The Juice

Exactly! A failed engine is not a big deal.

jsfBoat

I have my CASELI but not my multi comm, but have been reading up on twin flying. Seems like I'll be doing so many single engine flying that it'll become a piece of cake!

Anton Holodenko

Here's a video of the Qantas jet emergency landing made by a pax from inside:

YouTube - 747 Emergency Landing - Qantas jet

DYNASTY HVY

Since this is just forward of the strongest part of the a/c i would have to venture a guess as to possible fatigue ,this sort of thing also happened to a 47 with UAL out of Hawaii some years back and that damage was more substantial in size .
Good job by the crew though.

rocketman3746

The idea that this was a bomb or any other kind of explosion is fairly ridiculous. Someone's got a good imagination. It's not impossible I guess, but highly unlikely. I don't know the numbers for cabin pressurization on a 747, but if it can do anything above 6 or 7 psi (I'm guessing it can do 8 or 9, which is quite a bit), cabin diff pressure can create more than enough energy to peel back the skin like it did. I'm an A&P and used to be a sheet metal guy, and I've seen a few similar failures on a smaller scale, so a fatigue failure is a totally plausible explanation. I've pressurized Citations to 8.5 psi on the ground, and the stresses on the airframe are significant to the point of being scary. The cabin door, one of the more stronger areas of the airframe, usually juts out into the airstream and inch or two at max cabin diff. So let's can all the talk of the "b" word until they actually find something that suggests that. And I commend the entire crew for acting professionally and doing a great job getting their aircraft on the ground in one piece.

go43andrti

I have a LITTLE insight on this one. An acquaintance of mine was flying from Hong Kong to Manila when this happened. They were cruising along when all of a sudden they heard the Mayday call from Qantas. He told me that they sounded like they truly felt they were in big trouble. The aircraft that my buddy was on was relaying for the Qantas flight to Manila. There was apparently quite a bit of traffic on the radios and it was rather confusing. However scared they were, in my opinion, there should be nothing but praise for this crew. It was a rapid decompression. On top of having the shi^ scared out of you, the physiological symptoms that you are experiencing must be very painful. Yes, they sounded scared, but who wouldn't?
I fly the -400. We max out at 9.4psi. It is very plausible that someone could be ejected from the airplane. I can't really tell how high about the floor the hole was, but that much pressure will make your body small enough to fit through some pretty small holes.
I'm rambling now.....My buddy watched them land uneventfully into Manila. Congrats to the crew. If I ever get to meet them, beers are on me.

SomedayRJ

If memory serves, the incident you're talking about had to do with a cargo door ceasing its toil as part of the fuse and coming completely off due to being opened and shut firmly too many times—well forward of where the fairing came off/pressure hull was breached on this airplane.

LA Times had okay coverage (for non aviation folks); Barry Schiff was quoted. Local SoCal TV completely blew it, but they always do.

RedBaron007

Yeah...especially when it wasn't even a failure. It was just surging and the crew shut it down as a precautionary measure. Anyway - I'm done hijacking this thread.

It'll be interesting to see what happens with this. There were some reports that they were investigating a blown oxygen bottle. Does anyone else think this is unlikely? Oxygen bottles to me always seemed pretty sturdy....like you could take a sledge hammer to one and it probably wouldn't blow up, just dent. Maybe I'm wrong, and I'm not at all familiar with the systems on the 747. Would any 747 drivers have a comment on the oxygen bottle theory?

UAL T38 Phlyer

I haven't flown the -400 for 7 years, but it has---or had---an old-fashioned bottled-O2 system for crew and pax; none of this fancy chemically-generated stuff. I think it was two bottles, in the forward and aft cargo bays.

While O2 bottles, Halon bottles, and the like are sturdy (and steel), they can fail--especially if abused.

As a USAF student pilot many years ago, I still vividly recall a T-37 on the ramp at Williams AFB with the tail blown off--a new crew chief had tried to fill the bottle using high-pressure O2 instead of low-pressure. The bottle ruptured, and severed the fuselage aft of the engines.

Since other posters on this thread have discussed Quantas going towards outsourced maintenance, is it possible the bottles were ever over-serviced at some point, then bled-down? Or was it just random luck, or fatigue?

As to the UAL 747 that lost the door: the latches on the forward cargo door has something like 12 pins, visible through sight glasses on the outside (somebody help with the number). On that flight, the pins appeared to be closed, and all lights in the cockpit verified that. However, only a few pins were actually engaged. At FL240 when the pins let go, the upward inertia of the door ripped the hinge, and a dozen feet of skin above the hinge, off the airplane. The hole was huge, and that is why 4 people were sucked out to their deaths.

Some of them went into the number 3 engine. Other debris (I don't know if any of the people) FOD'd the number 4.

The only reason they made it back to HNL, with two out on one side, was because they were already at altitude.


As I remember it, for quite a while at UAL (it may have been when I was at Evergreen), you were required to pull all the circuit breakers for the motor system that locked and unlocked the pins, to make sure it wasn't an un-commanded event, before they had found that the door could be improperly latched, yet the lights would still go out. I think Boeing was found at fault on that one. This may have only been on the -200, though.

Rocketman:

I do have a pretty good imagination. Engineering is imagination paired with science.

rocketman3746

Haha... I agree. And anyways, although I figured talking about bombs required someone with a vivid imagination, it seems like it was not far from the truth this time... An O2 bottle letting go isn't all that different from a bomb. I've never seen the composite wrapped aluminum tanks go, but I've seen what a scuba tank can do when it lets go, and it isn't pretty. Qantas seems to be in the news a lot these days with mx issues, between the O2 bottle explosion, improperly working oxygen masks, and that nitrogen in the O2 bottle issue...