But in addition to the horrific list of damages to the aircraft was my lingering memory of what had happened as we were about to touch the runway. The speed and stall warnings lurked in my imagination like a monster, and by the time we’d been on the ground 24 hours and I was readying to return to Sydney, I’d gone through the approach and landing a million times in my mind: the computers and flight instrument displays were wrong! They let us approach at too slow a speed, too close to the stall. This issue haunted me, and continued to haunt me for a number of months.
I knew I had to pull myself together and get some sleep as, prior to the accident, I had volunteered to help Qantas celebrate their 90th birthday in Sydney on Saturday 6 November (the next day) by talking about the A380 as guests watched our A380 take off for Los Angeles.
Having fielded calls from friends and media all Friday (nearly all the passengers protected my number and refused to give it to the media), I took the hotel bus to Changi to catch the QF6 night-flight into Sydney. I was given a comfortable seat on the 747–400, on the upper deck next to the right emergency exit door. I remember looking around me and seeing Matt Hicks to my left, and I believe Michael von Reth was behind me somewhere on the upper deck. We barely made eye contact with each other – we were spent.
We took off and I could feel the stress leaving my body as we climbed into the night sky. Then, at 2000 feet, there was a loud bang and a brief shake of the airframe. A flame shot out of a left engine for a few seconds: it was a compressor blade failure. The blade failure was not dangerous but the engine would have to be repaired. So we’d take an hour to dump fuel to get our landing weight within limits, then make our approach to land back to Changi. There’d be an hour sitting on the tarmac, and then we’d be taken back to the Fairmont Hotel.
I looked to my left, where Matt simply rolled his eyes, pulled his eye-shade down, reclined his seat and went to sleep. Somewhere in the plane I could hear a female yelling. My heart sank, not because of the yelling woman, but because I wouldn’t be going to the Qantas birthday party and I doubted the airline would be able to host a big birthday party just after two engine failures in two days. This was a PR disaster for the airline. We couldn’t win a trick and I felt so tragically sorry for everyone involved. I found out later that they de-rated the birthday party, cancelled the interviews, called off the press and shredded all the PR material. It was a washout.
It didn’t go very well on board QF6 either. In the back of the plane, a female cabin attendant had flipped out and started yelling, ‘Brace, brace!’ to the passengers after the engine failure. She shouldn’t have done it and no one else in the crew knew what she was doing, and sitting at the back of the Jumbo was a big group of Germans who had no idea what she was talking about. In these situations, one person makes the call and the other cabin crew repeat or relay the message down the plane. The other crew simply ignored her until a more senior person could get down the back and disarm the situation.
After the passengers had left the plane at the terminal, I joined the cabin crew from QF32 on the lower deck. Many of my crew were already in a stressed state when they boarded the QF6, but then they had been sitting in the back, spread out around the cabin among the confused Germans, and they were either upset with the incident or angry with the attendant who had freaked out. One of our passengering QF32 crew members was crying, so I sat and held her hand and had a chat with her. Another male attendant was not responding to conversation – the whole thing had made him shut down. We were all affected one way or another; some were depressed, all of us were exhausted. Unless you have experienced it, you just can’t appreciate the different ways people respond to severe stress. I could sense rapid mental deterioration from many of them. Michael could sense it too and he told me that his crew weren’t flying anywhere until they’d had some professional psychological help. That was a great call.
Michael – who was staying at the adjoining Stamford – called Qantas and demanded that the crew spend an extra day in Singapore and be given access to a psychologist specialising in trauma. Qantas was fantastic. They had already dispatched a team from Sydney to assist the crew, and that help was gratefully received. I asked to stay behind in Singapore and support the cabin crew, but I was ordered to fly back to Sydney on the next plane. So that’s what I did. As I dragged myself onto the flight that Saturday morning, I felt I was abandoning my crew – I felt absolutely deflated.
*
I have never been in the public eye. I had no idea how to handle journalists and I really didn’t understand the extent of emotion that would be around after the QF32 incident. Even before I flew back to Sydney, Singaporeans who had seen me in the newspaper and on TV would point at me in the street. I had no idea how to respond to that since I saw myself as a person just doing his job.
I sent Coral an SMS message at 8.46 am on 6 November. It read: ‘Looking forward to coming home. As per normal coming home checklist, please have mattress strapped on back!’
Coral replied to my SMS at 9.03 am: ‘Acknowledge normal coming home checklist: mattress strapped on back. Please ensure you are the first person through the door!’
By the time I flew in to Sydney on 6 November (on another flight named QF32), Coral had been fielding calls from journalists and they’d camped outside our house – this at a time when she’d been half-crazy with worry. She’d had a tip-off from a friend at a newspaper that the photographers knew I was coming in on QF32, as when I’d been checking in at Changi a photographer had walked up close to me and started taking photos – one right in my face, which made me wince with the flash.
Coral rang Qantas and warned them that I was going to be ambushed, and, with all the media already around the house, had said she wanted me protected. They didn’t believe her but she argued strongly, and so when I arrived, Qantas security escorted me out the consular exit and into a car. I’d flown with Qantas for 25 years and finally I got to see how the diplomats and politicians arrive and depart Sydney Airport without being seen by the media. They drove me along airside roads to the Qantas building where Coral, Dad, Mariea, Alex and Sophia, and our good friends, the Ford family, were waiting for me.
Coral was very happy to see me. As the wife of a pilot she lives in dread that something like QF32 will happen, and now she’d had to deal with me on two failed-engine flights, two days in a row.
I knew from Singapore there was some interest in me because of the flight, but nothing like the scrum that had apparently assembled at Sydney Airport and around our house. I was not feeling well and I didn’t want to feel trapped in my house, nor did I want my family becoming stressed. So we took refuge with our best friends Julie and Simon Ford, and their daughters (Alexandra, Erin, Kirsten and India) for four nights until our neighbours reported the coast was clear.
We had a great low-key evening with friends; a few wines and a bit of a chat. But when I rose in the morning, I sprinted for the toilet and threw up. It was a post-stress reaction, and I knew that it was something that would happen for a couple of days as the cortisol slowly left my system and my sugar (energy) levels subsequently plummeted.
But the day got worse by the hour, ebbing to a terrible low. I had no energy and no optimism, and there was a wretchedness hanging over everything. I wanted to get my thoughts on the record, so I recorded a conversation with a journalist friend about the flight. It didn’t help.
I thought rest and the presence of my family would be enough, but when Monday morning came around the stress of the situation had taken its toll. During the flight, and in the terminal and then at the hotel, I was concerned about either the passengers or the crew or both. Even on the aborted QF6 flight on the Friday night I’d been settling into deep relaxation when the engine surge forced me back into the role of worrying about everyone else’s welfare. And then, on the Saturday morning flight into Sydney, I’d been concerned about Coral.
By Monday I was starting to take some interest in my own welfare. I felt deflated, exhausted and unable to concent
rate. I was kidding myself that this was an extended adrenaline–cortisol come-down, but it was more than that – I could feel it.
My mind was running in a two-hour continuous loop, replaying that flight. I couldn’t stop the loop. It was debilitating.
Dad and Mariea were also staying at Simon’s, which was great because, Dad being a pilot, I could discuss things with him.
*
I realised that I was too stressed to fly. With deep regret I picked up the phone and rang fleet manager Murray Crockett. I was due to make a delivery of the latest A380 from Airbus headquarters in Toulouse, France, in three weeks’ time. It was a privilege I’d been extended because of the handling of the delayed QF32 flight at Heathrow on 7 July 2010. I really, really wanted to make that delivery flight. However, I told Murray I wasn’t in a suitable state and he told me to take it easy.
I was on a roller coaster: manic about details and research one minute, and then completely mentally exhausted the next. I realised the severity of my unpredictable emotional state the next day, on the Tuesday, when I went to the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB). They’d planned to interview me for only one hour, but when they started off by asking, ‘Richard, tell us what happened after you arrived at the counter to check out of the hotel that Thursday,’ my answer to that simple question took over four hours.
Experience shows us that there is a need for post-crisis management (PCM) for every person who experiences a crisis or traumatic stress. Good PCM identifies the symptoms and acknowledges the human after-effects from a significant event, deals with them and ensures that the sufferer is fully supported and assisted along their journey back to full health. PCM prevents emotional ‘broken wings’.
Those who are fortunate to never experience a crisis usually underestimate the significance and duration of the effects to the victims. Some critics volunteer that those who suffer stress after an incident should simply toughen up. Most people do not realise that even for people who do not show overt symptoms of stress, these symptoms exist but are masked or submerged only to resurface up to decades later with severe consequences.
Here is my PCM story.
My recollection of events at the ATSB enquiry was fine and controlled until I recounted the episode twelve minutes after the engine failure, when I had asked to turn back to Singapore and got clearance to climb to 10,000 feet. As I approached this element of the story, I lost composure and cried for about fifteen seconds. I was shocked at my response. I didn’t know why I was crying, it had totally ambushed me. I was choked up, unable to continue, needing a minute to gather myself before I could resume the conversation. This was the first time I had cried since my mother died 37 years prior, when I was seventeen and in my final year at school. So I was unprepared for my emotional response with the investigators and confused when it happened.
This emotional unpredictability wasn’t a one off. Immediately after the ATSB interview, I visited the Qantas Crisis Centre to meet and thank the staff who had assisted us during the crisis. During my address to the twenty support staff, just as my discussion turned to describing the inbound path, I broke down and I had to leave the building. I soon discovered that every time I recalled that specific part of the flight I would choke up and cry. I found it very confusing and I was worried why I was reacting so unusually.
I was embarrassed about it to start with. I worried that someone at the ATSB or Qantas might think I had gone nuts, report me, ground me and finish my career; I worried about what people would think of me and I worried that I was losing my mind.
I’d always seen myself as an alpha male – a sportsman, motorcyclist, military man, pilot, father and husband, someone with ‘the right stuff’. Now I didn’t know where to put myself, and in my panic I decided not to confide in Coral.
It was a mistake.
Steve Anderson, the Welfare Officer at AIPA (the pilots’ union), recommended I contact a psychologist who deals with pilots and with trauma and stress-related disorders.
The psychologist helped me understand that when I broke down and cried that I was returning to the point in my memory when my emotions had been overwhelmed. He told me it was natural and the best solution was to accept my reaction, and that its effect would gradually reduce.
Over the next month I found myself revisiting the sensitive spot in my memory and reacting. But the reaction diminished, and soon I wasn’t crying any more. However, the entire episode was still ‘looping’ endlessly in my mind.
I remember driving with Coral from Sydney to Dungog and back in one day, a three–hour journey each way. For the entire time my mind was in a furious, intense replay of the two-hour loop of the QF32 flight. For those six hours in the car alone with Coral, I spoke to her only once, and then it was briefly. Coral was frustrated but knew she had no power to get me out of this loop. She was very worried for me.
I heard ‘SPEED, SPEED’ and ‘STALL, STALL’ warnings on the approach – warnings that should not have triggered, warnings that indicated to me that there were errors with our performance data and flight instrument presentations. I was worried that news of these warnings would be released to the media and would cause additional concern in what was an already very delicate situation.
Confused and exhausted, I finally told the psychologist about the loop. With his help and advice, I eventually managed to extract myself from the loop. Today I consider myself healed psychologically. I think it took two months; Coral thinks it took five.
I volunteer my experiences and I share them happily so that readers might learn from them and seek professional help if they find themselves in a situation similar to mine: it’s called post-traumatic stress. It’s real and there is a way to fix it.
CHAPTER 29
Stub Pipe
The Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) is planning to release its final Transport Safety Report into QF32 towards the end of 2012. It will be the ATSB’s largest investigation, involving up to half of the ATSB’s investigators and many teams from the United Kingdom and France. I think I know the sequence of events that led to the engine failing and exploding.
In June 2011, I heard from other pilots that Airbus had simulated our loss of systems.
‘What happened?’ I asked, wondering how you simulate cutting and shorting almost 600 wires and damaging most systems.
‘They couldn’t simulate your wiring failure,’ said the pilot. ‘But they simulated the flight and said there were no problems controlling the aircraft.’
I thought this was a joke when I first heard it: if you can’t simulate the damaged wiring and the damaged wing, then how can you simulate the flight?
I was told that the Airbus test pilots thought that there was plenty of stall and manoeuvring margin during the approach and that I’d got it wrong and overreacted.
I don’t think so. After landing, Matt Hicks approached me and said: ‘Rich, during the last control check, I felt the aircraft shuddering when we rolled left and right. Should I have told you that?’ I told him it would have been useful, because I would have increased our approach speed and tried another control check. But there was a practical limit to increasing our speed because, with only 100 metres of surplus runway remaining, we would have only been able to speed up by up to three knots before we faced an overrun situation.
The ATSB employed four people for a one-year period, dedicated to uncompressing then decoding and analysing the gigabytes of data from QF32’s computers. I believe that we dealt with about 100 ECAM checklists in the air and another twenty on the ground. Whatever the true number of ECAMs really is, I’m sure it’s a world’s record and one that is unlikely to ever be attempted again let alone broken.
The final ATSB report will detail the exact technical causes of the QF32 engine failure, and it’s guaranteed to be a fantastic read with many surprising revelations, but it’s not bedside reading for most of us. So here is my perspective.
*
But firstly, some background about the engines. The Rol
ls-Royce RB211 engine was originally developed in the late 1960s and was immortalised by powering Boeing 747s since 1973 as well as 757 and 767 aircraft. The Rolls-Royce Trent engine is derived from the RB211 design. Five versions of the Trent engines power aircraft such as the Boeing 777, 787 and the Airbus A330, A340 and A380 aircraft. The new Trent XWB will power the Airbus A350.
The Rolls-Royce Trent 900 engine was designed for the A380. The Trent 900 has over 34,000 parts made from one-third of the elements in the periodic table. Four thousand air foils in the engine enable an astounding compression ratio of 39:1. Each engine weighs 6.4 tonnes and costs US$18.5 million; that’s over two times its weight in silver. Compared to the earlier RB211 engines, the Trent 900 produces half the noise for 60 per cent more thrust, with 23 per cent more fuel efficiency.
The RB211’s three-spool design provides performance benefits, but it also presents engineering challenges. One issue is that the rear bearings for two of the spools must be located near the hottest part of the engine. This Achilles heel would play a part in our engine failure.
An oil-feed pipe supplies lubricating and cooling oil to a bearing support in the turbine section of the engine. This pipe enters the engine from outside the core, just forward of the intermediate turbine disc. The pipe extends radially towards the centre of the engine, where it connects to the bearing housing via a short ‘stub’ pipe. Here was our problem. Through a manufacturing fault, the installed stub pipe was found to be out of tolerance.
Here is my best guess on the events that led to the failure: it appears that the stub pipe fractured three minutes after take-off, or one minute before the engine failed, as we climbed through 5000 feet. When the stub pipe fractured, oil under pressure sprayed into an air cavity that was ventilated by ‘cooling’ air (coming from the high-pressure compressor) at about 800 degrees Celsius. The leaking oil immediately ignited and a flame of approximately 2600 degrees Celsius surrounded about half of the turbine disc, overheating and weakening it. The oil fire might also have overheated the bearing housing. For the one-minute period while the symptoms of the oil leak became apparent, the oil temperature (of all the oil returning to the oil reservoir) started to increase and the oil pressure started to decrease, though these changes were insufficient to trigger any warning or reports to the pilots or to the flight recorders.
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