I watched in horror as blaze ravaged plane & left holes in wings at 30,000ft… but most terrifying moment was yet to come
Watch as passengers and crew relive two hours of hell aboard a burning plane
IT was set to be the holiday of a lifetime, with proud gran Susie Pratchett flying across the world to meet her grandson in Australia for the first time.
But the dream trip, in November 2010, turned into a terrifying nightmare when the Qantas plane she was on caught fire, thousands of feet in the air, and began breaking apart.
An explosion caused one engine to fail and set ablaze, the plane was leaking jet fuel and the aircraft’s state-of-the-art computer system had gone haywire.
For the five pilots on board it was a battle of man against a gigantic machine as one false move could spark fatal disaster for the 440 passengers and 24 crew on the Airbus 380.
Susie – who saw the flames flash under the plane and holes in the wings – feared she would die.
Miraculously, after a dramatic one hour and 45 minutes of sheer panic, the super-skilled Captain Richard Champion de Crespigny and his team managed to land the stricken plane and evacuate everyone to safety.
Susie, 64, tells The Sun: “I do look on it as the luckiest day of my life, better than winning the lottery.
“Me and my husband met the captain two years later at a hotel in London – he tried to meet as many people as he could.
“I was so nervous and it still makes me feel funny because he walked in and all three of us cried. I knew that this man had saved my life. He knew what he had done – he had saved 500 people’s lives.
“He is my hero, the most incredible man. I truly believe if he hadn’t been the captain we wouldn’t have survived.”
Terrifying bang
Qantas flight 32 had touched down in Singapore from London to refuel for the final leg of its journey to Sydney, Australia, on November 4, 2010.
“I was really excited and very nervous because I had hardly ever flown and never on my own,” says Susie, from Newark, Nottinghamshire.
“It was something I knew I had to do. The main reason for going was to meet my grandson. I wanted to meet him and let him and his mum know that even though they were so far away they were always going to be part of our lives. It was very important.”
The Airbus 380 – the biggest passenger aircraft ever flown – had a wing spin of 80m meaning airports had to upgrade their infrastructure to accommodate it, as well as a new state of the art computer system – E-Cam – which detected problems and recommended pilot action.
In charge was Captain Richard, flying with first officer Matt Hicks and second officer Mark Johnson. There were also two additional check pilots – including Captain Dave Evans, who was there to do a route check on Captain Richard, an annual requirement for a pilot’s licence.
The team of five boasted over 71,000 flight hours between them – making them one of the most experienced A380 crews on the planet.
Susie Pratchett: “When I found my seat I was on the aisle but I could see through the window and see the wing.
“My friend told me that, if you put the webcam on, you can watch the plane actually taking off so I did that. It was really exciting.”
At 10.01 five minutes after take off, at around 7,000 ft, the passengers heard an almighty bang.
“There was this really loud bang,” says Susie. “In fact it was like a double bang. And at the same time I saw this flash of flame come from under the plane, under the wing, because I was watching the webcam. It flashed and went backwards and then disappeared.
“The man next to me said ‘Oh God, there are holes in the wing’. I looked at the wing and then I whispered to him ‘I’ve just seen flames under the plane.’
“I daren’t say it loud because there were families around me. My first thought was ‘what are my family going to do? My mum had just died in a car crash and now they are going to lose me. What are they going to do?’ I had a photograph of them in a bum bag around my waist which I got out so I could look at them.
“Then I started thinking about myself. ‘I hope it is quick, I hope we don’t burn or we don’t drown.’ But then my brain started to think, ‘well if we do go into the sea I can swim.’
“All these things go through your head. I was trying to remember what they said to do if the masks drop down. Can I survive it if we do crash? My survival instinct kicked in straight away.
“But my main worry was my family. They are not going to know what my last minutes were and how I was feeling. I know this sounds silly, but I thought ‘they won’t even have a body’.”
Engine failure
Susie and her fellow passengers would have a lot of time to think the worst. That first explosion was the start of almost two hours of hell.
In the cockpit, the master warning alarm was sounding and the E-Cam, which is meant to tell the pilots precisely what is wrong with the plane, was showing erratic warning messages.
Speaking on a new Channel Five documentary series, Terror at 30,000ft, check pilot David Evans recalls: “We really didn’t understand what had happened initially, other than the fact that there was an engine problem.”
In the cabin, service manager Michael Von Reth instructed his team to move into emergency mode. But knowing passengers look to the cabin crew for reassurance, he knew they all had to remain calm.
“I was surprised how calm I was,” he says. “Like a robot. It is amazing how your brain works, the capacity you have. I concentrated completely on the cabin because worrying about the wing and the holes and losing the fuel, I can’t do anything about that.
“It worked initially but then some of the crew got teary which was my biggest problem. I don’t want crying crew’. If you lose the cabin that is it, that’s the end of it. Put simply, you don’t want a panic, full stop.”
The E-Cam informed the pilots of an engine number two failure. They didn’t know the extent of the damage but they needed to keep the plane in the air.
My main worry was my family. They are not going to know what my last minutes were and how I was feeling. I know this sounds silly, but I thought ‘they won’t even have a body’
Passenger Susie Pratchett
Dave Evans says: “We needed some thrust to keep the aeroplane at that speed so Richard pulled all four thrust levers up. But because the engine hadn’t been properly shut down he was introducing fuel into a very damaged engine and it subsequently caught fire.”
The pilots fired some fire extinguisher into the engine, but that didn’t seem to work.
“All of a sudden we are going into an unknown realm,” says Dave Evans. “Richard made an emergency call, we need to come back.”
Michael was waiting for instructions from the cockpit, but he knew the pilots would be under immense pressure, so he decided to make an announcement to calm the passengers.
Susie says: “The tone of voice was so chilled, so relaxed, and when he was done talking I remember thinking that everything was absolutely fine.”
Michael explains: “It is absolutely vital for crew to be able to manage the situation without creating panic. But then I started getting nervous myself.
“The air was stifling and it would have needed only one person to scream and things could have started to fall apart. Then the captain rang and I told him ‘we are losing fuel and we have a big hole in the wing.’ He said he would send somebody down.”
Susie says: “People were calm but I think a lot of that was down to the crew on the plane. One of the pilots came out and he leaned over the chair in front of me to look at the wing and even he was calm.
“He just said, ‘obviously we are going to have to go back to Singapore but everything is fine.’ They kept everything calm.
“The manager of the cabin crew was just amazing, but they must’ve been petrified. They must’ve known more than we did about exactly what was going on.
“There was a family in front of me with very young children. The mum kept looking at me and asking if the wing was OK and I kept saying ‘yes it’s fine’. Her husband kept giving me the thumbs up behind her back because she must’ve been terrified.
“She had her kids with her and I only had to think about me. I don’t know how she must’ve been feeling.”
Fuel danger
Each wing of the plane was filled with highly flammable fuel, so with fire raging, and the computer system failing, the pilots needed a fail-safe plan.
Dave Evans says: “The E-Cam system couldn’t really cope with the number of failures that it was sensing. Things are becoming very serious.”
Around 17 minutes after engine failure the pilots contacted air traffic control and agreed a holding pattern to buy time to work out a plan.
The Captain wanted to stay within 30 miles of the airport in case all four engines failed and he had to glide the plane into land, so they were advised to circle the plane over the South China Sea.
Unbeknown to the pilots a small pipe carrying oil to cool and lubricate engine number two had cracked, spilling oil into the hottest part of the engine and causing an uncontained engine explosion.
This caused the turbine disc to burst, cutting into the wing, the inner fuel pipe, the body of the plane and through 650 electronic cables responsible for flying and landing the aircraft.
Pieces of hot metal had smashed into all parts of the plane causing catastrophic damage. As well as losing half the braking system, the left wing was rapidly leaking fuel meaning the right wing was 10 tons heavier, leaving the two storey super jumbo dangerously unbalanced for landing.
Terrifying touchdown
Dave Evans says: “I started experimenting by taking things out that I thought would be insignificant to the performance. And it told us we could land but at a very high speed.
“We have got a very small margin on a 4,000 metre runway to stop. So we have got to try to slow down once we touch down but we only had partial brakes to do that. That means our approach speed is fast and our rate of descent is fast.
“The worst case scenario is we don’t stop. We overrun.”
The pilots may have outsmarted the computer system by doing their own calculations but if they were wrong, they would overshoot the runway and it would be fatal.
Singapore air traffic control cleared the flight for its final approach and fire engines and ambulances were on standby on the runway.
“When the plane was coming into land I remember thinking, ‘is this going to be it?’” Says Susie “There were people holding hands. It was very tense. I had butterflies, we didn’t know what was going to happen.
“It was very fast, and it seemed to go on and on. I think we only had 100m left of a three mile runway. When we stopped everybody cheered and clapped.”
But that wasn’t the end of the drama. The engine fire was still raging, the brakes were white hot and fuel was gushing out of the plane, making it a tinderbox ready to explode.
The crew couldn’t risk evacuating the flight while the engine was still firing, nor until fire crews had made it safe. So there was a further agonising wait until they could disembark.
“When they wouldn’t let us off people were starting to wonder why,” says Susie. “They just kept telling us to stay calm and they would let us know when it was our turn to get off.
“I could just see these people in foil suits trying to put out the engine. Fuel was gushing out onto the runway.
“I call it the luckiest day of my life. There was no wind so the fuel didn’t blow into the white hot brakes. Also, if we hadn’t had the pilot that we did I don’t believe we would have landed and Singapore had a three mile runway. Everything went in our favour.”
After the near-disaster, Captain Richard Champion de Crespigny was awarded a Member of the Order of Australia gong for landing the plane without a single injury.
Qantas grounded the A380 fleet while the Australian Transport Bureau carried out an investigation.
The investigation found that a small stub pipe manufactured by Rolls Royce had been faulty and they came to a $100 million out of court settlement with Qantas.
Susie flew on to Sydney to meet her grandson Oliver and has continued to fly to this day.
She says: “It hasn’t put me off flying at all. If an aeroplane can stay in the air with all the damage it had, and then land, then aeroplanes must be built to an amazing standard. If it can survive that, it can survive anything.”
Terror at 30,000 Feet continues on Friday at 9pm on Channel 5, Stream now on My5.