QF32
Page 23
Nancy-Bird had died a few months after that ceremony, and now, two years later, here was her plane, deciding also to stay alive until she had returned 469 souls to safety. I’m not a religious person, but if Nancy was watching us from afar I am sure she would have been so very proud of how her aircraft performed and to have her name emblazoned on that wonderful machine.
It was an eerie and silent fifteen-minute drive to the terminal. It was the first silence I had experienced in the last four remarkable hours. My phone beeped. My daughter Sophia had texted me: ‘Just heard what happened. U OK?’
I replied: ‘Fine Soph, but busy. Luv U.’
She came back: ‘Love U 2.’
I then called Dad. My ‘wicked stepmother’ answered. ‘I think I’ve wrecked an A380, Mariea!’ I said. She replied, ‘I think they will understand’. I then hung up.
I needed time to reflect on what I was about to tell the passengers.
At the end of the fifteen-minute drive I was dropped at bay Charlie 32 (C32), the gate we’d departed from more than four hours earlier. My first stop was the main lounge where the Economy and Premium Economy passengers were assembled, all wide-eyed and waiting. I walked to the counter, grabbed the PA and started talking. I knew what I was about to say would probably be uploaded to YouTube within 30 minutes, and so I spoke carefully, explaining what had happened, why it had happened and what was about to happen to the passengers. I could see Ulf Waschbusch, the passenger from seat 55A, holding up his mobile phone, still recording every word.
The passengers had de-planed on the right side of the aircraft, so they hadn’t seen the terrible damage to the plane, even though I would later learn that so many of them had seen the explosion, the fireball and the debris flying out of the engine while inflight. So I kept things simple, explaining about the failed Engine 2, the holes in the wing, the fuel leaks, and Engine 1 that would not shut down after we landed. I spoke about the engine and the degraded systems, and explained how wonderfully the aircraft performed. As I spoke, someone pointed up at a TV screen where CNN was broadcasting a Qantas press conference at which Alan Joyce, our CEO, announced that Qantas had grounded all its A380s. This was the first word I’d heard from Sydney, and it confirmed my confidence that the Crisis Centre had convened early and was looking after the interests of my passengers. There was a hubbub among the passengers, who were all starting to ask, since the A380s were grounded, how they would get back to Australia. I said to relax, and told them that, at that very moment, there were a thousand people running around organising their accommodation, meals and transport. They liked that.
But there was a growing sense of tension in the air. The passengers didn’t seem so fussed about the flight, but suddenly realised all the attention on CNN meant they had to inform their friends and relatives back home that they were safe. People’s phones began ringing and the tension was mounting as they spoke to people who thought they had died. I could see the passengers’ perceptions were beginning to change and the incident was starting to seem worse. Also, there was every chance the media would spin the details of our flight into such a feeding frenzy that the passengers’ stress would be elevated hours after the event, when everyone had adjourned to their hotel rooms. I felt the only way to counter this escalation was to provide full and open disclosure, and to offer the passengers some sort of personal guarantee to ensure I could follow up later and provide assistance if required.
So I spent fifty minutes debriefing the passengers, describing what had happened and answering their questions. I explained that jet engines only fail about once in every 300,000 hours, so that everyone should feel comforted, having experienced this engine failure, that statistically they should never see another engine failure.
I didn’t tell them this was my fourth engine failure.
One passenger asked me why we hadn’t evacuated the aircraft. I answered, ‘The decision not to evacuate was mine, and I based it on the simple notion of where you would be safest. Are you safest hurting yourself during an evacuation, or are you better off inside a stable cabin with experienced cabin crew looking after you. I continually re-evaluated this decision. After fifteen minutes, when the brakes were cool and the fuel covered in foam, I think you were absolutely safer inside the aircraft than outside. With the benefit of hindsight I think I made the right decisions.’
Up until this point, I was the captain in charge of the flight and responsible for the passengers’ welfare. But now I was passing the passengers over to an unknown group of Qantas and Singapore staff, and I was unsure if the Qantas standards could be maintained. So I then said something very unusual: ‘Qantas is not going to like this – but I want you all to grab a pen and be ready for information that I give you. Qantas is a value-added airline, we are not a no-frills airline. You paid more to fly with us than you would have for a no-frills airline, and although I have not delivered a good service to you today, I want to make amends. So here is my personal guarantee. If you don’t agree with how Qantas is treating you or if you think Qantas doesn’t care, then call me on this number.’ And then I recited my mobile number several times.
I was well aware that the passengers, and in fact the media, had no idea just how severe the incident was and how many systems had failed. But I did know the media would have amassed outside the terminal and would try to paint the passengers into a position where they would think that they might have died. I told the passengers that they now knew more about the incident than the press, and that they could tell the press exactly what had happened because I had just given them an accurate account.
‘Don’t let the press suggest we were on fire – we were not,’ I said. ‘Don’t let the press suggest the crew were scared, because we weren’t. We were busy, but we were never scared.’
A US Embassy official in Singapore cornered me, wanting to know if there were US nationals on board. I didn’t know, so I used my mobile phone to call Sydney Crisis Centre, and Captain Peter Probert told me he’d call the embassy official and take it from there. Finally, a passenger thanked me for my efforts. I replied that many teams had worked brilliantly to bring them home, so although I refused to accept their thanks personally, I would be proud to accept thanks on behalf of all the pilots, cabin crew, air traffic controllers, police and firefighters who had worked so effectively.
Finally, after 50 minutes of debriefing, I found myself standing alone in the centre of the room surrounded by 300 passengers who were all happy, smiling and talking to each other. There were no more questions.
By this time the cabin crew had started to arrive at the terminal, so I took the opportunity to start to debrief them, telling them I thought they’d done a fantastic job. When you have a crisis in the air, the pilots have to grapple with machines and the laws of physics; the cabin crew have to deal with hundreds of people, all of them responding differently and unpredictably to the danger. After a ten-minute crew debrief it was time to debrief the 62 Business Class and fourteen First Class passengers in their respective lounges.
The adrenaline was wearing off and I was starting to feel fatigued. I had to contact the Crisis Centre over the phone, so I asked Matt and Harry to debrief the Business Class passengers. Mark and I then went to the First Class Lounge, spending another 45 minutes answering every question until Mark and I found ourselves again standing like totem-poles alone in the centre of the room.
The decision to hand out my phone number to passengers wasn’t unprecedented – I’d done it four months earlier on 7 July 2010 when QF32 from London to Singapore had been delayed overnight. I had felt so bad about the way it had gone that I announced my phone number to the passengers and asked them to call me if they were not happy with the way Qantas was treating them or if they thought we didn’t care. I travel with my own kids a lot and I knew the disruptions that are caused when there are delays and long periods of sitting in stationary aircraft. I thought it was the least I could do. In response, many passengers sent positive emails and letters to Qantas’s Hea
d Office, and the flight crew and cabin crew of that 7 July flight would be honoured with the 2010 Qantas eXcel Service Award. So I knew that giving full and open disclosure generates trust in the minds of the passengers. Everyone feels vulnerable in these situations; they just want to be given the truth and be treated with respect.
After the debrief, we were ushered by airport management and Qantas crisis managers through immigration and then into a side alleyway used for consular and VIP passengers. The media were prepared for us, lined up along the 30 metres of paparazzi barriers that bordered the concrete walkway to where our bus was waiting. I estimate there were 200 media people there, pushing so hard on the barriers that we had to walk single file. The flash guns went off, the cameras clicked and the reporters yelled questions at us as we walked that gauntlet.
I don’t remember the bus ride back to the Fairmont Hotel. There was little chat, just lots of exhausted people lost in thought, recounting the event in their minds. Coral’s phone recorded me sending her a text at 5:49 pm: ‘In bus to hotel.’ She was keen to talk to me but knew I was distracted so left me alone. She replied: ‘Let me know what room you’re in and I’ll call you.’
I was proud of the care we provided to the passengers that day. We provided continuous communications, with full, open and honest disclosure, hiding nothing, answering all questions, and providing phone numbers for a personal guarantee. We also empowered the passengers to meet the media throngs outside. The proof was in the pictures that quickly circled the globe. When the passengers departed the airport for the hotels, their smiles conveyed the happiness and gratitude they felt for Qantas that day – our passengers had become Qantas devotees, and every Qantas employee is grateful for their understanding in tough circumstances.
Our passengers had smiles on their faces because all their questions had been answered, and they had my personal guarantee that Qantas would care for them. I am not aware of images of any passengers crying or in distress as they left the terminal. The press looked for criticism of Qantas, but the passengers refused to play along, only offering praise. I could not have asked for a better outcome. It’s a privilege to be part of such a wonderful mega-team.
CHAPTER 28
Deja Vu
A police guard protected our path from the waiting press into the Fairmont Hotel. I asked the hotel manager to cordon off a section of the main bar and close the curtains so the cabin and technical crews could talk privately among themselves after the day’s events. I also asked if hotel security could be posted around the bar to block the media.
Michael von Reth had already received authorisation from Qantas to spend $400 at the bar, and he began to take orders. I received the following SMS message from Captain Murray Crockett, the A380 fleet manager:
Richard, please pass on my sincere thanks to all of the crew on a job well done. All of you appear to have handled a very serious event in the best tradition of Qantas pilots. Please buy a celebratory drink for everyone on me. Look forward to hearing the details on your return. Best regards, Murray.
Murray was on holidays and so, like most other people in Australia, I didn’t think he knew all the things that had gone wrong on our flight.
I approached Michael at the bar and said: ‘Murray has just given me permission to buy a drink for everyone. Bugger that – these people need to de-stress!’ I told Michael to put the $400 back in his pocket and said to the barman it was my shout. ‘Give all the crew whatever they want for as long as they want it. And please bring lots of plates of snacks!’
The 29 of us were in the bar until midnight, debriefing each other while the enormous wall-mounted TV shared continuous surreal coverage of our flight, with amazing graphics re-enacting the explosions and images of our aircraft rolling around. My bar bill was just over $4000 that night; money well spent to help everyone unwind. These people had done a remarkable job under incredible stress for the passengers and Qantas, and they deserved to have a couple of drinks without having to reach into their own pockets.
By 10.28 pm I was conscious Coral was still keen to contact me, so I texted her: ‘I’m still in the bar getting the crew relaxed. I’ll call when I get to the room.’
I went to my room at about midnight. It was the same room I had had the night before. I called Coral and spoke to her for two hours, and then I tried to go to sleep, but (cortisol) energy was still coursing through my body, keeping me awake. I was very concerned about the whole incident: Did I carry out every activity correctly? Were the passengers okay? Did I embarrass Qantas? Was there something else I should have done? Who should I have called?
I knew I had to sleep, but my mind was racing and I couldn’t relax. I am not sure how much sleep I got that night, but I was certainly not rested in the morning. I was tired, I had no clean clothes or toiletries (my suitcase didn’t arrive until 6 pm the following night) and I felt dirty.
I’d arranged with the four other pilots to meet for breakfast and go over things. As I was making my way to the restaurant at 8.30 am I received a call from Peter Wilson, the chief pilot at Qantas. Peter congratulated us on handling a very challenging event, but he was also concerned about our wellbeing. He’d seen the data feeds from QF32, and he told me we’d processed 58 checklists from the ECAM and that we had handled the complex incident very well. But I think many more checklists and alerts that we actioned were not logged by the aircraft data systems, and that we had cancelled the master warning bell about 100 times in flight and about twenty times on the ground. It was possible our ECAM checklist tally was in fact closer to 120. However, I appreciated Peter’s comments and his praise for the crew, for it was an extraordinary team effort.
The phone call only took about two minutes, and in retrospect he was probably probing my mental state and deciding whether I was in a fit mood to take a call from Alan Joyce, Qantas’s CEO. Sure enough, two minutes later Alan Joyce rang, congratulating me and the crew, and saying that Qantas was proud of the team effort.
I went out and bought a phone charger and some toiletries, and I had slightly shaking hands as I shaved back in my room. I was starting to experience the memories of the flight with unnerving clarity in a sort of video loop.
I was still in one piece and so was everyone on that flight, but I was finding it hard to process all the information: the wing damage, the landing gear damage, an engine explosion, two speed warnings below 500 feet and a stall warning as we flared for landing. A stall warning, how could we ever have got close to the stall! And then, as we’d sat on the runway, we’d watched, horrified, as 3 tonnes of jet fuel had poured out of the holes in the wings and around a set of wheels that was at least 1000 degrees Celsius, and the aircraft electrics, radios and systems collapsed.
I should have felt elated: I was the captain on a severely damaged aircraft with 469 people on board, and I’d brought it down without a single injury – not even a broken toenail. But I felt overwhelmed, exhausted and melancholic. And beyond the stress was confusion about what had happened: it couldn’t really have happened, could it?
It was dawning on me that QF32 might be talked about as a ‘black swan’ event – an unforecast event that has significant consequences. I decided to write down what we’d dealt with on that flight. The list went something like this:
Engines: Engine 1 degraded, would not shut down on ground; Engine 2 failed; Engine 3 alternate mode; Engine 4 degraded. One less thrust reverser for landing; runaway Engine 1 on ground (two shutdown systems faulted); Engine 2 failed then fire warning; no over-thrust protection on Engines 1 and 4. Three out of four fire extinguishers inoperative on left wing.
Hydraulics: 25 per cent pumps operating – GREEN system failed, and YELLOW system operating on two of four pumps.
Electrics: two generators failed in flight; 50 per cent AC buses failed in flight; 1 per cent emergency services available on ground; ram air turbine failure.
APU: pneumatics and electrics failed.
Flight controls: operating program degraded to alternate law; 60 p
er cent less lift devices (slats, ailerons); 64 per cent roll control lost; wing damage – about 10 per cent lift lost; 50 per cent spoilers lost. Spoilers reducing stall margin.
Landing gear: half computers failed; reduced sensors; gravity extension; no retraction available.
Brakes: auto-brakes failed; anti-skid failed; wing gear on emergency accumulator only; 64 per cent braking.
Fuel: a mess. Two lateral imbalances; one longitudinal imbalance; six fuel pumps failed; no transfer; no jettison; more than fourteen fuel leaks; eight out of eleven tanks unuseable; both fuel computers failed.
Weight: centre of gravity well aft for landing; 42 tonnes over maximum landing weight.
Flight instruments: probe heating failed; air data computer failed; incorrect minimum speed calculations and pilots’ displays; speed and stall warnings activated.
Auto-flight: auto-thrust failed; no auto-land capability; autopilot disconnected many times.
Pneumatics: 50 per cent failed (leaks isolated). APU backup pneumatics failed.
Avionics: both Ground Proximity Warning Systems failed; system overheat. On ground: six out of seven radios failed; nine out of ten screens failed.
Cabin: multiple lighting failures; indication failures; management computer failures.
Performance application: incorrect stall speed calculations, incorrect speed margins; incorrect approach speed.
Airframe: greater than 70 penetrations under wing; seven penetrations on top of wing; about 500 impacts on fuselage.
All up, there were at least 130 minor faults logged and about 120 master caution alarms (perhaps checklists) spread over two hours.