This is an ATSB animation showing an incident that occurred at Tullamarine on the night of 20 March 2009. It was developed by downloading the data off the FDR. There's no sound.
The aircraft, an Airbus A340-541, registered A6-ERG and operating as Emirates EK407, with 18 crew and 257 passengers suffered a tailstrike and cleaned up a locator beacon when it ran out of runway.
The reason? Erroneous take-off performance parameters were entered into a laptop by the crew. Apparently someone typed "2" instead of "3".
Some typo!
The crew and passengers need buy no more lottery tickets. They've used up all their luck.
This shot (taken off the end of the runway) shows a locater beacon taken out by the aircraft.
This one shows marks left by the main wheels in the dirt also off the end of the runway.
That was close.
4 comments:
Didn't they have enough speed?
Apparently the amount of thrust necessary for a safe takeoff is automatically calculated by the aircraft's flight management system before takeoff.
Incorrect data entered by the crew meant insufficient thrust to get airborne and they didn't realise what was going on until it was almost too late.
So, no more ramming the throttles home to the stops when you want to take off?
A typical example of assuming the computer must be right, even when all your senses are telling you that things are wrong, wrong, wrong.
"ramming the throttles home to the stops"
If you watch the thrust gauges on the animation, you'll notice that this happens at about 1.55, by which time, alerted perhaps by the sound of aluminium scouring tarmac, the crew realises that all is not as it should be.....
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