Flight BA 38: The Fate of a Boing 777

5.1 Accident and Impact

After a smooth and uneventful routine flight over Siberia and Norway, the two pilots, Pete Burkill and John Coward, got ready for approaching London Heathrow Airport. Going through the checklist for preparing a landing, everything appeared perfectly normal, except for the fact that they had over ten tonnes of extra fuel available. That in itself was somewhat unusual because normally the engines would not have saved this much fuel. But this particular flight had been exceptionally smooth without any turbulences, changes of the height level, or speed corrections, which explained why less fuel had been burnt than previously expected. The Captain did not worry about that at all, though. It just meant that they wouldn't be getting short on fuel in case they faced some sort of unexpected delay or had to abort the landing, which Burkill actually appreciated.

Nearing Heathrow Airport, the plane experienced some turbulence for the first time during the 10 hour flight, which led to the pilots keeping the autopilot on a little longer than usual during the final approach. The autopilot could react faster to constantly changing wind speeds than the pilots, who were responsible for the safety of the plane and passengers. At 1,000 feet and 45 seconds before impact, tower control gave the cockpit crew clearance to land on runway 27 left.

35 seconds before impact, the aircraft was 500 feet from the ground. In aviation, this height is of great importance, because it is the last opportunity to safely cancel the approach if necessary. In Speedbird 38's case, Burkill decided to continue with the runway already in visual range. But just seconds afterwards, Senior First Officer John Coward, who was flying the aircraft during the landing, announced that he couldn't get any power on either of the two engines.

 Being dangerously close to the ground in one of the most critical phases of the flight, the pilots had to diagnose the problem immediately to avoid potentially fatal consequences. Burkill and Coward checked the instruments, which informed them that they were experiencing a double engine failure, which is statistically speaking highly unlikely. Nevertheless, the pilots knew they had to react fast, because the instruments also told them that they were about to crash land in less than half a minute.

Burkill was conscious of the fact that they were currently experiencing what trainers call a worst case scenario. It meant that there were no books, no checklists covering such an incident, so the two pilots couldn't refer to any reference material based on a previous similar occurrence to help them avoid a fatal crash. In addition, they had received no formal training preparing them for the crisis, since it simply hadn't been known that something like that could actually happen.

Despite the seemingly hopeless situation, Burkill's training kicked in and he started working on the problem by using the "PPP-rule", while First Officer Coward struggled with the controls.

The three P's stand for "Plane, Path People". It's a guideline for pilots in which order they should handle what needs to be taken care of to resolve the issues as fast, efficiently, and safe as possible.

Burkill had already taken care of the first point (Plane) by diagnosing the double engine failure, so now he could concentrate on the second point, which meant dealing with the path the aircraft took. He was very aware of the fact that everyone would die on impact if the plane was to continue on its current path. Evaluating the situation in his mind, Burkill reacted only seconds later, in fact almost immediately, by moving the handle controlling the flaps from position 30 to position 25. The Captain did this to reduce the drag in order to clear the small neighborhood near the airport and the close A30  Southern Perimeter Street, and also to avoid impact into the local petrol station.

The flaps are essential components of every aircraft's wing. They play an important role during landing.

Flaps

The more the flaps are moved out, the higher the drag is the plane experiences. This way, pilots can slow down the aircraft during flight until reaching the correct velocity for landing.

Flaps generating drag

John Coward had decided earlier to do a flap 30 landing, which means that the flaps reach out as far as possible and create a lot of drag. Pete Burkill, knowing that he had to reduce the drag to make it safely over the inhabited area, moved the small handle from 30 to 25.

Finally Burkill had to concentrate on the people. He decided that it would be better for the passengers and the crew members to be unaware of the upcoming accident, so that their bodies would be under less stress during impact. In addition to that, there had been no time for the cabin crew to instruct the passengers how to execute the brace position correctly, so some of them would have gotten it wrong. (Doing the brace position incorrectly can actually be quite dangerous.)

Actually, there would have been a possibility of alerting the crew members without letting the passengers know. But doing that would have resulted in two of the stewardesses going straight to the cockpit to find out what was happening, which Burkill considered "not exactly a good idea" since the plane was about to crash-land in a few seconds.

Speedbird 38 cleared the airport's perimeter fence and the perimeter street by only 8 meters before hitting the muddy ground violently just 330 meters short of the runway. Unbeknownst to the pilots, this moment the at-the-time Prime Minister Gordon Brown was being driven to the terminal for his own departure later that day while Speedbird 38 was coming down on top of him.

Hitting the grass

Because of an in fact dangerously low groundspeed of only 108 knots, which proved an advantage in Speedbird 38's case, the plane juddered 370 meters over the grass and eventually stopped on the runway.

Map of the crash site

Immediately after impact, Burkill and Coward followed the emergency checklist to prevent fire, which is always a grave danger after a crash landing because kerosine (fuel) is highly flammable. Burkill then gave the order to evacuate, which was carried out perfectly by the cabin crew. In the end 47 of the 152 people on board got injured, only one of them seriously. There were no casualties.

Flight BA 38: The Fate of a Boing 777