Categories: uncategorized
Date: 18 January 2008 13:05:38
With yesterday's failed landing at Heathrow thoughts took me back to the Concorde crash in Paris. Then I was based at GE Aircraft Engines, where they overhauled the engines. For the next few days things were very tense, their were nervous meetings and many people wandered quietly along the corridors and across the repair shop floors.
The problem with aircraft is that there are many things that can go wrong, especially so on aircraft built in the last 15 years. As with Concorde and the initial 9/11 attacks, no one knew exactly what had happened when the first reports came in; the first reports were that the main under carriage had collapsed.
When I heard that the crash had probably occured due to power failure I immediately thought of the people in the various Rolls Royce and GE engine shops. BA 777 are powered by either GE90 or Rolls Royce Trent 800 engines - though this is overlooked by the media who only mention the Trents. They will already have people meeting the air accident investigators to begin the task of discovering th ecause of the crash.
Thankfully there was no loss of life and the crash was not too serious. This means that the flight recorders will be easily accesible and quickly analysed. We should know very shortly the cause and what remedial action can be taken to ensure that a similar event does not occur.
We should all be grateful that this did not happen a few minutes earlier. Considering the population density around Heathrow we could have seen many lives lost.
Yet, with today's 24 hour news operations, the networks are always trying to fill dead air to stretch the stories out. The BBC were guilty of this yesterday when they tried to get an Air Accident Investigator to commit to a cause, even after he'd stated that he wouldn't speculate without some evidence. He was met wit the phrase: "We don't want to speculate on this but what do you think...."