I was uneasy with how quickly the crew were lauded as heroes, long before the flight data recorder had even been looked at. There is no doubt that they did an excellent job given the situation they found themselves in (something of a British Airways specialty, if you remember the 747 and volcanic ash incident), but I’m reserving my adulation until the cause of the situation is understood.
The first reports of complete loss of power implied a dead cockpit as well, I’m guessing this is an idiot reporter’s misunderstanding of what a pilot would mean by loss of power.
It is now fairly clear that the engines failed to respond to requests for additional thrust, both through the autothrottle and the manual throttles. That there didn’t seem to be any indication of the lack of response to the autothrottle requests is probably some kind of failure in the airplane’s system (or the system’s design). Had the crew been alerted to the abnormal response to ordered thrust increases earlier they may have had time to alter the glideslope, change configuration to extend the glide, or even possibly solve the reason for lack of thrust.
I do not believe the airplanes systems failed catastrophically, I.E. were not delivering orders or were ‘crashed’. It seems far more likely there was a problem with fuel contamination or icing in the engine. There is also a potential failure here of systems that should’ve warned of the icing possibility or contamination… or of the systems designed to prevent those problems.
If my postulations are correct some systems failures played a major part in the crash, and pilot skill played a major part in mitigation of the crash… BUT, what if the crew had been more hands-on with the approach? Would they have noticed the disconnect sooner? If they’d been monitoring engine performance the way a 2nd officer used to (instead of relying on the airplane’s systems to report a problem) might they have realized something was wrong? I don’t know… but I would like to.
3 of the 4 jets were successfully hijacked by people who had smuggled weapons aboard.
The 4th jet was an El Al flight. Then, (as now) they put more emphases on the safety of their passengers and flights then squeezing out every cent of profit. There were intended to be 4 hijackers on that flight but El Al flagged two of them as suspicious so they didn’t make it aboard. When the two hijackers onboard made the attempt multiple armed Israeli sky marshals responded and with a lot of luck (a grenade was dropped but did not explode) the only death was one of the hijackers.
The two denied boarding on the El Al flight instead boarded a Pan Am flight, there was an attempt by El Al to warn of their suspicions about the two but it was poorly relayed and ineffective.
All three of the hijacked planes landed in the middle-east, eventually every single passenger was set free but the aircraft (and a fourth hijacked later) were destroyed.
As I read this account last night I couldn’t help but seethe with rage. WTF is wrong with “us” in ‘the west’ that what little we remember we manage to take the wrong lessons from? (The first WTC bombing comes to mind as well–anti crash-through barriers and vehicle inspection but not better evacuation training or response planing.)
We threw a couple dollars at screening and x-ray and assured ourselves that everything was fine. Did we put air marshalls on trans-Atlantic flights? No, we pretended that doing the least possible must have resolved the problem and then forgot about the incidents.
Do you think TODAY there are air marshalls on every trans-Atlantic flight? Except on El Al, I mean…
About 40 years from now I fully expect somebody to be reading an account of September 11, 2001 and slapping their head in disbelief that something fairly similar was allowed to happen yet again, killing an order of magnitude more people.
In the meantime I highly recommend Emergency, Crisis on the Flight Deck (2nd edition) written by Stanley Stewart. I’ve read a lot about airline disasters and incidents but this had many that were news to me, and it is quite powerfully written.