Qantas plane loses power

[Lusankya]

link in a tux

Qantas jet 'could have crashed'

QANTAS faced a potential disaster on Monday when a jumbo jet en route from London lost all main electrical power and was forced to land on battery back-up.

Flight QF2 with 344 passengers on board was about 15 minutes from Bangkok when the highly unusual failure took place and a back-up system kicked in.

With the batteries providing power for up to an hour, aviation sources said the failure would have been a disaster if it had occurred further out to sea.

"If this had happened over the ocean in the middle of the night, it would probably have crashed," an experienced 747 pilot told The Australian last night.

The near-disaster came nine years after a Qantas 747 aquaplaned off the end of the runway at Bangkok airport, crashing through navigational equipment and finishing up across a perimeter road 220m away.
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The crash, Qantas's worst in 40 years, caused about $100 million in damage.

Qantas chief pilot Chris Manning and the Australian Transport Safety Bureau yesterday confirmed the incident took place as the plane returned from London. "The back-up system was activated and the aircraft landed safely," Captain Manning said.

"Qantas reported the incident to Boeing, the ATSB and Civil Aviation Safety Authority and is also conducting its own thorough investigation.

"The aircraft is currently being repaired and assessed."

ATSB deputy director of aviation safety investigation Julian Walsh said investigators had been advised of the failure and had asked for flight data and cockpit voice recorders to be quarantined.

He said the ATSB was liaising with Thai authorities about who should lead the investigation. It was too early to say what had happened, he said, but he agreed the failure was "unusual".

"Obviously Qantas, Boeing and ourselves are keen to get to the bottom of it," he said.

"The information I have at the moment is that it was a total power failure."

Mr Walsh said he understood the aircraft's systems went into a degraded mode under standby power to reduce the drain on the batteries. The 747-400 has four generators, one on each engine, plus two generators on the auxiliary power unit that sources said could be linked to the main system in an emergency.

A Qantas engineer familiar with the the 747-400's electrical systems said the failure was unheard of.

He said the battery back-up and standby inverter would supply power for up to an hour.

"It's pretty dramatic if they've lost all generation systems," he said.

The engineer agreed the APU generators could be used in an emergency but noted that would depend on the fault that had led to the loss of power.

Another 747-400 pilot said he was aware of two other instances when the electrical systems had failed and the aircraft went to the battery back-up. "It has happened before and the aeroplane can quite comfortably cope with it for a limited period of time," he said.

Australian and International Pilots Association president Ian Woods was also surprised that the plane had lost all power. "The pilots have done a good job in dealing with a highly unusual event," he said.

[Zablorg]

Fucking journalists. It's Quantas, get it right.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

Fucking journalists. It's Quantas, get it right.

It IS Qantas dipwit!

http://www.qantas.com.au/regions/dyn/ho ... -region-au

[loomer]

I wish Mr Walsh had been flying the plane. Then there'd be Firefly jokes out the wazoo.

[Chris OFarrell]

Quantas are a bunch of idiots.

They had the perfect record you CAN'T BUY of never having crashed an aircraft due to their phenomenal levels of saftey standards and crew training. Then management in the 1990's in their wonderfully greedy way starts to penny punch on maintience and operating costs. Quantas had that 747 go off the end of the runway and loose its nose wheel because high management demanded no use of thrust reverser's to save money, limited use of flaps to save money, carrying less fuel to save money...
Nothing ILLEGAL of course, just RIGHT on the line of legal requirements, where before they had carried a huge safety margin.

And look, the perfect storm happened and they ran an aircraft off the end of the runway when they HAD to land because they were running out of fuel, in bad weather conditions and couldn't stop in time. The aircraft would have probably been written off by any other company, but they spent a huge amount of money to repair it and put it back into service, so they could claim 'they never lost an aircraft' and tried to downplay the crash as a minor incident that couldn't be helped.

Of course the cost to rebuild and repair the aircraft was about two orders of magnitude greater then the minimal savings all this skimping had made them over the past few years.

And then on top of that, they have increasingly shafted their local maintenance teams who had a reputation of being the BEST of the BEST, so much so that most local airlines used them for the major work on their own aircraft. But NOOOO, we can for a far cheaper cost, fly the aircraft to China and Singapore and get THEM to do it! Hell there is right now another big industrial strike about to go ahead over plans to ship even MORE of the work overseas and ignore the people here.

Seriously. It was bad enough when they lost their 'never crashed' record, even if they still are in denial about it and they were bloody lucky that they didn't loose anyone, which is why a lot of people think it was just a minor 'vehicle' accident, that someone drove it off the end of the runway while taxing or something crazy like that. But one of these days, they are going to have a packed 747 nose into the Earth and I just don't want to be on the aircraft when that happens....

[Zablorg]

Oh. Clearly I have been blinded by a shroud of grammar nitpickage.

[Spyder]

Quantas are a bunch of idiots.

They had the perfect record you CAN'T BUY of never having crashed an aircraft due to their phenomenal levels of saftey standards and crew training. Then management in the 1990's in their wonderfully greedy way starts to penny punch on maintience and operating costs. Quantas had that 747 go off the end of the runway and loose its nose wheel because high management demanded no use of thrust reverser's to save money, limited use of flaps to save money...

This is like accountants working for health insurance companies overriding doctors instructions. Here's an idea, let's leave the flying to the pilots.

[tim31]

Welcome, to the world of tomorrow!

With the cost cutting on the flagship line, it's a wonder that Jetstar birds don't throw out fan blades on the tarmac.