point of view, and emergency descent is certainly impressive, but it does not means that the aircraft is out of control or will crash. The purpose of such expeditious descents is to descend to altitudes which provide enough oxygen to allow people to breath normally.

Click here to read more about the mysteries of pressurization.

Aircraft and procedures are designed to cope with such situations, and crews are trained accordingly. Nevertheless, kudos the the Qantas crew who handled it perfectly: the plane landed safely, no one got hurt, and there are no panic signs on the videos.

Regarding the causes, as always, one have to wait the conclusions of the investigation. The NTSB, FAA and Boeing sent experts to support the investigators.

External links:

BBC video, incuding passenger interview and in-cabin images

Reuters video, including in-cabin images

Coverage of that event by CNN, with video

One month and two weeks after the crash of a freighter Boeing 747 in Brussels, a similar accident occured in Columbia. The crew survived, but two persons on ground were killed, and all my thoughts go to their relatives.

When I received the e-mail notification from NTSB, I immediately made the relation to the Brussels accident, but I could not believe it when I read it: the plane that crashed in Columbia was also operated from Kalitta-Air. Wow.

Reacting to that requires to keep a cool mind. Until otherwise demonstrated, there is no relation between these two accidents. The probability that an operator looses two aircraft is rather small, but a low probability does not means something can not happen.

If you flip a coin 10 times, there is one chance on 1024 that you get 10 times a head. Remote but not impossible. I don’t know about the aircraft accident statistics, but it’s not the first time a company loses several aircraft, but the time between these two accidents is at least disturbing.

Investigators will tell if this is simply bad luck, or if there is something wrong with Kalitta. This will take time, and until then, speculiation will go on, as always. Don’t trust anything you could read, see, or hear, unless it comes from an official investigation body.

In aviation like elsewhere, shit happens.

Click here to read the CNN coverage of this accident.

The recent accidents involving British Airways Boeing 777 in London and Kalitta Air Boeing 747 in Brussels both occurred really closed to the airport perimeter. One was landing, and the other was taking-off, but both were close to crash outside the airport. The Kalitta one is probably even slightly out, and the nearby railway had to be temporarily closed.

The pictures below show how close to off-airports accidents these cases are.

Each accident raises an endless list of “what if ?” questions. In these two cases, there was a special focus on “what if it had been longer / shorter”. Thanks to Google Earth, it’s rather easy to answer these questions. I measured the distance from the runway threshold or runway end to the next building (roads, parkings and railways excluded).

In Brussels, the first building in the axis of runway 20 is as 1.2 kilometers, and in Heathrow the last building before landing is at 1.0 kilometer. On standard ILS approaches, planes descend by 52 meters for each kilometer flown. Climb rates are much higher, and strongly variable, depending on aircraft type, load, and weather.

Both Heathrow and Burssels are in relatively dense areas. To compare, I measured the same distances for various airports and runways:

This little survey is not a safety benchmark, but is intended to show the how varied are airport implantations throughout Europe. Tempelhof (which is about to be closed) and Madrid are certainly exceptions. An airport like Madrid with nothing around might seem better, but this has its counterpart: even with a taxi, a transfer to city center takes 30 minutes.

If you want to measure distances between your home and the landing point, do it to threshold, or to the touchdown zone. Many runways have displaced thresholds - planes can’t land at begin of runway, but only after the numbers.

This is to make sure they come in high enough if they are roads or other things to protect before landing, to avoid things like what happened to this Iberia plane.

Geneva runway 05 threshold is displaced by 330 meters. The part of runway which I highlighted in red can be used to take-off run only. This ensures that approaching planes fly with sufficient height over the public road highlighted in blue.

So next time you’re on an airliner and wonder why your pilot did not landed at runway begin, you’ll know why. Ok, sometimes they also just land loooooooong by mistake.

I can’t finish this post on landing distances and what’s shortly before the airport fence without mentioning the famous Princess Juliana airport, in St-Marteen. This is where some of the most famous airplane photos have been taken, picturing Boeing 747s approaching low over the beach. There’s displaced threshold as well, it’s anyway impressive. I have to go there one day…