The Wondering Brit

While not a great fan of Airbus because to me the Boeing 777 is about the best aircraft to fly on, I recieved an email this week that has been doing the rounds that left me gobsmacked!! check this out…

This brand spanking new Airbus 340-600, sat just outside its hangar in Toulouse , France without  a single hour of airtime. Now paint it in Airline colours and continue reading…

Enter the Arab flight crew of Abu Dhabi Aircraft Technologies (ADAT) to conduct pre-delivery tests on the  ground, such as engine run-ups prior to delivery to Etihad Airways in Abu Dhabi .
The ADAT crew taxied the A340-600 to the run-up area.

Then they took all Four engines to takeoff power with a virtually empty aircraft. Not having Read the run-up manuals, they had no clue just how light an empty A340-600 Really is.

The takeoff warning horn was blaring away in the cockpit because they had All 4 engines at full power. The aircraft computers thought they were trying to take off, but it had not been configured properly (flaps/slats, etc..)

Then one of the ADAT crew decided to pull the circuit breaker on the Ground Proximity Sensor to silence the alarm. This fools the aircraft into thinking it is in the air.

The computers automatically released all the Brakes and set the aircraft rocketing forward. The ADAT crew had no idea that this is a safety feature so that pilots can’t land with the brakes on.

Not one member of the seven-man Arab crew was smart enough to throttle back the engines from their max power setting, so the $200 million brand-new Aircraft crashed into a blast barrier, totalling it.
The extent of injuries to the crew is unknown due to the news blackout in the major media in France and elsewhere.
Finally, the photos are starting to leak out.

OUCH!!!!

I’d like to add something here, you see when they designed the Boeing 777 – they did so around one basic idea; trying to break it, crash and just generally destroy it, thus designing that exact possibility out of the basic aircraft. Airbus on the other hand, simply do not do this, there first Airbus crashed at the Paris Airshow for that very same reason sadly. Boeing 777′s - with only one real incident that was not even related to the actual 777 systems has not had such silly mistakes happen to it.

That said – what confidence does it install in anyone that a flight crew is more than happy to start pulling breakers out just to silence and alarm?!

As they say in the world of aviation:   Flying, 99.9% boredom,  0.01 % shear bloody terror!!