A magical silence pervaded the flight deck. Total silence for a while. It was now one hour and 30 minutes since the explosions, and we all shared the same thoughts: had we completed all the required actions? Had we missed anything? We’d actioned about a hundred ECAM warnings and checklists. We’d stabilised the aircraft, built ourselves a Cessna replacement, and we’d briefed ourselves, the cabin crew, the passengers and air traffic control. Were we ready?
Yep, I thought, I’m happy. Now let’s put this aircraft on the ground!
I had practised emergency landings in the simulator – now it was time to run those procedures. We had kept to our SOPs the entire flight, including all the task sharing, so we all knew what our responsibilities were, what we would say and when. Even though we were all working at 100 per cent, the cockpit was now very quiet.
I asked for one last look at the fuel page and told everyone to think about a possible evacuation, and then said, ‘Let’s do this.’
The nose lowered and we started our way down.
CHAPTER 24
Threading the Eye of a Needle
Harry called out loud and clear: ‘Richard, you can’t be fast!’
Harry was worried about our speed control. I was using only one inboard engine to control our speed. This non-standard technique enabled me to contain the speed within 165 to 168 knots during the final approach. On a digital aircraft, one knot can be the difference between safe flight and a speed warning. I still had set the two outside engines – 1 and 4 – to the same thrust and was controlling the throttle on Engine 3 to minimise the yaw and roll divergencies. Airbuses are terrible to fly with manual thrust; they are designed to be flown with fly-by-wire and auto-thrust, and so they don’t have the manual thrust-balancing system that operates so well on a Boeing 747–400.
Balancing the thrust to prevent yaw and roll was a good idea, but not good enough. We had lost 75 per cent of our aileron roll authority on the left wing, and I would not find out until one year later that the spoilers on the right wing rose whenever I moved the sidestick to the right to command a roll to the right. Our stall speed would increase every time the spoilers lifted, and this would be the last thing we needed if we were already flying with less than our normal margin to the stall.
I was happy with my speed control, but the flight warning computers were not. We were locked in a silent tension, when even the slightest change felt like a harbinger of our worst fears. As it happened, I found Harry’s concern worrying because I thought it was a sign that he probably didn’t trust the landing performance data either.
My mind flashed back to the China Airlines 747 overrunning Kai Tac airport exactly seventeen years earlier – this would not be my story! Passing about 2000 feet I looked up at the runway. It was a perfect surface with about 300 metres of overrun before a road and sand dune. If we ran off the runway, the 220-psi tyres would cut like a knife into the soft tropical soil just like my brother’s Ariel Red Hunter motorcycle at the Ponderosa and that would probably help us stop. I looked to the left and right of the runway to see what side would be preferable to put a wheel into the dirt and slow us faster if an overrun was imminent. But Runway Two-Zero Centre at Changi is a perfect Code ‘F’ runway – 60 metres wide, easily accommodating our 14 metre–wide wheel track. I decided I’d wait until I had landed, to determine which side of the runway was closest.
*
I tried to maintain 166 knots exactly but it’s difficult to read the speed as you’re flying (a good argument for a head-up-display), and as we passed 1000 feet the speed dropped one knot to 165. Immediately the flight warning computer broke the silence in the cockpit with ‘SPEED! SPEED!’ The autopilot disconnected, handing back control to me. I felt everyone stiffen and I touched the thrust on Engine 3, advancing it a bit, lifting the airspeed back over 166 knots. I had no idea why the autopilot was failing. There wasn’t time to diagnose, just to fly, so I ignored it and flew the aircraft manually for the remainder of the flight.
How on earth could we get a speed warning? I was flying at about 165 knots and our speed tape showed we were faster than the lowest speed that would guarantee a 19 per cent speed margin to the stall.
During my entire aviation career, the only time I ever heard the speed warning was in 2004 during a simulator exercise. I was shocked to hear it now.
At that moment I didn’t really care why it had sounded. I knew the aircraft was safe to fly at 166 knots – the control check had proved it. But it was not safe to fly at 165 knots. All I knew was that I was safe if I kept exactly at 166 knots, not any more, and certainly now not any less. I had to thread the eye of a needle.
Silence befell the cockpit again and I could sense the two senior pilots sitting behind me were just as confused as I was and just wanted me to stop mucking around with the speed and get us on the ground. But I wasn’t satisfied. Being two knots over 166 knots at landing would halve our surplus stopping distance, and being three knots over would take us off the end of the runway.
My attention was fully focused. My eyes rapidly flicked between the two most important variables: runway, speed, runway, speed, runway, speed.
‘Confirm the fire services on standby,’ Matt asked the control tower.
‘Affirm, we have the emergency services on standby,’ replied the tower controller.
‘Thank you.’
‘Welcome,’ replied the tower. The tower controller seemed normal, even jovial, but it was anything but normal. Their attitude would soon change.
QF32 had now passed from the watch of the Singapore approach controller to Tony Tang, the tower controller located in the eagle’s nest atop the 80 metre–high Singapore Tower. Tony later spoke of his curiosity after hearing relays of our calls requesting fire services to meet us at the end of the runway, and now he watched to see the plane come into view on its approach. And then the horrible reality appeared before him. The terrifying silhouette of our aircraft filled Tony’s binoculars and the cold reality of what we faced set in: ‘I could clearly see the QF32 on finals. Fuel was streaming from the wing. I have never seen that before in my twenty-six-year career.’ We were approaching 500 feet. I was head down and busy, while Matt was free to assess our approach path and make the final assessment whether we were safe to land. He quickly asked the tower what the surface wind was (170 degrees at 5 knots) while he watched the rate of descent (800 feet per minute), speed (166 knots), flight path (in the cone) and thrust (stable). It was Matt’s call that comprised the final decision. If he called ‘STABLE’, then I knew I had his blessing to continue and land. If he called ‘NOT STABLE’, the SOPs call for me to initiate a go around, I would have to – something I didn’t want to do considering the state of the plane.
Matt was cool – taking it all in.
‘STABLE!’
Phew!
This was followed almost immediately by ‘SPEED! SPEED!’ It was okay this time. My speed had dropped a knot, but a touch of thrust to Engine 3 fixed the problem. I almost felt fully in control. But if I slowed the aircraft too much more, the flight warning computers would escalate the speed warning to a stall warning.
We were on a knife edge as the runway loomed closer. Our weight and failures meant there was little we could do about our fast descent: 14 feet per second, well above the maximum certified 12 feet per second for the landing gear.
And even with such a high rate of descent, that huge bird was coming in with its nose held so high that it felt slow. We were committed, and as we descended, Matt counted down the altitude to himself while I lined up and tried to find a perfect attitude for the stricken plane. The runway’s painted landing zone – my ‘aiming point’ – loomed large. Matt called the wind velocity to me as we approached the airport perimeter. The flight warning computers cried ‘One hundred’ as the wheels passed 100 feet. The A380’s flight control computers slowly morphed our flight laws into a flare law, inhibiting the trim, locking the static stability and changing the elevators to direct law. Any dynamic compensation the
flight control computers had been making to account for an aft centre of gravity was locked now, and I was handed the tail-heavy aircraft in its most raw state.
At 14 feet per second, our rate of descent was too high not to flare. The paint of the runway markers filled our windscreen. As the computers called ‘FIFTY’, I pulled back slightly. ‘FORTY’. I pulled back more. ‘THIRTY’, ‘TWENTY’ – the nose was coming up. But as we rotated, that metallic voice squawked out into the cockpit: ‘STALL, STALL!’
CHAPTER 25
Round (Phase) 11
The stall warning filled all of us with disbelief. This was the first time I had ever heard a stall warning during a landing. I didn’t want to hear it now. The last control check I’d performed had provided a full dress rehearsal of the landing conditions, so I had been confident we were never going to approach the stall speed. Why were we hearing it now? There was no time to think about our condition, only time to act as the runway continued to fill the windscreen.
I was powerless to prevent the plane from crashing in a stall. It was a case of ‘Brace yourself, Nancy!’
Something was wrong with our performance – very wrong. But our flight control checks had proven our aircraft safe to fly and that was all that mattered. The speed and stall warnings were trying to tell us something that the performance and flight instruments could not, that we approached at a speed too slow to give us the regulatory margins to the stall. But if we had sped up three knots we probably would have run off the runway. The control checks saved the day.
The rapidly lifting nose during landing was creating another problem. The main landing gear trucks are mounted about 26 metres behind the pilots, well aft of the aircraft’s centre of gravity. So, as the nose lifts, the landing gear at the other end of the ‘see saw’ is thrust downwards. Now I was getting very close to runway impact, at a high rate of descent, with the stall warning blaring in my ears, and the landing gear also descending as the aircraft pitched perilously close to the ground. It was not an ideal situation, and there was only one thing to do to rescue the landing – a radical manoeuvre that has to be timed very carefully.
At a fraction of a second before I sensed the landing gear crashing down onto the runway – I pushed the side-stick full forward. This is not a trained technique as the risks of damaging the aircraft generally outweigh the benefits of the manoeuvre. And it’s not something I aim to do on any landing, but it’s a fix that works if timed accurately. As the nose lowered, the wheels behind the centre of gravity rose, and the aircraft’s rate of descent reduced as the plane settled onto a pillow of air trapped between it and the tarmac (a phenomenon pilots call Ground Effect). The fast descent rate washed off. Nancy-Bird cushioned onto the runway and we touched down at only two and a half feet per second. I was very pleased with the smooth touchdown made a short distance after passing the runway threshold.
Touchdown 11:46 am Singapore time.
It was a challenging landing, but I was pleased. I’d hit my aiming point, giving us the best chance of stopping short of the runway’s southern boundary. The flight data recorder shows we only took five seconds from 50 feet to touchdown, a fast transition, but a smooth one with no ‘float’. In fact we touched down two seconds earlier than the Airbus test pilots I was trying to mimic, so this gave us additional ground distance to stop.
The A380’s brakes were degraded from the explosion. Just like the fuel system, there were too many failures affecting the brake systems for my mind to absorb. So I had inverted my logic and reduced the braking system complexity to that of a car. I thought to myself, ‘After the main wheels touch down, I put the nose wheel down and then, and only then do I push hard on the brake pedals and leave them on until the aircraft stops. Not too early, only one application. That was understandable, that was easy!’
We only had half our thrust reversers to help us stop. The A380’s reverse thrust is only installed on Engines 2 and 3, and we’d lost Engine 2. So I selected full reverse thrust on Engine 3 and heard it roar, while feeling no discernible slowing of the aircraft. Taking a plane from 166 knots to standstill in 3900 metres is not a problem when everything is working together. Doing it when 41 tonnes overweight with only 64 per cent of your brakes and 50 per cent of spoilers and ailerons (which act as speed brakes) and reverse thrust was not fun. We had too much energy and not enough brakes. To put Nancy-Bird’s energy into perspective, my daughter Sophia, who spent a year in South Africa, tells me Nancy-Bird had the equivalent energy of 3800 stampeding male African elephants!
We were now on the ground but our problems were far from over: if I pumped the brakes, then our emergency brake accumulators would run out of pressure and the wing brakes would fail; if I applied them too early I’d blow the wing tyres. And with only 64 per cent of our total braking capability remaining, our landing distance was increased. The plane slowed, but not dramatically. I never really felt the brakes kick in.
Harry jumped in: ‘Max braking, Rich!’
Matt jumped in: ‘Brakes! Brakes! Give it full brakes, Rich!’
I replied: ‘I am!’
My feet were pushing the brake pedals hard flat against the floor. My back was being jammed back into the seat cushion. Matt didn’t believe me – the aircraft wasn’t slowing. There was just too much kinetic energy. Matt put his feet up on the brake pedals and discovered they were fully depressed hard to the floor. ‘There was nothing left,’ he would say later. There was lots of noise from the reverse thrust, but not much action. The first 1000 metres went past in a blur. I kept pushing the brake pedals hard against the floor.
Matt called out: ‘Keep it in, Rich. Hammer them!’
At the 2000-metre runway marker the plane finally started to slow to about 120 knots and I felt better. We were going to make it.
As we went past the 3000-metre mark I could see the end of the runway followed by a paddock, then the perimeter road and 300 metres of sand dunes to the ocean and the Singapore Strait. The green expanse seemed to fill my vision. I didn’t discover till later that I totally missed seeing a few fire trucks, to the left side, that we passed midway down the runway. They were positioned short in case we crashed and didn’t make it that far, but as we passed they took chase down the runway following us to our stop point. But I also knew my fear of overrunning the runway was just the adrenaline playing tricks. I was now confident we’d pull up short of the paddock, and I was looking for a large area with lots of concrete around us where the fire trucks and emergency rescue services could assemble and protect us.
As I switched Engine 3 out of reverse a rush of relief swept through the cockpit when we all realised we would be able to stop.
‘Beautiful,’ said Matt.
‘Fantastic,’ said Harry.
*
Michael von Reth was also relieved. As we slowed he jumped on the PA and, in his typically cool and unflappable dulcet tone, addressed the passengers: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Singapore. The local time is five minutes to midday on Thursday 4 November, and I think you’ll agree that was one of the nicest landings we have experienced for a while.’
It wasn’t an easy task for a man who’d spent the past half-hour briefing his crew on their responsibilities in case of an emergency landing and an evacuation. Michael was not relaxed, yet he projected a sense of calm, confidence and control that could only come from a long and distinguished career.
But our mutual self-gratification would be short-lived. As we slowed down through 80 knots the ECAM transitioned to flight phase 11, with the result that all the ECAM checklists that had been inhibited inflight now became enabled. The calm cockpit atmosphere was suddenly pierced again by the sounds of ever-more warnings bells and ECAM checklists.
‘Bing . . . bing . . . bing . . . bing . . .’ The emergency wasn’t over yet. Far from it. It was like a bushfire; just when you think you have it under control, the wind shifts and it all changes direction.
As we came to a halt, I looked out to the runway markers: we’d pulled up jus
t short of the 3900-metre mark. I switched the parking brake to ‘ON’, then keyed the public address pushbutton and called in a clear and deliberate voice: ‘Attention! All passengers remain seated and await further instructions!’
I commanded Matt to focus on the ECAM checklists. We had to make sure the plane was safe before we let the passengers disembark. Then I contacted the tower controller: ‘QF32, we have stopped now. Please advise fire services we have very hot brakes and fuel leaking from the left wing.’
My PA to the passengers may seem like a low-key announcement coming at the end of a harrowing journey, but it was just the beginning of yet another tense time for the 24 cabin crew. With those simple words, I was officially starting a formal ‘alert phase’, during which the cabin crew would prepare for a possible emergency evacuation down the escape slides.
Michael von Reth was worried. The holes in the wing that were above the fuel level in flight were now below the fuel level when the aircraft sat flat on its wheels. He looked outside to see fuel gushing even faster from about 70 holes in the wing. He knew there would be hot brakes and he knew the situation was extremely dangerous, and so he tried to contact me to tell me about these threats. He pulled out his interphone handset and pressed the ‘PRIO’ and ‘CAPT’ buttons to establish emergency communications with the flight deck. No one answered. Michael had lost communications with us again, but this time the situation outside the aircraft was dire.
Michael then turned his attention to keeping the passengers calm. Even though he couldn’t reach me, he made a PA to the passengers, announcing I’d be speaking to them soon, aware that at any time he would hear the piercing screech of the evacuation siren that signals the beginning of a dangerous passenger evacuation, when the task sharing ends and every cabin attendant becomes their own leader with the sole responsibility to evacuate their passengers out through their door and down the slides as rapidly as possible. Tensions were high, but no one panicked.
QF32 Page 20