The details of the British Airways 747 near-accident in South Africa are out, and man, was that scary for the pilots. They did a great job of keeping that bad boy in the air, but it could have ended very differently. Here’s what happened.

On May 11, 2009, BA flight 56 prepared for its evening departure to London/Heathrow. Afternoon rain had cleared out and it was a clear evening with light northerly winds and temps in the mid-50s (something like -358 degrees Celsius, I’m told). Boeing 747 G-BYGA was ready to bring 265 passengers and 18 crew members back to the UK, so it was about 80 percent full. It probably looked a lot like this one (though this was in Cape Town, not Jo’burg):

Photo via Flickr user Sara&Joachim

They buttoned up and headed for the runway. Engines spooled up as usual and they started rocketing to the north on runway 3L for the long flight home. When the airplane hit 167 kts, just about the time for it to rotate, all hell broke loose. Somehow, due to a technical fault, the airplane showed that thrust reversers had been deployed. Thrust reversers deflect the air within the engine to push it forward instead of backward. This is generally only a good idea when you want to stop the airplane, so it happens with wheels on the ground during the landing rollout. Here’s what they look like on a Lufthansa 747.

Photo by Flickr user wbaiv

Fortunately, the thrust reversers didn’t actually deploy and it was merely a faulty warning, but it did bring with it some unintended consequences. When the thrust reversers deploy, the slats Krueger flaps automatically retract. What the heck is a slat Krueger flap? I’m glad you asked.

Original photo via Martin20

See those little things hanging over the front of the wing? Those are slats Krueger flaps. Like flaps behind the wing, they’re meant to help increase the surface area camber of the wing to provide more lift. When you’re cruising, you don’t want this because it provides drag and slows you down. But when you’re taking off and landing at slow speeds, it makes it more stable and allows you to fly slower. That’s good.

When it’s not good is when they retract just when you need them most. So picture a 747, just about reaching take-off speed, that suddenly loses its slats Krueger flaps because they think it’s time to retract. Lift goes away and the pilots see less and less runway ahead. Holy crap. So what happened? Well, they took off and sat at about 40 feet above the ground trying to pick up speed. It kind of looked like this:

Photo by user klever

Ok, so I lied. It looked nothing like this. Instead, replace that airplane with a hulking, slat-less 747 barely clearing the terrain below. Yeah, I’d freak out too. Ultimately, the slats Krueger flaps were back in their deployed position a mere 23 seconds after they ran away, but those were the 23 most critical seconds of the flight. The airplane then started climbing, but the pilots weren’t content to continue on. They dumped fuel and eventually returned with everyone safe.

My guess is that there might have been some people in the back wondering what was going on, but it happened so quickly that they unlikely would have had a chance to even register that this was a real issue. The pilots, however, must have absolutely flipped. Fortunately, they did a fantastic job. The pilot in command happened to have aerobatic training and was well-versed in how to fly at near-stall speeds. There’s no question that those guys saved that airplane and all the people onboard.

But it’s not just them. There was some serious luck here. Johannesburg sits a mile high, and that reduces aircraft performance. But had this been in summer instead of winter, it would have been much worse. Hot weather makes it harder for airplanes to gain altitude, so the mild temperature undoubtedly helped here. It’s also a blessing that the airplane was only 80% full instead of 100%. The added weight would have hurt. On the other hand, it certainly didn’t hurt that they had a slight headwind and the the weather was good.

Anytime there’s an accident, it always requires a handful of things to go wrong. In this case, while one awful thing went wrong, everything else went right. And that’s why the airplane was saved. One other thing going wrong could have resulted in disaster. Fortunately, that didn’t happen here and changes required by the FAA mean this particular incident shouldn’t happen again.

Update at 917p on July 9 – Thanks to the readers who corrected me here. There are no slats on the 747 but rather Krueger flaps. Wikipedia has a good explanation of the difference:

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How many of you know what EMAS is? I can guarantee that the 34 people on a US Airways Express jet in Charleston West Virginia now are intimately familiar with it. It prevented them from plunging off a mountain. This mountain. Seriously.

EMAS stands for Engineered Material Arresting System – a name only the government could love. Think of it like a runaway truck ramp. You know what I’m talking about. When you’re coming down a mountain and you see those gravel strips on the side where trucks can go if their brakes fail? (For those of you in the Midwest, a mountain is something you’ve probably seen on TV.) But EMAS stops airplanes, not trucks, so it requires some more strength.

You will find an EMAS in 28 airports today; the first was installed at JFK in 1996. How do they pick the airports? Airports in the US are required to have overruns called runway safety areas (RSA) that are 1,000 feet long and 500 feet wide, at least. (Many advocate for more.) There’s only one problem. Many airports were built before these rules went into place, so they don’t have the room. Those airports have been getting EMAS.

Remember the Southwest flight the went off the runway and parked at a gas station in Burbank in 2000? By 2002, Burbank had an EMAS. And that brings us to our buddies at Charleston, West Virginia, better known by many as Charlie West. Charlie West sits on a mountain (as you saw above), and in 2007, the feds decided it might be a good idea to keep planes from sliding off the end. Good thing they did.

Earlier this week, a US Airways Express 50 seat regional jet operated by wholly-owned PSA Airlines rejected its takeoff. It couldn’t stop quickly enough and it ended up off the runway. Thanks to EMAS, the plane didn’t plunge off the end of the runway. Brian Belcher and the rest of the team at Charlie West have been doing an excellent job of keeping people up to date via Twitter and Facebook. (I wrote about Charleston’s expert use of social media on BNET.) They posted this picture:

Holy crap. Now, the plane has been moved, the airport is back to normal operations, and all they need to do now is fix the EMAS so it can do its job once again. Talk about a great invention.

I don’t like to dwell on these end-of-year facts and figures too often, but sometimes I think it’s worth pausing to take a look. For example, let’s take a look at airline safety in 2009. It was actually a very safe year. There were 30 fatal “airliner” accidents that ended with 758 people being killed (1 on the ground). That sounds like a lot, right? We’ll break it down further after this slideshow from Aviation Safety Network, which highlights the accidents of the year.

Airliner Accident Review 2009

View more presentations from Aviation Safety Network.

So, of those 30 accidents (which may seem like a huge number), only 11 involved passenger flights. And of those, many were in the usual places you would expect – the ones without a strong safety leadership culture. There was one in Rwanda, one in Papua New Guinea, and one in Indonesia. I believe having at least one accident is required in Indonesia every year. There was an old TU-154 that crashed in Iran and a little Embraer 110 that went down in the Amazon. There was also that Yemenia A310 that crashed in the Indian Ocean off Africa.

Some accidents involved runway overruns and were mostly survivable. The Turkish 737 that landed hard in Amsterdam is one example, as was the Bangkok Airways ATR-72 and the Mashad IL-62. But that brings us to the big two.

The biggest, of course, was the Air France flight that plunged into the Atlantic off the coast of Brazil. We still don’t know what caused that one, and we may very well never know.

The other? The Colgan Air (Continental Connection) Dash-8 that went down in Buffalo. That, of course, was caused by a combination of pilot error, fatigue, and bad weather.

So when it comes right down to it, 2009 was a very safe year. You were much safer flying than, well, eating airline food, especially if it was prepared by LSG SkyChefs in Denver. (That’s a whole different, disgusting story.)

It has been plastered all over the news, but I wanted to wait a little until we had more information on what happened. Now that the NTSB has released its early findings, let’s talk. This is a mess.

You know the story – Northwest 188 from San Diego to Minneapolis decided that Wisconsin was a better destination. Once pilots realized they had gone too far east, they turned around and landed. As far as I’m concerned, the excuses given by the pilots seem flimsy at best.

At left, you can see what happened to flight 188 on October 21 thanks to FlightAware. The last radio communication is said to have occurred around 656p Central Time. That would have been about 20 minutes after they started talking to Denver Center (the air traffic control center that controls that patch of airspace). The plane was at 37,000 feet traveling at a roughly 30 degree heading.

There were a couple of slight course corrections but nothing else until 814p when they got back in touch with air traffic control, well past Minneapolis. They then started turning south and at 817p they started descending. Air traffic control made them do some turns to prove they hadn’t been hijacked, and they ended up landing around 9p. So what the heck happened?

Well, these pilots had ample experience, haven’t had any problems before, and weren’t fatigued after a 19 hour layover in San Diego. The pilots insist they weren’t arguing nor sleeping but rather having a heated discussion. That means that for over and hour, the pilots ignored radio calls and attempted contact from their company dispatcher because they were engrossed in this conversation about their new crew scheduling system.

At one point, the pilots pulled out their laptops, apparently to review the new system. Delta says they don’t allow personal laptop use for pilots while flying, so naturally the mainstream media folks have jumped on this as the headline. It shouldn’t be. But could the new bidding system really have been so exciting to have kept them distracted for over an hour? It’s certainly going to be a complicated topic of discussion, but I find it unconscionable that they would simply forget that they were flying an airplane for that long.

Delta put out a statement on personal laptop use that says:

Using laptops or engaging in activity unrelated to the pilots’ command of the aircraft during flight is strictly against the airline’s flight deck policies and violations of that policy will result in termination.

Sounds like these guys are going to have to fight for their jobs.

I still just can’t believe that for over an hour they failed to respond to any attempts at communication. You could have a live stage show in the cockpit and they still should have heard something to trigger them to actually pay attention for a minute. What did finally bring them back to reality? A flight attendant called up 5 minutes before they were supposed to arrive asking for an estimated time of arrival. That’s when they realized they screwed up.

Even though they were out of contact for over an hour, they didn’t overshoot the airport by that much. The flight the day before was 3:36 while the one the day after was 3:20. This flight took 3:54. I have to assume that had it gone any longer, some sort of fuel warning would have caught their attention . . . or not.

Sadly, we’ll probably never know what happened since the cockpit voice recorder only held 30 minutes of data. It began during final approach, so all the good stuff was missed. We probably won’t know if something else happened instead.

I can’t say this makes me particularly nervous about flying in general, but it definitely makes me think twice about those reinforced cockpit doors. What if these guys had been so engrossed that they failed to answer to any sort of communication attempts? Or what if they both ate the fish? Ted Striker never would have been able to get up there to save the day.