The Tale of the Arab Flight Crew
The brand spanking new Airbus 340-600, the largest passenger airplane ever built, sat in its hangar in Toulouse, France without a single hour of airtime. Enter the Arab flight crew of Abu Dhabi Aircraft Technologies (ADAT) to conduct pre-delivery tests on the ground, such as engine runups, prior to delivery to Etihad Airways in Abu Dhabi. The date was November 15, 2007.
The ADAT crew taxied the A340-600 to the run-up area. Then they took all four engines to takeoff power with a virtually empty aircraft. Not having read the run-up manuals, they had no clue just how light an empty A340-600 really is.
The takeoff warning horn was blaring away in the cockpit because they had all 4 engines at full power. The aircraft computers thought they were trying to takeoff but it had not been configured properly (flaps/slats, etc.) Then one of the ADAT crew decided to pull the circuit breaker on the Ground Proximity Sensor to silence the alarm.
This fools the aircraft into thinking it is in the air.
The computers automatically released all the brakes and set the aircraft rocketing forward. The ADAT crew had no idea that this is a safety feature so that pilots can’t land with the brakes on.
Not one member of the seven-man Arab crew was smart enough to throttle back the engines from their max power setting, so the $80 million brand-new aircraft crashed into a blast barrier, totaling it.
The extent of injuries to the crew is unknown, for there has been a news blackout in the major media in France and elsewhere. Coverage of the story was deemed insulting to Moslem Arabs. Finally, the photos are starting to leak out (click thumbnails to enlarge). Link
Thanks Mike and Michael!
Doug
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There are actually more photos that accompanied the email version of this story. If you want, I can email them to you.
Is this for real? I looked on Snopes and was unable to find anything about it but it seems almost unbelievable.
By all means let's keep it quiet. We don't want to insult (embarrass) any Moslems! The media is so SENSITIVE!
LOL! The front of the aircraft looks demolished so you would assume the Arabs in the cockpit were too. But they may have panicked and run for the rear of the plane when they realized "something" was wrong :) But if they weren't fatalities of the crash, then they would hopefully have been victims of their employers :)
And no 72 virgins!
More like an embarrassment to the Saudi government. They are probably the ones that applied pressure to the main stream media to suppress the story.
I got this as an email a couple months ago. Pretty embarrassing for the Saudis and probably a pink slip for the ADAT flight crew I hope.
"There are actually more photos that accompanied the email version of this story. If you want, I can email them to you."
No thanks, Todd. Mike sent me all the photos, but since the others were essentially different perspectives of these two, I purposely omitted them.
Doug
Oh that's right! The French are especially sensitive since their country was overrun by Mooslems. Don't want to stir them up with unflattering press. Oh no.
They are described as a "flight crew" so they must be qualified pilots. But maybe like the hijackers of 9-11 they only learned how to take off and fly, not how to land or run up engines on the ground. ;)
That sounds like something Airbus may want to rectify in their aircraft. If "pulling" the circuit breaker under these circumstances can have this undesired effect, then a "popped" circuit breaker might cause the same thing. Pulling the breaker should not have that effect while on the ground for obvious safety reasons.
I agree. I understand the protection against landing with brakes on, but where is the protection against what happened here? Seems simple enough with a sensor that detects full weight on the landing gear. Any aeronautical engineers with an opinion?
Frogs and Arabs = perfect match lol.
You can't make everything failsafe on an aircraft. Systems fail. That is why there are pilots and checklists. Actually I am surprised that pulling an alarm breaker would disengage a system setting (ground) already in use. But I am not familiar with the 340.
"Actually I am surprised that pulling an alarm breaker would disengage a system ..."
I agree, Al. I'm not that familiar with modern commercial aircraft, but the B-52 (and KC-135) required several manual settings including brakes (after verifying hydraulic pressure) before runup. And we never ran all engines to TOP at once (except during takeoff). This would be an excellent example of how an automated system can lead to careless reliance on technology. As you say, "that's why we have pilots and checklists."
Doug