by Jim Eames
In the case of Indonesia, Australian authorities detected a reluctance to put even the most basic measures in place, the first of which would be to set up radio outposts in suspect areas to raise the alert—a difficult decision for a country that had its own security concerns about equipping people with radios in remote parts of the country.
One of Qantas’s most experienced captains, Bill Cape, led the Qantas team that eventually established an early warning system advising operators of imminent eruptions. The phenomenon itself is now known as Convective Available Potential Energy and describes the amount of energy a parcel of air has as it is lifted vertically through the atmosphere. Bill Cape’s deep involvement in the process remains in its acronym—CAPE.
NARROW CORRIDORS
If you asked an international airline pilot to list the world’s most dangerous skies, the Middle East would probably rate high on the list. It’s up there with such things as the vagaries of weather and other unpredictables, including volcanic eruptions.
As for the Middle East—for decades now conflicts have moved back and forth in this part of the world, bringing with them the requirement for airlines to be constantly aware of the dangers below and to adjust their operations accordingly.
Arguably one of the most significant effects has been the narrowing band of safe airspace a multitude of airlines need to fly through as they transit the region, requiring a constant change to flight plans as wars break out between foes below, are settled, then break out elsewhere across this conflicted landscape.
Often it’s not simply a question of a large number of airline jets crisscrossing narrow corridors within easy sight of each other, but an air traffic control problem that brings with it language difficulties and often confusing interpretations of English.
For many Qantas crews, it has been standard procedure to have every one of the available crew on the flight deck during Middle East over-flights. As with approaching busy airports like Los Angeles or Heathrow, any extra pair of eyes in the cockpit is a bonus. Extra ears can be helpful too. One Qantas captain, heading through the night sky one evening, heard an Egyptian air traffic controller clear another Qantas Boeing 747 flying in the opposite direction onto the same altitude. Quickly asking the other aircraft to turn on its landing light, he was horrified to see it heading straight towards him. Both crews immediately took steps to avoid each other.
Such violations were relatively commonplace, as Roger Carmichael can attest. ‘We would keep our wing lights on all the time in some areas and most of us had multiple incidents over the years where we had to call air traffic control to prevent breaches or warn of head-ons.’
On one occasion Carmichael had to call up another oncoming aircraft, telling them to climb 500 feet while he descended 500 feet until they passed.
Over the more notorious areas like northern India and Iran, pilots would often opt to fly one nautical mile to the right of their normal track to avoid the risk of a head-on collision.
Richard Cantor said one airway—known as the Chitral route as it crossed northern Pakistan—was particularly disliked by crews for several reasons. He recalls one captain recounting how he was flying along the route one night when another aircraft turned on its landing lights. ‘Immediately, others followed suit and they realised just how many other aeroplanes were out there,’ says Cantor, explaining these were the days before aircraft were fitted with traffic collision avoidance systems (TCAS).
Another reason for the Chitral route’s unpopularity was the proximity of the mountain ranges through the Hindu Kush, highlighting a little-known factor when it comes to the general public’s appreciation of the hazards of international flying—sudden decompression. Should decompression occur, the pilot must get the aircraft down quickly to an altitude where oxygen isn’t needed, usually around 10,000 feet. He therefore needs to know immediately whether he might need to avoid mountainous terrain which might be higher than 10,000 feet as he dives his aircraft to a lower level.
Despite such initiatives, it would be far from the last brush airlines like BA and Qantas would have with the dreaded invisible ash cloud.
Almost exactly three years later, flying through the night towards Sydney from Hong Kong, Captain Graham Crowther’s Boeing filled with smoke as St Elmo’s fire began to dance across the windscreen. The culprit this time was Soputan, a volcano situated near Manado on the northern tip of Sulawesi, Indonesia.
Crowther told the 287 passengers on board he suspected the sulfur-ridden smoke was due to atmospheric conditions and no cause for concern, but the conditions lasted for around four to five minutes, one of the engines faltered briefly, and dust settled across everything in the cockpit. At one point he contemplated diverting to Darwin but, as conditions returned to normal, he decided to continue on to Sydney. As dawn broke, he saw the windscreen had been sandblasted to the point where forward visibility was restricted but he was still able to land safely.
But damage to the aircraft amounted to much more than replacing Crowther’s windscreen. All four engines had to be removed and more than 5000 man-hours were expended on bringing the 747 back into operation—at a final cost of $500,000.
Once again a Qantas team would be dispatched to Indonesia, this time led by Qantas safety manager Ken Lewis, who had by now identified the problem as a lack of coordination between Indonesia’s meteorologists and vulcanologists. He confirmed this situation soon after his arrival when he invited the vulcanologist and the meteorologist concerned to dinner and found they’d never met! Things improved after that, although Qantas took the extra precaution of closing the direct route over Soputan and directing all its aircraft well to the east. Crews operating the sector were also advised to contact Sydney by radio for updated information before reaching the area.
Not all Qantas’s volcano crises have been in the air. Passengers on Qantas flight QF20 were buckled up and ready to depart Manila on the evening of 15 June 1991 when Captain Derek Tomasetti suddenly noticed that his windscreen was covered in sand. Just then the airport manager Ernesto Fray appeared in the cockpit with his hair filled with a sand-like substance.
Mount Pinatubo, 87 kilometres away to the north-west, had exploded in what was one of the most cataclysmic eruptions since Indonesia’s devastating Krakatoa in 1883.
In the following minutes, while arrangements were made for the passengers to be ferried to hotels, Tomasetti’s crew and Qantas airport staff gathered sheets of plastic and whatever other materials they could to protect the 767’s engines from the abrasive volcanic ash, as heavy rain began to turn the ash and sand to mud. Several other aircraft were less fortunate, a Boeing 747 and an Airbus A-320 suffering damage to all their engines. It was four days before conditions had improved enough for the airport to open and flights to get under way again. One of the first to leave was the Qantas 767, saved from serious damage by the quick thinking of the Qantas staff.
And then, of course, along with near misses and volcanoes, there’s always the weather. Despite sophisticated onboard weather radar and the introduction of weather satellites, climatic extremes are often impossible to avoid as changes of altitude or diversions may be limited by other traffic or airspace restrictions.
That was the dilemma that faced Qantas captain Geoff Rees, flying over Yugoslavia when he was confronted by a weather build-up that extended many kilometres ahead and above his 747. With no chance to climb out of the storm, Rees asked for permission to divert either side of it, only to be told there was gunfire on one side and conflicting air traffic on the other. Forced to maintain track, Rees flew through it and into hailstones so large they tore the radar dome off the aircraft and smashed against the leading edges of the wings with deafening force, as if someone was battering the 747 with a giant hammer.
So damaged was the aircraft that Rees decided to return to London. Eventually the damage would cost more than a million dollars to repair.
Being closer to the ground provided its moments too, particularly at airports like Rome and Kai Tak at
Hong Kong, where vicious cross-winds would appear out of nowhere. Geoff Westwood, whose 747 went within metres of being taken out by the US Air Force C-5A over Thailand in 1990, was in the middle of flaring the aircraft to a touchdown at Rome on a clear night when Rome’s notorious south-westerly cross-wind picked it up and thrust it towards the edge of the runway. Westwood managed to regain control but not before damaging the landing gear and some of the runway lights to the extent the Boeing had to be ferried back to Sydney for repairs.
Cliff Viertal’s experience flying a 747 Special Performance aircraft into Seattle in the United States highlights some of the unusual external factors that must be taken into account by a pilot when landing in poor weather. Viertal was delivering the latest version of the SP, which had been fitted with more powerful Rolls Royce engines, into Seattle at night. The weather was appalling but a diversion was out of the question as conditions at other nearby airports were no better. Not only did he have to constantly operate the de-icing equipment on the wings and engines, but the little extra fuel he had in the wings was close to freezing and creating its own external ice on the wings as well.
Added to that, as Viertal approached Seattle, he was having trouble slowing the SP down during the descent due to a combination of opposing forces—the light weight of the empty SP and the required thrust on the more powerful Rolls Royce engines to keep it in the air. It was a problem that could normally be handled by deploying the Boeing’s speed brakes and putting the wheels down early but in this case Viertal knew extending brakes and the wheels was likely to generate large ice blocks capable of killing someone on the ground. ‘Somehow I managed to get it down on a flooded runway but it did create one of the “memories” in the life of a pilot,’ he remembers.
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In more recent times, it was another flooded runway that took a Qantas 747 to the very edge of disaster and caused the airline to take a long hard look at its operational standards and emergency training. It also highlighted the lengths to which some at the top of the airline would go to protect the airline’s reputation as one of the safest in the world.
Thunderstorms and heavy rain were lashing Bangkok’s Don Muang international airport as Qantas flight QF1 approached to land late on the night of 23 September 1999. Although ground control told the Boeing 747 crew that visibility was 4 kilometres, they hadn’t been told of another weather observation that estimated the visibility was down to 1500 metres. The crew were also unaware that, only minutes in front of them, another Qantas Boeing—QF15—had abandoned its first attempt to land and gone around for another approach. Air traffic control did tell them that another aircraft had reported that, although the runway was wet, braking was good, something that would have been reasonably reassuring to the crew. Although it may be difficult for the layman to comprehend, a 300 tonne aeroplane is still capable of aquaplaning on a drenched runway.
By the time the Boeing was within metres of touching down, the rain was so heavy that the captain told the first officer who was flying the aircraft to abandon the landing and go around. As the first officer shoved the thrust levers forward the aircraft’s main wheels touched the runway and, without announcing his actions, the captain pulled off the thrust levers. It was to be a critical decision.
By now, the Boeing was more than 600 metres beyond its normal touchdown point on the runway and still travelling at its touchdown speed of 154 knots (285 kilometres per hour), having already used up almost half the runway length.
A later detailed report on the accident pointed to confusion in the cockpit leading to the crew not using the aircraft’s reverse thrust but relying on the brakes to stop the landing roll, now seriously affected by the Boeing’s tyres aquaplaning on the runway. Under these conditions and without reverse thrust the crew had no chance of stopping the Boeing on the remaining runway length available.
As chance would have it, sitting in seat 4K in first class was the airline’s former director of engineering, Mick Ryan, then working for Australian publishing magnate Kerry Packer and on his way to Amman, Jordan, to check out a new aircraft Packer was looking to buy to replace his ageing DC-8 executive jet.
Ryan realised something was wrong when he heard an unusual change in engine power before the nose wheel touched down, followed by a shuddering action that became more intense as the aircraft’s fuselage started to shake violently. Panels from the ceiling broke away and crunching noises from outside told him the aircraft was hitting solid objects and tearing apart.
Then there was a jolt. Ryan was thrust forward against his seatbelt. The aircraft stopped. Suddenly there was deadly calm. It was pitch black outside and still raining heavily.
Ryan released his seatbelt and was preparing to evacuate but the crew told everyone to stay calm and remain seated, causing Ryan concern as the cabin filled with a strong smell of hydrol (the hydraulic fluid) and the pungent odour of burning electrics.
Minutes went by. Passengers began to use their mobile phones and Ryan started to wonder what was happening. Numerous times during his long Qantas career he had watched cabin crew training exercises demonstrating the urgency of getting people off the aircraft. This was the opposite to what was happening here and the crew didn’t appear to know what to do. So he sat and waited as the time ticked by.
Although they didn’t know each other, one of Ryan’s former engineering employees, Peter Thomas, on the ground at Bangkok, had been watching and listening to the drama unfold. Thomas, whose job it was that night to check over the Boeing during its transit of Bangkok, had been listening to the company radio frequency so he could keep track of the aircraft’s movements after it landed.
He saw the Boeing touch down—then watched it disappear in the gloom of the torrential rain. There followed some confused chatter over the radio until someone said the aircraft was apparently stuck at the end of the runway with no brakes and suggested he go and have a look. When QF1 didn’t respond to Thomas’s calls on the company frequency, he headed off towards the runway in the Qantas vehicle.
‘When we got to the end of the runway there it was, sitting alone and silent, three hundred yards [metres] away on the golf course, still out of reach.’ Fortunately Thomas played golf on the course so he knew how to get there, driving across an active taxi-way and along a road verging the course.
By now the rain had stopped but the Boeing’s nose, firmly jammed into the mud, now prevented him from using the front attachment on the aircraft to plug in his phone and communicate with the crew. He was making his way towards another plug on one of the engines when he heard a crew member shout whether it was okay to use the aircraft escape slides.
‘I shouted back it was okay but not to use the rear ones as back of the fuselage was so far off the ground the slides wouldn’t have reached it.’
Passengers then began coming off, but soon there were more than Thomas could handle as they gathered on the roadway alongside the aircraft while Thomas kept urging Qantas ground control to get buses to the scene and allow passengers to get well clear of the aircraft.
As passenger numbers dwindled Thomas climbed up the raft to be told there was no power in the aircraft and therefore no communications. Thomas checked the battery switches in the cockpit to make sure they were off, then went to look for the captain and the first officer, finding them down the back shepherding the remaining passengers forward.
Passengers already on the ground outside the aircraft were remarkably calm as they were coaxed under the forward section of the Boeing towards the golf course road to where buses would arrive. Mick Ryan might have been calm, but was singularly unimpressed by the whole process. He says it was 5 or 10 minutes before the fire engines arrived. ‘We could have been incinerated as it was impossible to tell from the inside of the aircraft if a fire was under the wing. The crew acted like stunned mullets but at least the emergency floor lighting worked,’ Ryan recalls. He says another 10 minutes went by before the order to deploy slides was given.
‘There was no real hurry to
get off and, at the bottom of the slides, people just wandered around and had to be encouraged to move away from the aircraft. When the bus arrived 20 minutes later, they were boarded but didn’t move as the drivers had to work out how to navigate the one-lane golf course track, finally backing up the road to a turning area.’
Four hours later Ryan and other passengers were in Bangkok’s Emerald Hotel with what they stood up in, while Ryan’s son Andrew, also a Qantas engineer, was already on his way to Bangkok on a relief aircraft to help in the recovery of the Boeing.
By now, as lights began to arrive, Peter Thomas could see the state of the aircraft. Unable to stop in time, the Boeing had crossed the end of the runway, its nose gear and right-side undercarriage collapsing almost immediately, taking with them an airport navigation aid that had been mounted on a concrete base.
Thomas believes that, had the aircraft crossed the road, the remaining landing gear would have been torn off and the Boeing would have been totally destroyed with the loss of lives. ‘Qantas certainly dodged a bullet that night,’ he says.
In Australia the next morning, the crash made front-page news as Qantas went into damage-control mode, although that didn’t go according to plan either. Ben Sandilands, one of Australia’s leading aviation writers, remembers a visibly shaken Qantas chief executive, James Strong, appearing on a morning television show.
‘He showed clear signs of being rattled or shocked,’ recalls Sandilands, who clearly remembers Strong describing the crash as ‘a safety enhancing incident’ to the show’s female presenter. Sandilands acknowledges that, as this would have been only hours after the accident, Strong could not have been in possession of all the facts, but what struck Sandilands as strange was the choice of the word ‘incident’ rather than ‘accident’, particularly when live pictures were coming through of the crippled Boeing on its nose on the golf course. Speculation later arose that to use the term ‘accident’ would have meant a part admission by the company that the aircraft had to be written off, which in airline terms means a hull loss, something no airline wants on its record. Perhaps there are grounds for this in the fact it would cost more than $100 million to repair the aircraft, not far short of replacing it with a new one.