WATCH: Pilot reveals moment Qantas engine explosion led to catastrophic failure mid-flight
PILOT Richard de Crespigny has revealed how he saved the lives of everyone onboard after a plane engine exploded mid-flight just moments after take off. It was the first ever failure of its kind for the Airbus A380.
Qantas 32: Survivors describe their on-flight experience in 2014
Captain Crespigny had just taken off from Singapore’s Changi Airport, bound for Sydney when the incident occurred.
Qantas flight QF32 was headed to Australia from London with 469 people onboard in 2010.
The plane ascended above 6,000 feet in good weather with the seat belt sign about to be turned off.
Just four minutes into the flight, the engine then exploded in the first failure in the history of the Airbus A380.
Leaking engine oil created a fire front that burnt through seals, then advanced up against the intermediate turbine disc
In his new book 'FLY! Life Lessons From The Cockpit Of QF32', he explained he first heard a “relatively small boom” followed by a “huge boom" like he had never heard before.
Pilots are trained to fly with both an engine fire and a broken engine, but he explained what happened next was unprecedented.
In an extract revealed by news.co.au, he said: “Leaking engine oil created a fire front that burnt through seals, then advanced up against the intermediate turbine disc.”
Due to a loss in thrust, the plane is made to automatically increase fuel flow.
“The increased fuel flow generated higher gas flows that spun up the now disconnected 160kg turbine disc until it burst like a supernova. Hundreds of pieces of shrapnel blasted through the engine, travelling at more than 2.6 times the speed of sound,” he explained.
The plane was then left with under half of the controls still working and was completely out of balance.
All the other engines were not operating correctly, with the left wing also badly damaged.
Pilot Crespigny said: “In four years of flying A380s I’d never seen more than two or three failed systems during a flight.”
He realised he needed to land back at Changi Airport, at a high speed due to malfunctioning breaks and too heavy due to excess fuel they could not jettison.
Amazingly, the plane came to a stop just 100m from the end of the runway.
Passengers were not able to evacuate immediately. The brakes which were hot due to the speed of the landing were near to the leaking fuel, which could have caused another fire.
Eventually, fire crews which greeted the plane managed to hose water onto the brakes and fuel with foam to stop the engines, which could not be shut down due to the failures.
Two hours after landing, all passengers and crew safely departed the plane.
A passenger at the time said she could see the “holes in the wing” in a video with the Associated Press and praised the “wonderful crew” for helping them.
An investigation by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau was launched after the incident which took 966 days, the longest in its history.