Beating the Odds
by Paul McGoldrick
I'm in Canada this week, in British Columbia, and I needed two commercial
flights to get here, both using the same Canadian-built turboprop equipment.
Winds at my local airport were gusting to about 45 knots, from between 30°
and 60° off the starboard side of the nose. Guess in which direction
the 500 ft turn is in circuit? You guessed left about 40°, correct?
Quite right. The climb after the surface wind effects was rather nice and
the cruise was uneventful.
Then, coming in to land, we were at about 5000 feet on a long base leg -- maybe 7 miles -- when I felt and heard the front office feathering the #1 engine. The prop kept windmilling but there was an immediate speed reduction, the nose was put down and we suffered a long, slow approach with the plane very vulnerable to ground heat effects. The turn into final was bloody but the landing was not bad, just a bit kangarooish, with the novel addition of the fire trucks paralleling us down the runway. I don't think there was one other passenger on the full plane that noticed, most of whom were golfers returning home after the weekend.
When we got into the terminal, the return flight using the same equipment was "delayed" and before I walked to my next flight, to Vancouver, it was "cancelled." I have no idea what the problem was but the flight deck told us nothing (they did call the flight attendant). I am rather glad there was only about 45 minutes between flights; it gave me less chance to dwell. But I did, later, call to mind previous occasions when airlines have tried to cause my demise.
In domestic flights the most interesting was a United flight from San Francisco to Denver in a DC-10. The plane lost the steering engine in what must have been about halfway into the flight (the crew also killed the ATC channel fed on passenger headsets). In one of those decisions that is unfortunately popular with airlines, "for operational reasons," the pilots decided to return to San Francisco instead of getting us down to an inconvenient (to United) alternate like Salt Lake City. That mistake was verified when somewhere over Sacramento the plane lost the #2 engine. I've never been on a plane that was directed into San Francisco so fast, with no pattern at all. It was a full brace landing, with the crew chanting away, but it fortunately went right.
Other engine problems: On a 747-2xx of British Airways on the last leg from London to Sydney (from Singapore) all four engines died in the dust from a volcano above Indonesia. The crew managed to start two of them at about 10,000 feet. I later found out that the crew had set the glide towards Darwin, but we probably wouldn't have made it…
A PanAm flight from New York to London's Heathrow: all four engines flamed out on the runway after landing and we had to be tugged off to the gate. How can you make such a mistake on fuel load?
British Airways tried to kill me on another occasion. 747 flight from London to Nairobi, which is on a plateau in Kenya: the Laikipia Plateau. Approaching the Plateau from the North, fortunately at dawn, the crew looked out the front and realized we were flying directly into it: they had set the QFE incorrectly! All too much like a James Bond escape sequence for my liking.
While Lee Goldberg is running his worst "War
Stories" contest. . . does anyone recall a worse flight experience?
E-mail me at pjm@analogZONE.com.