QF32 by Richard de Crespigny

Author:Richard de Crespigny
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan Australia
Published: 2012-06-27T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 16

QF32 Down!

While we were busy in the cockpit dealing with the never-ending ECAM checklists and the vast array of failures, people on the ground were also coming to grips with the situation.

At the Qantas 24-hour Operations Centre in Mascot, Sydney, there is an Integrated Operations Centre (IOC), which is sort of like the Houston command centre depicted in movies about NASA. From this centre, aviation engineers can use a program called Airman to monitor any Airbus aircraft’s systems, and pilots can call the IOC from their cockpit using their satellite phones.

At 1.01 pm Sydney time on 4 November, the screen in front of the engineer on duty erupted with a rapidly scrolling list of messages from VH-OQA (QF32) – at a rate he had never seen before. His job was to monitor all 160 Qantas Boeing and Airbus aircraft, and so when one aircraft appears to be in distress he needs specialist advice. The volume and severity of messages streaming from VH-OQA was unprecedented in Airbus’s history. It seemed unbelievable. So the IOC engineer, thinking the Airman systems had malfunctioned, threw back his chair and made his way to the maintenance watch desk for the A380.

A380 Maintenance Watch provides 24-hour support to Qantas A380 aircraft worldwide, tracking the aircraft state, unserviceabilities and planned maintenance (overseas or at home in Sydney), and answering satellite phone calls from pilots. The engineers also have priority phone lines to Airbus and Rolls–Royce’s 24-hour support engineers.

The IOC engineer and the A380 maintenance watch engineer watched more than 130 gruesome red (warning) and yellow (caution) messages scroll down the screen. They couldn’t believe they were true – it meant the plane was in catastrophic trouble. The idea was confusing and terrifying.

Meanwhile, Peter Wilson, the Qantas chief pilot, who happened to be in a meeting just 30 metres away from the engineers’ desk, first found out about QF32 when he received an SMS message from his son, which said, ‘Have you lost an aeroplane?’ Peter quickly called Lyell Strambi, the group executive manager for Qantas operations, who was also unaware of our predicament.

Unbeknown to us, the exploding turbine disc from our Engine 2 had fractured into at least four pieces. When Airbus designed the A380, they assumed that in the event of a turbine disc failure the parts of the disc would have infinite energy – wherever the pieces were going, nothing would stop them. This was a wise assumption. In our case the chunks of the disc exited the engine core, cleaving the back of the engine’s nacelle from the strut. Chunks opened up the wing like a sardine can, creating a wall of shrapnel that peppered the fuselage. The engine’s rear cowling landed in a residential area of Batam, an Indonesian island just south of Singapore. The locals heard a loud explosion and, looking up at the sky, thought they saw a Qantas plane on fire. Turbine blades screamed like fizzing fireworks as they rained down to earth. A large 70-kilogram chunk of the

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