QF32 Read online
Melbourne born and educated, Richard Champion de Crespigny got his first taste of a future flying career as a fourteen year old when his father took him on a tour of the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) Academy at Point Cook in Victoria.
In 1975, aged seventeen, he joined the RAAF. One year later, he started flying. During his eleven years with the RAAF, he was seconded as Aide-de-Camp to two Australian Governors-General – Sir Zelman Cowen and Sir Ninian Stephen. Richard remained with the RAAF until 1986 when he joined Qantas.
Richard and his wife, Coral, have two children, Alexander and Sophia.
For more information, please visit http://QF32.Aero.
First published 2012 in Macmillan by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd
1 Market Street, Sydney 2000
Copyright © Richard Champion de Crespigny 2012
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. This publication (or any part of it) may not be reproduced or transmitted, copied, stored, distributed or otherwise made available by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organisations), in any form (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical) or by any means (photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise) without prior written permission from the publisher.
This ebook may not include illustrations and/or photographs that may have been in the print edition.
National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data:
de Crespigny, Richard.
QF32 / Richard de Crespigny with Mark Abernethy.
9781742611174 (pbk.)
Airplanes—Collision avoidance.
Aircraft accidents.
Other Authors/Contributors: Abernethy, Mark.
363.12416
Adobe eReader format: 9781743347881
EPUB format: 9781743347898
Online format: 9781743347874
The author and the publisher have made every effort to contact copyright holders for material used in this book. Any person or organisation that may have been overlooked should contact the publisher.
Typeset by in Sabon 11.5/18 pt by Midland Typesetters, Australia
Cover design by Deborah Parry Graphics
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This book is for everyone who played a role in QF32.
To all of you, I am proud of you.
Thank you.
To wonderful Coral.
You are the wind beneath my wings.
To my son, Alexander, and daughter, Sophia, who keep my feet firmly on the ground!
To Dad – thank you for the RAAF Academy tour!
With thanks to Mark Abernethy,
my collaborator, who was integral
to this story being told.
Contents
General Declaration
Chapter 1 First Flight
Chapter 2 Planes, Balloons and Duels
Chapter 3 With Wings as Eagles
Chapter 4 Wombat Airlines
Chapter 5 Aide-de-Camp
Chapter 6 The Road to Cairo
Chapter 7 Twenty Minutes of Fame
Chapter 8 Steam Power
Chapter 9 747–400
Chapter 10 The Far Side
Chapter 11 ‘Embrace’
Chapter 12 A380
Chapter 13 Pre-flight
Chapter 14 Boom! . . . BOOM!
Chapter 15 The Armstrong Spiral (HAC)
Chapter 16 QF32 Down!
Chapter 17 ECAM Armageddon
Chapter 18 Apollo 13
Chapter 19 If You Can’t Trim, You Can’t Fly
Chapter 20 Housekeeping
Chapter 21 It Won’t Do It!
Chapter 22 Through the Looking Glass
Chapter 23 It’s Now or Never
Chapter 24 Threading the Eye of a Needle
Chapter 25 Round (Phase) 11
Chapter 26 Evacuate!
Chapter 27 Qantas is Not Going to Like This!
Chapter 28 Deja Vu
Chapter 29 Stub Pipe
Chapter 30 Wash-up
Appendices
Appendix 1 Letters and Emails Richard received from Passengers on QF32
Appendix 2 A380 Specifications
Acknowledgements
For More Information
A Note from the Author
Images
GENERAL DECLARATION
The Pilot-in-Command is responsible for completing the General Declaration. The General Declaration that I completed for QF32 is reproduced below. This document is necessary for international flights, and includes details of the crew, aircraft registration and itinerary. Copies are provided for airport authorities and customs at the departure and destination airports.
CHAPTER 1
First Flight
4 February 1976. It was a rare day over southern Victoria, with the sky so clear you could look upwards and see blue receding forever into white. I remember it well because I was at the controls of a Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) A-85 Winjeel and beside me, in the instructor’s seat, was a legend of the Air Force, Flight Lieutenant Bill Evans.
It is the mark of a small air force that the best of the best are called on to teach the novices, and so Evans was spending time away from flying Mirage III fighters to instruct new RAAF trainee pilots in the propeller-driven Winjeel. An aircraft first designed in 1949, the Winjeel was a bit like a Caterpillar D6 bulldozer with wings – it didn’t look like it belonged in the air.
The nine-cylinder, 13-litre Pratt & Whitney radial engine produced a deafening roar as we chugged away from the Point Cook Air Force Base to our cruising altitude of 5000 feet. The heavy Winjeel’s performance was not helped by the fact its tail fin had been moved significantly forward along the airframe for the sole purpose of making the aircraft less stable and easier to ‘flick’ into a violent spin.
Trimming the aircraft to fly ‘hands-off’ at cruise altitude and heading across the Bellarine Peninsula aiming for Tasmania, I was happy the engine had lost its coughing roar and found its comfort level, more like a sleeping alsatian than an angry attacking bear. This was my first instructional flight and it seemed pretty straightforward. Responding to Evans’s tour of the flight controls and his instructions to ‘feel’ the stick in my hands and the rudder pedals at my feet, I gave the thumbs-up.
I relaxed as we settled in, cruising at around 140 knots. The sky seemed to sparkle with sugar crystals and the green of Victoria gleamed like a jewel. It was a beautiful day to fly, a great day to be alive. As I was starting to enjoy myself, Evans’s voice crackled in my ears: ‘Throttle back – let her slow down, hold your height and give her some left rudder.’
I eased the throttle back. As the speed slowed I felt the stick pull forward as the heavy nose wanted to drop. I pulled back to maintain the altitude, pushed slightly on the left rudder pedal to twist or yaw the aircraft to the left, then put a bit of right stick to stop the aircraft rolling left wing down.
‘Back off some more,’ Evans said, ‘and give me some more left rudder.’
I did as I was told, feeling the big engine in front of me quietening. Even at full throttle the old Pratt & Whitney radials only turn at around 3000 RPM, and backing off the throttle at 5000 feet sounded like the whole engine was about to shut down. The Winjeel didn’t just look like something that shouldn’t fly, it also felt like it, and I worried that too much pulling back on the throttle would put us into a stall. As the speed slowed I had to pull back harder, and adding rudder meant I needed even more right stick to stop the aircraft rolling left.
We must have slowed to about 70 knots by the time Bill Evans’
s voice jumped into my headset again. ‘Take more off the throttle – and give it more rudder!’
Less throttle, more rudder, more back stick, more crossed aileron input – suddenly the Winjeel flipped right wing over the left. The nose dived for the ground – it must have looked like the footage you see of aircraft breaking away from a formation, except we were flying at about 60 knots and corkscrewing straight down to the ground in a tight spiral.
Every one of my senses was in overload. I remember my mouth hung open in a mask of terror as the aeroplane spun downwards with continuous roll, yaw and pitch forces I had never felt before. I knew the theory of an aircraft spinning, but never imagined it to be so physically stressful. Sitting on my parachute and held in tight by my harness, I turned towards the fighter ace for guidance.
Flight Lieutenant Bill Evans was sitting back, looking at me with a smile on his face and his arms crossed smugly over his chest. He winked and pointed at me: here I was frozen with terror and the instructor wasn’t going to help! It was my plane. I turned back to face the fast-approaching farmlands and gripped my hands around the joystick.
I was eighteen years old and I was in a full and potentially deadly spin. It was terrifying. It isn’t just the terror of racing towards the ground that fills your mind with panic, but the physical spinning that pushes your head sideways against the canopy, disorienting you, making it hard to think and even harder to make good decisions.
I gathered my senses and pushed the stick forward – which is counterintuitive – gave full opposite rudder and set the throttle to idle. When the plane stopped spinning and stabilised I was able to throttle up, pull the plane out of its dive and fly the aircraft again under my control. None of it thanks to Bill Evans who didn’t touch a thing. He let me handle the whole emergency on my own and made me realise I should never permit myself to be too relaxed while flying. Ever!
Thirty-four years later, on 4 November 2010, four minutes after a routine take-off from Changi Airport in Singapore, the Qantas ‘QF32’ A380 that I was in command of, climbing out at 7400 feet, bound for Sydney with 469 people on board, experienced a massive explosion in Engine 2. This engine was mounted closest to the fuselage (and passengers), and projected 6 metres proud from the leading edge of the left wing.
The huge Rolls-Royce Trent 900 engine was destroyed. The extent of damage was unprecedented in Airbus’s history. Two heavy chunks tore through the wing, travelling at approximately two times the speed of sound. The fan blades and chunks acted like the explosive core of a hand grenade, ripping wing panels into shrapnel that sprayed like missile fragments over the fuselage as far as the massive tail sections. One chunk also ripped through the aircraft’s belly, severing hundreds of wires. Over 600 wires were cut causing almost every aircraft system to become degraded. I think one of the aircraft’s two backbone networks failed, confusing both flight warning computers. The hydraulics, electrics, brakes, fuel, flight controls and landing gear systems were all compromised. No Airbus aircraft had ever suffered so much damage to so many systems.
I am proud of the impeccable performance of the other four pilots on the flight deck and the 24 Qantas cabin crew who managed to bring QF32 back into Changi after the catastrophic engine explosion, with no deaths or injuries. I also appreciate the enormous and critical support provided by Singapore’s air traffic controllers, as well as the firefighters, police and Qantas ground and crisis management staff who assisted us. Then there were the 440 passengers. Their contribution was priceless, helping to ensure a safe outcome. Following the accident, many passengers became evangelists for Qantas and their kind words are humbling. It’s not every day a crew is praised by strangers for simply doing their job.
The decisions I made on QF32 were influenced by my earliest flying lessons, beginning at the RAAF Academy with my first flight in that Winjeel, through 35 years of training in aviation to the day before our fateful flight. Every lesson is valuable.
When Bill Evans directed me into the spin at the controls of the Winjeel, back in 1976, he was forcing me to confront some of the raw physical forces that act on all aircraft at all times. In a few terrifying seconds he shook me out of a contented world of stable flight and the romance of air travel, and brought me face to face with gravity, velocity, weight and catastrophic forces that, if not handled correctly, result in death.
In that first flight, I learned two lessons about flying that I would never forget.
The first is that the overriding job of any pilot is to fly the plane – to aviate! There is no computer, manual, autopilot or carefully crafted standard operating procedure that will ever replace that key responsibility: to keep the aircraft in the air in one piece. As the pilot-in-command in the flight deck, you can delegate the navigation and you can ask someone else to work the radio, but you can never delegate your responsibility to aviate.
The second lesson is to never, ever become complacent about aviation. The pilot-in-command has absolute and final authority over the crew and passengers. From the simplest act of signing for the amount of fuel loaded into the aircraft to the most complex reaction to a mid-air catastrophe, the captain carries this responsibility on his own shoulders: legally, professionally and personally. If he’s lucky he gets to spread the load by delegating tasks to competent pilots, but he can never outsource the fact the passengers he signs for are the passengers he is expected to return safely to ground. He also signs for the aircraft – but that is of secondary importance. Evans taught me that when something happens up there, you’re on your own and you had better fix it – fast.
I must have learned that lesson quickly because when I encountered Bill Evans again in 2011 he reminded me of that first flight and then burst into uncontrolled laughter. When I asked what was so funny, he said, ‘The look on your face when we started spinning.’
Indeed, that was my wake-up call – a lesson I would carry with me for the rest of my life.
CHAPTER 2
Planes, Balloons and Duels
Flying was always going to exert an influence on my life.
My great-uncle, Air Vice Marshal H.V. ‘Vivian’ Champion de Crespigny, was a Melbourne boy who volunteered for service in the First World War when just eighteen years old. He enlisted in the British Army as a flying officer in the Special Reserve and became the commanding officer of 29 Squadron in Belgium at Poperinge and La Lovie. Under his command 29 Squadron flew reconnaissance over, and conducted raids on, the German lines around the battlegrounds known as Passchendaele.
Vivian was awarded a Military Cross and many other honours. The citation in the London Gazette on 3 December 1918 for his Distinguished Flying Cross reads:
A brilliant and gallant officer who displays high initiative in night flying . . . flying a machine unsuitable for night duty, and in face of adverse weather conditions, he reached, and successfully bombed, his objective. A fine performance, calling for cool courage and determination.
Years later, Vivian was promoted to the rank of air vice marshal when he was the air officer commanding the Allied headquarters in Iraq and Persia. He was among the first and only generation of pilots who carried out air-to-air combat with pistols and hand-held guns.
Another great-uncle, Air Commodore Claude Champion de Crespigny, followed his brother Vivian to England during the First World War and joined the Royal Air Force (RAF). Claude would then command Blenheim bomber raids over Europe during the Second World War before becoming commanding officer of RAF operations in Singapore.
My uncle, Squadron Leader Humphrey Champion de Crespigny, joined the RAAF during the Second World War, flying Wirraways out of Darwin to defend Australia’s front line from attack by Japanese fighters and bombers. He was discharged in 1945 and continued flying. He owned a Cessna 210 and then a twin-engine Cessna 310, but stopped flying in 1974 when his aircraft was destroyed in a fatal accident. (A pilot chartered Humphrey’s aircraft on 2 April, became disoriented in thunderstorms then lost control. The tail plane separated from the fuselage and
was later found over 550 metres from the main wreckage.)
My father, Peter Champion de Crespigny, always harboured an obsession for flying. He was a boarder at Geelong Grammar and would craft Spitfire fighters from blocks of wood. He used to play truant from the dorms at night and ride his bicycle across the paddocks to Lara Airport where the RAAF conducted night-flying training. When the aircraft stopped at the end of the runway to do their pre-take-off checks, Dad would open the rear door and climb in. He’d then move forward, taking his ‘seat’ behind the two pilots – sitting on the bare wing spar and holding onto the fuselage with both hands. The pilots knew it was wrong to take Dad flying but they had never seen a boy so keen, so off they would go, bouncing down the grass runway then spearing into the black sky as they flew around Victoria.
Dad would sneak back into school early in the morning, but eventually he was busted and my grandfather, Frank Champion de Crespigny, a well-respected doctor from the country town of Ararat, received a letter from the headmaster of Geelong Grammar informing him of Dad’s aberrant behaviour. Dad was also skipping classes during the day to test-fly Airspeed Oxfords from the International Harvester Works at Corio, but the headmaster thought that passion expressed by a young man should be encouraged, not beaten out of him, and suggested that, if Frank approved of Dad’s flying, the school would not interfere. My grandfather agreed and Dad continued to fly.
When he was just out of school, Dad joined the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) for wartime service, on his eighteenth birthday in May 1944. He commenced the pilots’ course, but when the Japanese surrendered in 1945 Dad was discharged along with about 15,000 other Australian pilots who were now surplus to the RAAF’s needs. He wanted to continue as a pilot in the aviation industry but lacked sufficient experience to compete with all the pilots coming home from the war, so he joined Australian National Airways (ANA) on the administration side.
Under the leadership of one of its founders, Sir Ivan Holyman, ANA was growing rapidly. Sir Ivan formed a management course to groom future leaders and Dad was one of the first chosen. Travelling the world visiting major cities and socialising with royalty, politicians and the foreign service at cocktail parties and the opera, Dad learned to appreciate how aviation would cross oceans, flatten borders and unite economies. After two years, he returned home and introduced an innovative ticketing system that was used Australia-wide.