Qantas pilot recalls A380 engine incident to RAes

Qantas A380. Photo: By Rob Finlayson.

In an interview with the Royal Aeronautical Society, one of the five pilots aboard the Qantas Airbus A380 that suffered an uncontained engine failure after take-off from Singapore Nov. 4 gave insight into the handling of the emergency on that “extraordinary day” (ATW Daily News, Dec. 6). The Australian Transport Safety Bureau has credited the Qantas crew with saving the aircraft and all on board.

Qantas Senior Check Capt. David Evans, who was training Route Check Capt. Harry Wubben on the flight deck of QF32, told the RAes in an interview released Dec. 8 that there “were 43 ECAM messages in the first 60 seconds after the explosion and probably another 10 after that. “It was nearly a 2-hr. process to go through those items and action each one or not action them depending on circumstances. It was getting very confusing with the avalanche of messages," Evans said.

Once aware of the damage to the wing, with fuel streaming out, Evans said the crew elected not to initiate further fuel transfer in response to a number of the ECAM messages. “We elected not to open cross-feed valves and try and transfer fuel in a wing that had obvious damage. We were getting messages about imbalance, losing fuel out of one side and not the other. And those messages were some of the ECAM messages that we didn’t follow. We were very concerned about the damage to the galleries, the forward and aft transfer galleries, whether they were intact, whether we should be transferring fuel. We ended up with quite a significant imbalance between the two—nearly 10 tonnes of fuel.”

Giving insight into the complexity of the problems, Evans told the RAes, “Subsequent to the hydraulic system we lost some braking. The wing brakes went into what they call the emergency system —‘accumulator only’—this gives about three or four applications before the accumulator runs out of brake energy. Also the anti-skid on the wing gear. Now, with the antiskid being unserviceable on the wing gear, it’s very important to have the airplane nose gear down that limits the braking on the wing gear to 1,000 psi. If you have lift and not all the weight on the wing gear, you run the risk of locking the brakes up and bursting tires,” he said.

In another complication, Evans recounted to the RAes that the computer that calculates the landing speed spat out the problem saying it was unable to calculate that many failures. “So we then looked at them in more detail and rejected ones that we considered minor. After we’d eliminated about three or four items, the computer happily made a calculation and it gave us a touchdown speed of about 165 kt. and showed us about 130 m. of surplus runway—so it basically said we could stop on the runway.” With the loss of the leading-edge slats and the overweight position, the approach speed was 35 kt. above normal,” he said in the RAes interview.

Underscoring the severity of the situation, Evans told the RAes that the airline has since tried to “recreate it in the simulator and we can’t! I think it was just such an extraordinary day.”