Cobalt wrote:
If you read it, it will also debunk a lot of other nonsense spouted about this. People say the “crew shut down the wrong engine”… technically yes, engine 1 was surging, but engine 2 started surging and the engine 2 fire alarm went off. Which engine should they have shut down?
At this stage of take off, NONE. You don’t touch jet engines even if they are on fire while not in safe altitude. I recall reading the French original where Captian Marti in quired of the FE if he had shut down the engine, it sounded to me as if he was very surprised. They shut down one engine basically in ground effect and when the 2nd one failed (no 1) they ran out of power. Had engine 2 still be on, they might have continued for a while but I doubt strongly they would have accomplished a landing at Le Bourget.
Cobalt wrote:
disagreements about the relevance of these items varies.
It does indeed. Fact is, the decision to take off with significant overweight pretty much directly caused the accident. In how far the missing spacer or the decision to shut down Nr 2 was instrumental people will fight to the end of times.
Clearly, the Brits I got my stuff from were very angry people at the time because their very different operation of that airplane was killed on what they felt were phoney reasons and as some put it, French determination that if they had to stop, they would do anything in their power to make BA stop as well. You are right that one needs to see the statements made in this light. However, you can check out yourself, there is a movie with John Hutchinson, one of the more outspoken Concorde captains, who does a whole interview about this sordid affair and you will hear pretty much similar thoughts than I have voiced. As I said, many within BA were not in agreement with that report at all and very much hacked off at a crew who willingly started an illegal take off causing a disaster to end Concorde’s ops. My sources which I have read over the years basically all came out of BA’s Concorde crews.
Nevertheless, this is but one accident in the long row of irreguliarities. You say you agreed with the general gist of things and I guess that is where we have common ground. Concorde is history but the airline is not, therefore the systematical problems still exist which unfortunately was proven very drastically by the accident of AF447. BTW I was positively surprised by the report of that accident and felt that the BEA had changed it’s way big time. It remains to be seen if it stays that way, albeit in the hope we won’t have a chance to find out any time soon. Accident investigation circles I talk to don’t share my enthusiasm however particularly in the aftermath of the “investigation” into the German Wings disaster.
Fair point. Typical airline SOPs for engine fire after V1 (with the engine failing or not) is to wait until established in safe climb (in Air France’s case, until reaching 400ft). But the AFM called for immediate action (BTW – this is all in the report). In any airline crew, these things get drilled every six months, and the actions the crew takes are almost automatic.
The thing that made this lethal was a combination of the gear not coming up and the Engine 1 also failing.
Cobalt wrote:
Fair point. Typical airline SOPs for engine fire after V1 (with the engine failing or not) is to wait until established in safe climb (in Air France’s case, until reaching 400ft)
Yes, 400 or 500 ft is what usually is used even though I’ve seen SOP up to 1000 ft. With a Jet you don’t loose much doing that, as there is no drag from a failed engine comparable to props. Several pilots who went from MEP/MET to Jets said this was the most significant thing they had to unlearn. Leave everything alone until you are at safe altitude and then start fiddling is something a multi prop pilot really has trouble with.
Cobalt wrote:
The thing that made this lethal was a combination of the gear not coming up and the Engine 1 also failing.
Primarily it was that they had to rotate before Vr which is totally lethal to a delta wing. While one may argue that Marti saved the lives of the people on the 747 and of course was trying to save his own airplane, had that obstruction not been there and they would have continued to Vr and reached V2 then they would have stood a chance, at least initially. The shut down of No 2 at this point was also very bad as it was producing power urgently needed. Obviously the failure of the gear contributed as well. When engine 1 failed due to fuel starvation, that was it. There is no way a delta wing can recover from this kind of thing. If I remember right, what happened is that it pitched up and came down tail first.
All in all they were faced with “the mother of all emergencies” once they had comitted an overloaded airplane of questionable airworthiness to get airborne. One question never really answered was what would have happened if they had aborted. They would have overshot the runway end most probably but that might have been survivable rather than what happened next.
