Fly By Wire

How the aviation industry is making it safer to travel.

- Farhan Shah

Qantas flight 32 had been in the air for four minutes after taking off from Changi Airport at 9.57am local time when Captain Richard Champion de Crespigny and his crew heard two, almost coincident “loud bangs”. The 440 passengers in the A380 aircraft too were startled by the loud explosion and began peering out of the windows. “My reaction immediately was, ‘Oh my goodness, maybe this is it’,” Marion Carroll, a passenger on board the fated flight, remembered vividly.

In the cockpit, the crew scrambled to determine the problem and realised that engine turbine number two had overheated and exploded. The captain wasted no time, 35 years of flight experience automatically kicked in. He switched off the auto-pilot, assumed full control of the crippled aircraft and instructed his first officer to ascertain the damage. In the meantime, Captain de Crespigny issued a pan-pan message to everyone in the skies and on the ground. Unlike a mayday radio call, a pan-pan call signals to whoever is listening that there is a non-life threatening situation on board the vessel and that air control should clear the airspace.

During all this time, the passengers too were uploading pictures of the damaged left wing onto social media. “I could see the hole that was in the wing made by the explosion. It was quite a large hole, a couple of feet across and all the metal was jagged and sticking out,” said Carroll.