This Almost Was Australia's Worst Air Crash | Emirates Flight 407

Footage: @N125AS and The ATSB

This is the story of Emirates flight 407, On the night of the 20th of march 2009 an emirates A340 was to fly from melbourne to dubai with 275 people onboard. The flight was to depart at 10:25 pm local time and the flying time was 14 hours and 8 minutes. Going off topic for a second it feels kind of weird seeing the emirates livery on a quad engined plane thats not the A380, I didn't know that they used to operate the A340 did you?

As they prepped for departure the pilots were busy in the cockpit getting the plane getting ready for the departure. The first officer was on a laptop known as the electronic flight bag, he would be using this laptop to calculate the takeoff metrics for runway 16. Its a simple process really, you put in parameters like the wind direction, take off weight, altimeter setting , temperature air conditioning , flaps runway condition and a whole host of data and it gives you the performance data for that take off, what power setting to set your engines to, their reference speeds that sort of thing. With all of that calculated they copied all of that data onto the master flight plan.

As the crew discussed the instrument departure from melbourne the laptop was handed to the captain who type the data into the plane's computers. The first officer was in contact with the tower for the clearances that they needed. The captain had finished entering the data into the flight management computer and he checked with the first officer and the master flight plan to make sure that he had done everything correctly. They checked again, the first officer read out the take off weight of the plane from the flight management system of the plane, the take off weight was 361.9 tonnes but the first officer read it out as 326.9 tonnes, he immediately corrected himself and stated 362.9 tonnes as their take off weight, one tonne was added to the take off weight to account for any last minute changes made to the plane. At 10:18 pm the plane was pushed back from the gate 7 minutes ahead of schedule. At 10:30 pm it was at the northern end of runway 16 ready to take off, a plane was on final and flight 407 was given the all clear to take off before it landed, the pilots lined up and set the engines to take off power.

10:31 and 53 seconds they hit the calculated rotate speed. The captain who was the pilot monitoring called out “rotate” the first officer pulled back on the stick. But the nose barely budged, the captain called out rotate again, the first officer pulled back even more the nose rose up slowly but the plane did not take off it was still on the ground. Sensing that something was wrong the captain immediately pushed the throttles to TO/GA or go around power. The four rolls royce trent engines reacted quickly. As the plane accelerated it ran out of runway. It went through the stop way and a grassy part beyond the runway but three seconds after full power was commanded the plane was airborne. It was a close call So close infact that the a340 had knocked out a light on the runway and the ILS Antenna for runway 16, runway 16 did not have ILS anymore but they were airborne.

Melbourne ATC came on and told the pilots that they had just had a tailstrike and so the pilots decided to land to assess the damage. They climbed to 7000 feet to dump some fuel so that a safe landing could be attempted, the plane was fueled up for a 14 hour flight and as of right now it was too heavy for a landing. As they climbed the relief first officer noted that the plane was not pressurizing the tail strike must have done some damage, the captain immediately asked the relief first officer to pull up the checklist for a tail strike, but he or she could not find it.

[DDelusionMusic]

Pilot: We had a tail strike we would like to return to airport. Give me the localizer frequency.
ATC: Congratulations sir you just broke it.

[morenofranco]

Lesson from Carpentry: "Measure Twice! You can Only Cut Once!"

[Slynsmiley]

I attended an airline safety investigator conference some time after this accident. An investigator from the ATSB gave a presentation into the investigation of this accident and findings.

At the end, questions were invited from the audience of about 350 professional senior aircrew and investigators. The first question was the obvious one: “ Why didn’t you discuss crew fatigue as a causal factor in the investigation and accident report”. After staring at the ceiling for about 10 seconds, the response from the ATSB person was shocking- “We determined very early in the investigation that fatigue was not an issue in this case”. You could have heard a pin drop! The audience could not believe what we had just heard!

There was, in pretty much everybody’s opinion, that interference into the investigation was influenced by the UAE government ( who owns Emirates) and the Australian government. Note that the ATSB is NOT a fearless, independent body as was the excellent BASI (which was dissolved because it WAS independent, effective and frequently embarrassed the regulator). There is absolutely no doubt in the minds of many that the UAE government told the Australian government that it did not want the state of fatigue for the crew ( which was know to be high) to be discussed in the report and the Australian government acceded to this request.

The crew were all terminated on their arrival back in Dubai.

[rilmar]

I was binging your videos right now, to see a new one made me overjoyed. I am not ashamed to admit that for the last two weeks plane crashes and aviation in general have been my obsession

[mileswhite]

Regardless, the A340 lives on with a perfect safety record

[AnujFalcon]

Moral of the story: Don't overwork/rush the flight crew.

[tevitasteen]

Consistent images of the same aircraft type and livery that you’re reporting on makes a huge difference and is less distracting. Well done great vid!

[andyhill]

A lucky escape from a serious human error.

[Disablednoob]

I'm currently a KC-10 Flight Engineer. We have to manually compute Takeoff and landing data (TOLD) and we do this exact procedure by using charts and such. We also do flexible takeoffs and trick the thrust rating computer to give us less power.
One very basic told card takes an average of 20 minutes to complete. We can use a computer once you show proficiency at manual TOLD. But most elect to still use manual TOLD

[ParikshitBhujbal]

The Emirates management are know to overwork their crews, the pilot still did a good job at landing the plane safely!

[timgooding]

The city I live in and I never heard about this incident until today. Cheers.

[TheHayabusa]

After the incident, the entire crew were returned to their normal layover hotel, (Hilton On The Park) and then received strict instructions from Emirates management that they were forbidden to communicate to any persons, including family over the incident and that their mobile phones would be monitored for any such activity. Goes to show that EK regards social media over crew welfare.

[Mysticlambo]

"Runway 16 did not have ILS anymore, but they were airborne" lolol

[dseanjackson]

Love your videos dude, great work!

Related - at Southwest we used to enter our performance numbers the same way as the crew in this incident. Years ago we changed to a new system that basically inputs the numbers automatically for us (straight into the airplane's computer) so there's less likelihood of an error like this.

[meirionowen]

Three cheers for Rols Royce engines, saving the day once again.

[colombogermano]

The A340 was a great plane. It is sad that it is out of service, except from some government models waiting for replacement. Of course, twin-engine ariplanes are easier and less costly to maintain and the new engines are "more environmentally friendly and economical". As far as I know, the A340 is, up until now, free from accidents involving fatalities since its first flight in 1991.

[RaivoltG]

You do such a great job bringing these flights to life! I, like many others have left many comments, there isn't an episode that isn't at least, very good! I'm leaving comments now to help with the algorithm that recommends videos! Great channel, you put in a lot of hard work and it shows! I wish you the very best in your life and your channel! Keep up your great work! Thank you!!

[escaperoomleander]

"Hey, you know where we should put antennas and stuff?"
"At the end of runways?"
"At the end of runways."
"Or maybe off to the side."
"No, the ends are better."
"Yeah. And maybe the occasional small warehouse."

[ivebeenmemed]

Love the footage of the A340, keep up the good work, you deserve way more subscribers.

[DLWELD]

How odd that there is that manual "break" in the controls - laptop calculates the correct numbers, and then the crew manually transfers these critical numbers to the actual aircraft computer. Seems having the laptop integrated would make more sense.