This brand spanking new Airbus 340-600, the largest passenger airplane ever built, sits just outside its hangar in Toulouse , France without a single hour of airtime.
Enter the Arab flight crew of Abu Dhabi Aircraft Technologies (ADAT) to conduct pre-delivery tests on the ground, such as engine run-ups prior to delivery to Etihad Airways in Abu Dhabi . The ADAT crew taxied the A340-600 to the run-up area.
Then they took all four engines to takeoff power with a virtually empty aircraft. Not having read the run-up manuals, they had no clue just how light an empty A340-600 really is.
The takeoff warning horn was blaring away in the cockpit because they had all 4 engines at full power. The aircraft computers thought they were trying to take off, but it had not been configured properly (flaps/slats, etc)
Then one of the ADAT crew decided to pull the circuit breaker on the Ground Proximity Sensor to silence the alarm. This fools the aircraft into thinking it is in the air.
The computers automatically released all the brakes and set the aircraft rocketing forward.
The ADAT crew had no idea that this is a safety feature so that pilots can't land with the brakes on.
Not one member of the seven-man Arab crew was smart enough to throttle back the engines from their max power setting, so the $200 million brand-new aircraft crashed into a blast barrier, totaling it.
The extent of injuries to the crew is unknown due to the news blackout in the major media in France and elsewhere.
Finally, the photos are starting to leak out.
Airbus $200 million aircraft meets retaining wall and the wall wins
No wonder they still ride camels
I thought that you guys might like this.......
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Never knock on deaths door... Ring the doorbell and run away, death really hates that!
Edited: Sun October 11, 2009 at 4:22 PM by Karl Hofmann
Had a similar computer type error yesterday helping my son purge his sprinkler system for the winter using air pressure. Accidentally or maybe even intentionally hit the wrong button on this computerized controller. My son got all wet. No injuries reported that were worse than that.
Sounds like Airbus should add:
Are you sure?
Are you really sure?
Are you damn sure?
Edited: Sun October 11, 2009 at 6:30 PM by NickD
Someone should have talked with them!
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Could be the pilots spoke Arabic and that was explained to them in French.
Hooray!
One more glued together phrench aircraft that will not fly again. Saves us fishing it out of the sea.
Brilliant. A single point failure like a popped breaker can disable the brakes? Sheesh. A popped breaker on approach with a cabin full of people could be far worse.
They better hire some of the laid off detroit engineers...
B.
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"Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the act of depriving a whole nation of arms, as the blackest."
~ Mahatma Gandhi, Gandhi, An Autobiography, M. K. Gandhi, page 446.
Wheel chocks might have been a good idea here. I don't know that much about airplanes but I know that at the airport you'll get yelled at a lot for not using wheel chocks at every possible opportunity.
I was thinking that brake interlock was a terrible idea too but maybe it just prevents the parking brake from being applied unless the plane is already landed and sitting still. No reason for the brake pedals to not work all the time. Clearly if no one touched the throttle they wouldn't have bothered to try the brake pedal either.
You must have a pretty good "news blackout" over there Karl, as this incident occurred November 15, 2007 and is hardly a secret. It is interesting though to see how many different versions of the story came out in the early days afterward, suggesting there was a serious effort to cover it up.
According to the official French investigation, these are the "facts." Which may still be all lies.
* The person in the co-pilot's seat was an Airbus employee. The "pilot" was from ADAT.
* The test procedure called for testing only one engine at a time at full throttle, the corresponding one on the other side being at part throttle to keep from torquing the plane too badly, and the other two at idle. This procedure was not followed, though there was about an hour of uneventful testing in place before the crash. Perhaps this testing was completed and then someone said "wouldn't it be fun to run up all 4 at once"...
* Wheel chocks were not in place, another violation of procedure.
* Brakes were applied the whole time. The parking brake acts on only 2 of the 3 groups of wheels under the plane. The combined thrust from all 4 engines at full throttle is sufficient to overcome the parking brake, especially considering the plane was empty so the wheels had less traction. As that happened, the plane began to move forward slowly, which was immediately noticed in the cockpit. Very soon after the plane started to move, both "pilots" fully engaged the foot brakes, braking all the wheels instead of just the outer ones. But even though the hydraulic pressure in all brakes reached rated maximum, the plane continued to gain speed over the ground. Impact with the wall happened 11 seconds later at about 55 km/hr.
* The A340 has a system which reduces braking force on the center wheels when the nose wheel is turned sharply. Someone did turn the nose wheel sharply hoping to avoid collision, causing the brakes to lose effect.
* No one reduced the throttle until about 2 seconds before impact, or 9 seconds after the plane started to move. This was the final critical mistake (which might have recovered from the other critical mistakes of running all 4 engines to full power at once, and not using wheel chocks).
* Etihad Airways had not taken delivery of the new plane at the time, so the cost of the loss was borne by Airbus.
* Five of the 9 people on board were injured. No one was killed.
And it can happen here. January 23 of this year, a new Bombardier 5000 business jet had a similar runaway in Wichita Kansas. There were no injuries and damage was minor because the "wall" was basically just a tin fence.
Edited: Mon October 12, 2009 at 5:13 PM by mk378
Ha!.... Well the French never told me!.... But then again they don't like me much
Bohica, Perhaps those laid off engineers would be better employed assembling the Hummer assembly line in China...
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Never knock on deaths door... Ring the doorbell and run away, death really hates that!
Karl:
The brakes on the hummer work regardless of throttle setting or steering input. The engineers did the job already, and even the chinks will be able to make that product. It will still be a better product than anything that ever came from Leyland, Morris, or Rootes.
B.
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"Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the act of depriving a whole nation of arms, as the blackest."
~ Mahatma Gandhi, Gandhi, An Autobiography, M. K. Gandhi, page 446.
Brakes on the huge airliners are incidental anyway, depend practically on reverse thrusting to stop the darn things, certainly never want to land dead stick. From what mk378 said, sounds like the pilots were idiots, why didn't they instantly back off on the throttles the instant the plane started to roll? Typically, vehicle brakes are far more powerful than the engine, maybe these guys thought they were driving a car. Who knows what they were thinking if even thinking.
Bohica,
Leyland, Rootes and all the others died because they made crap cars that no one wanted to drive... GM in the US do the same, it is only a matter of time... The brakes on American vehicles are regarded as barely adequate even by those who love them... All your engineers had to do was to copy what our engineers invented..
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Never knock on deaths door... Ring the doorbell and run away, death really hates that!
Yep, sure hope we don't copy this trend. With Nobel Peace Prize winner Obama at the reigns it's probably another leftist Euro idea he will follow.
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Tim, How is selling government owned assets Leftist? Surly it is better for these things to be in private hands to make them more competitive... On the other hand, pouring cash into wall street and your car manufacturers who otherwise would have crashed and burned because they didn't perform really is the pinacle of capitalism, isn't it?
We tried it in the seventies with British Leyland and it just doesn't work....
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Never knock on deaths door... Ring the doorbell and run away, death really hates that!
Edited: Tue October 13, 2009 at 2:04 PM by Karl Hofmann
Trust me Karl I think these bail outs are ridiculous. I also think selling off one's assets to a foreign country is a leftist move.
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The bailouts are a two edged sword... by bailing them out you keep folk in work so that you aren't paying out welfare but you are keeping manufacturing dinosaurs alive on borrowed time.. Much as folk here hate Maggy Thatcher, she saw this and killed off anything that couldn't support itself by selling them off to private investors so that they could either sink or swim.. But if you don't have manufacturing you have to rely on the financial industry to keep the country afloat... Unfortunately love them or loath them you are stuck with them until it becomes financially viable to manufacture in the first world again..
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Never knock on deaths door... Ring the doorbell and run away, death really hates that!
Not everybody can make money with money, somebody has to work and unfortunately the labor is much cheaper overseas. A lot of our inner cities are looking just like China where several dozen people all share a tiny apartment. Wouldn't be so bad if the cost of living was equal across the globe, it's high here, mostly with taxation, but then we have the more powerful military to support as well.
Global is the dirty word, both with climate and markets, maybe this is good as far as the world is concerned, but a lot of us have to give up some of the things we have grown accustomed to like a home in the country with a white picket fence, can't afford the gas to drive out to it.
A good share of our communication and entertainment industry is owned foreignly, we only have to thank our leaders of the last 40 years for that, all traitors to this country in my opinion. And we are getting brainwashed, whether we know it or not.
Karl not all these hand outs were to support manufacturing! Bush and Obama have wasted billions of dollars which has had little effect on supporting the people of this country. Plus I don;t see the need to support a turd even if you put a new coat of paint on it! After all it's still a turd!
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Those billionaires that lost billions had a really nice party when the government gave them their lost billions, weren't you invited?
Granted, never sat in the cockpit of an airliner, the stuff I fly, need power to land and get back to the hangar. But just a lot of airline travel, when they slam into reverse thrusters after touchdown, you really lean forward. But I am talking about American built aircraft, if I see an Airbus on my flight itinerary, request either a Boeing or a Douglas, never rode in an Airbus, don't want to.
Karl, I am both narrowed minded and prejudiced, what's your reason? Just read to many nasty things about Airbus, but if you put a saddle on a Rolls Royce engine, will be happy to ride on that, without the plane.
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