by Jim Eames
One can hardly imagine the sight that confronted Howells when he had crawled far enough to open the cockpit door and claw his way into the vacant second officer’s seat directly behind Nye. By now the aircraft was heading straight down in an inverted dive, approaching the speed of sound with Nye and Watkins trying to regain control.
Howells’s arrival in the cockpit had one critical advantage, an advantage that helped to save their lives. In a matter of seconds, from where he sat, back a little from both crew members, Howells could clearly see a discrepancy in the three artificial horizons, noticing Nye’s was still stuck on a 30 degree bank to the right while Watkins’s artificial horizon and the stand-by horizon on the central control panel agreed with each other.
Here Howells’s experience flying military aircraft on instruments also came to the fore and he shouted to Nye to raise the nose of the aircraft to stop the airspeed increasing, applying the proven theory that the moment the speed increase stops is the moment when the aircraft is flying level.
By now, less than a minute since Howells had been tipped out of his bunk, the aircraft had already fallen through 19,000 feet to around 16,000 feet and it began to porpoise wildly as it climbed again to 21,000 feet before its nose dropped again and it descended to 17,000 feet before finally coming under full control. Gradually Nye began the slow climb to return to 36,000 feet to reset course for Bahrain. The whole death-dive sequence had taken two minutes in what had been a horrifying experience for those in the cabin.
Maureen Culey had just completed a ‘walk through’ the cabin to check the passengers when she remembers feeling an enormous force against her as the aircraft turned and she had the presence of mind to head for the jump seat near the forward door where she managed to strap herself in.
‘This is it. I’m dead. This aircraft is going to crash. So this is how it ends,’ flashed through her mind.
She vividly remembers Howells crawling along the carpet and over the top of her. ‘It must have been a mighty effort for him as the force was phenomenal.’
Ed Kirkland, meantime, found himself pinned to the Boeing’s ceiling for a few seconds then, as the gravity eased towards another gyration, came crashing down on Sir Mark Oliphant seated below him. (Oliphant later admitted to Howells that, in keeping with his scientific bent, he had used part of their downward spiral to calculate how many seconds it would take before they hit the sea!)
As soon as the aircraft recovered, Kirkland and Culey set off for the rear of the aircraft to help John Davis, the senior economy class steward, but found the concertina door separating first class from economy jammed. Ripping the door off its mountings they were met with the sight of bags, pillows, blankets, broken duty-free bottles and other debris stacked against the forward part of the cabin.
‘Everything had been just turned upside down, although strangely enough the passengers were much calmer than I had thought they would be,’ a situation Culey attributed to sheer shock.
Fortunately nearly all passengers had their seatbelts on, although one who didn’t, a Royal Brunei policeman, hit the ceiling and slammed into the seat-rest ashtray as he came down again, later requiring the wound to be stitched in Bahrain hospital. Robert Edy and his wife had their daughter Chrissie lying across two seats and at first thought they had merely hit some turbulence until they saw Chrissie floating about a metre above them. Chrissie was unharmed. Another passenger also remembers hitting the ceiling and ‘watching all the stuff in the cabin floating around below’.
But another bizarre event was in store for the cabin crew. A woman seated towards the rear of the aircraft suddenly became distressed, telling the crew the baby she had been carrying in her arms had disappeared. After a frantic search the crew located the infant under the pile of debris at the front of economy. It had floated the length of the aircraft and when negative gravity had come off, descended to the floor, to be then covered with cabin trash. Miraculously, it had been fast asleep the whole time and was uninjured.
With the aircraft now stabilised, the cabin crew used their medical kits to treat any minor cuts and bruises and began to clean up the aircraft.
After making a brief calming announcement over the intercom, Nye went back to talk to the passengers while Howells slipped into the first officer’s seat. Several minutes then passed before Howells, realising that the Boeing’s engines were still set at cruising speed, and now alarmed at the stress damage the aircraft may have suffered, told Hodges to reduce the speed by 25 knots (45 kilometres per hour) to ease the strain on the aircraft. He could not know at the time but it would be a decision that would later have serious consequences for him.
By now the shaken crew in the cockpit began to realise what had happened with the artificial horizons. When Nye had returned to the cockpit after his rest period, he had noticed with alarm that his artificial horizon was showing a 30 degree bank to the right. With pitch darkness outside and therefore no external references, he reached forward and switched off the automatic pilot and, without first cross-checking the other two horizons, ‘corrected’ with a 30 degree bank to the left, thus sending the aircraft into a downward spiral dive earthwards.
Later investigation showed the Boeing’s speed had peaked at 885 kilometres an hour in the dive, close to the speed of sound; although some of the Qantas experts involved in the investigation would claim that at some point the aircraft had actually exceeded the speed of sound, as compressibility around the pitot tubes that measure an aircraft’s speed can cause airspeed indicators to under-read. What was without doubt though was that the Boeing had rolled onto its back in the first part of the dive, eventually to end up pointing in the opposite direction to which it had been flying when Nye first rolled it to the left.
None of the investigators was in any doubt as to the critical factors that had saved the lives of those on board. One of the main reasons was that the aircraft had been relatively lightly loaded. Had it been carrying a full load of passengers and fuel, the Boeing would probably have broken up in the air as it pulled out of the dive. Even allowing for the light weight, it was a tribute to the robustness of the Boeing’s construction that it hadn’t started to break up anyway.
After landing at Bahrain at around 1 a.m., the Brunei policeman was taken to hospital and arrangements were made for onward flights for the remaining passengers. Several, still badly shaken, opted to remain in Bahrain for several days before moving on to London.
As is normal under such circumstances, Nye, Howells, Watkins and Hodges were stood down pending an inquiry, City of Canberra was grounded awaiting the arrival of a technical team from Sydney and both crews headed for local hotels. Buddha Greene had the presence of mind to relieve the aircraft’s bar of several bottles of whisky, but Howells can’t remember touching a drop before he went to bed, only to wake up later in the afternoon shaking uncontrollably. They spent five days in Bahrain while Nye compiled his written report on the incident, and the Sydney team assessed the damage, removed the flight data recorder containing all the details of the flight and prepared the Boeing for an empty ferry flight back to Mascot.
At one stage during their stay Nye and his crew returned to the airport to watch one of the Qantas engineers crawl into the bowels of the aircraft below the cockpit, tinker for a while, then call out: ‘Is this what you saw?’ They watched as Nye’s artificial horizon showed a 30 degree bank to the right and the other two remained level. The cause: a loose wire at the power source to the captain’s artificial horizon.
Even more than 40 years later several of the crew, including Kirkland, Culey and Davis remain critical of their homecoming treatment by the airline. Apart from the two people in charge of the male and female crews, John Davis says there was no one else to meet them when the aircraft parked at a remote section of the airport. Davis is convinced the company did all it could to avoid publicity about the incident as, although there had been press coverage in the UK immediately afterwards, virtually nothing had appeared in Australia.
Cule
y, now Maureen Bushell, agrees: ‘We were met by the passenger service people who said “How are you, dear?” and that was about it, although I did get a fairly limp letter from Customer Services. They seemed to have successfully swept it under the carpet although I did receive some clippings my parents found in the London papers. ‘There was no such thing as counselling in those days, although I never had any nightmares. I guess we were fairly young and you just move on.’
Culey left the airline eighteen months later to marry. But for the technical crew, particularly David Howells, the saga was far from over. As the investigation progressed, it became clear that, in common with many aircraft accidents or incidents, there are often multiple links in the chain of events that lead to the eventual occurrence. The unfortunate combination of the captain’s faulty artificial horizon, the crew’s lack of awareness of any prior problems with the instrument and that the failure occurred on a pitch-black night without outside situational references were obviously part of the problem.
There was also the fact that in the very first seconds of the incident, second officer Ian Watkins was busy transmitting a regular position report to Karachi air traffic control, reading from an A4 sheet clipped to an aluminium board with the help of a map light, which would have obscured his instrument panel. By the time the aircraft rolled on to its back and started to dive, neither Watkins nor Nye would be cross checking artificial horizons as they fought to control the aircraft.
But what was incontestable was that Nye omitted to observe one of the basic tenets of instrument flying, which is to immediately check the authenticity of the horizon’s readout with the other instruments. The arrival of Howells in the cockpit, bringing with it his extensive night-flying experience as a former fighter pilot and his ability to read all three instruments, helped close that loophole—not that this was going to help Howells much when the company’s investigation report was handed down. While Ian Watkins and Bob Hodges were absolved of any blame, Bill Nye was sent off to do some refresher training and David Howells received a reprimand—for reducing the speed of the aircraft after the incident without the consent of the captain! Howells was shocked, not only because he wasn’t even on the flight deck when the trouble started, but it appeared he was the only one being punished, with a permanent mark against his flying record.
The whole process was reduced to farce when Howells presented himself before the investigation committee to hear the official inquiry results before he could return to flying. By now the Australian Federation of Air Pilots (AFAP) had taken an interest in Howells’s predicament, insisting he be accompanied to the hearing by another of their members, Captain Barry Ellis, an old friend of Howells from when they had both been based in London. Both sat there stunned as the captain handling the process spent the first few minutes haranguing ‘engineer officer Hodges’ until it was pointed out to him that the chap before him was actually first officer Howells. Duly corrected, the captain went on—to repeat the whole harangue word for word—only this time addressing it to ‘first officer Howells.’ By now Ellis and Howells could see the funny side of it and could barely contain their laughter.
With the reprimand still on his record the AFAP insisted on taking the matter further, resulting some months later in a union delegation to Canberra to bring the matter to the attention of the Minister for Civil Aviation, Senator Robert Cotton, before the reprimand was expunged from Howells’s record. Howells went on to become a training captain on Boeing 747s and, like Ian Watkins and Bob Hodges, had a long and successful career in Qantas.
Bill Nye continued his training but after a subsequent landing incident in Singapore, he was relegated to first officer, a position he held until his retirement.
Boeing 707 City of Canberra, later to be renamed Winton, flew with Qantas into the 747 era, and was eventually sold to an international aircraft leasing company in 1977. Needless to say, old hands at Qantas still talk in hushed tones of her role as the ‘Bahrain bomber’ and those minutes of terror over the Middle East.
11
BATTLING THE ELEMENTS
In the years before the attacks on the World Trade Centre on 9/11, inviting passengers forward for a look at the flight deck was a common practice. Inevitably some would come away with the impression that ‘not much was really happening,’ as ‘George’, the automatic pilot, was doing all the work.
Experienced airline captains will tell you nothing is further from the truth. Everywhere pilots fly, they must have a ‘safety height’, or a limit to where you can descend before you hit a mountain, as things can get complicated when you have a range of mountains reaching up to 20,000 feet below. As one Qantas check and training captain puts it: ‘I get very cross if a pilot I’m checking can’t tell me without looking at the flight plan what his safety height is at any given moment, as the action required in a decompression must be instantaneous.’
Because a rapid decompression is capable of sucking all the maps and other charts out of the cockpit in a split second, it’s essential that pilots keep ahead of their aircraft and know what their ‘safety height’ is at all times. ‘You might be sitting there a little fatigued for fourteen hours but your brain’s situational awareness needs to be working,’ says another.
Duty dispatchers like Richard Cantor factor this safety height into every flight plan they deal with, while at the same time making sure their flights are well out of range of what military activity might be taking place on the ground below.
Cantor says particularly after 9/11 there were three routes through the danger area presented by Afghanistan: one that opened up on a day-to-day basis; another that went fairly close to Kabul; and a third further south. A US military AWACS aircraft in the vicinity of the day-to-day route operated in conjunction with a ground station and Qantas could work with the latter to make sure everything was safe. The problem with the other two routes was created by so many aircraft converging on the relatively narrow ‘gates’ at either entrance to them. Not that the ‘gates’ were the only concern. Often air traffic control would re-route the aircraft at short notice, meaning Cantor’s people back in Sydney would have to quickly determine which was the most acceptable route to, say, Singapore, without sending the Boeing over a live rocket-firing range in India.
Flying into and across China presents other challenges beyond high ground, particularly with communications. For instance, if a service was crossing Chinese airspace from Afghanistan en route to Bangkok, all communications modes such as satellite and data links, in addition to voice, had to be working because it would be passing through areas of Chinese military airspace and where controllers had limited English. If there was a glitch in any one of these, the aircraft would be diverted to Hong Kong. ‘It’s not that the Chinese are uncooperative but rather if you want to change a routing due to a cyclone or weather effect the process can be quite labour intensive at their end, possibly due to their hierarchical culture,’ Cantor says.
Cantor credits Qantas with pioneering route development through to Europe over many years and it’s still a truism that every flight plan for every route has its own idiosyncrasies, often causing people like Cantor to wonder whether even some of the aircrew realise what’s really going on behind the scenes. ‘It’s a bit like the duck. There’s a lot of paddling going on underneath,’ he says.
On occasions that ‘paddling’ involves skirting the dust from volcanic eruptions that can cause havoc with a jet’s engines. It was an issue dramatically brought to the public attention when a British Airways Boeing 747 flew into a cloud of volcanic dust thrown up by Indonesia’s Mount Galunggung in June 1982.
Despite flying through clear night skies at 37,000 feet, the first sign of trouble was the appearance of St Elmo’s fire on the Boeing’s windscreen—a strange light created by an electric field around air molecules occurring under certain weather conditions—soon followed by an accumulation of smoke and a pervading odour of sulfur within the cabin. A short time later all four engines stopped.
The f
ollowing minutes have earned a place in aviation history as they record how British Airways captain Eric Moody and his crew methodically went through repeated attempts to restart the engines as the Boeing, now little more than a 300 tonne glider, gradually lost altitude towards 11,000-foot mountains on Java’s south coast. If the engines couldn’t be started by then, they would have to contemplate turning the Boeing towards the sea for a crash landing.
Moody’s announcement to the passengers has all the hallmarks of classic British understatement: ‘Ladies and gentlemen. This is your captain speaking. We have a small problem. All four engines have stopped. We are doing our damndest to get them going again. I trust you are not in too much distress.’
Finally, after losing more than 20,000 feet, the crew’s repeated attempts to restart were successful when first one engine fired into life, then was followed by the other three, allowing Moody to climb again out of harm’s way. His troubles were far from over though, as damage to the windscreen from the St Elmo’s fire effect meant Moody had to squint through a remaining narrow strip of the glass to see the runway.
Investigation showed that, because the volcanic ash was dry it had not been detected on the Boeing’s weather radar, which is designed to detect moisture in cloud. Entering the hot engines, the dust had melted, clogging intakes and causing the engines to fail. Fortunately, as the aircraft reached lower altitudes, the molten particles solidified and began to break away, making it possible for a restart.
The incident caused serious concern within the industry, particularly with airlines like Qantas, as the majority of its routes cross volcanic regions. The worry was accentuated by a lack of established warning procedures that could alert airlines to the danger. Everyone knew where the volcanoes were but advice needed to be gathered when an eruption took place.