SmartWings flight 6H-734 had to divert and make an emergency landing in Kosice, Slovakia, on May 29th.
The Boeing 737-800 plane heading from Warsaw, Poland, to Tel Aviv, Israel, was diverted after it lost cabin pressure.
The plane landed safely. All passengers and crew members remained unharmed.
KLM flight KL-1576 had to go around before making a safe landing at Amsterdam Airport Schiphol, Netherlands, on January 27.
The Boeing 737-800, en-route from Athens, Greece, had to fly around the airport due to some technical problem.
The plane landed safely.
No injuries were reported.
Pictured: A United Express (Colgan Air) Saab 340B at Washington – Dulles International
Click to view full size photo at Airliners.net
Contact photographer AviaStar
What: United Airlines Express / Pinnacle Airlines / Colgan Airlines two-engine SAAB 340 en route from Parkersburg, WV
Where: Dulles International Airport
When: 3:35pm Oct 24 2009
Who: 11 passengers
Why: While en route from West Virginia, the flight suffered turbulence, injuring a flight attendant and a passenger. Both struck their heads.
The plane made an emergency landing amid heavy rain and with gusty winds at Dulles; and both injured women were taken by ambulance to the hospital. An injured male passenger was treated at the airport.
American Airlines flight AA-3478 had to return and make an emergency landing in Champaign, Illinois, on December 13th.
The plane took off for O’Hare International Airport, Chicago, Illinois, but had to turn back after the crew noticed fumes in the cockpit.
The plane landed back safely. All eighteen people aboard remained unharmed.
The Asiana investigation continues.
Back in July, the pilot who was insecure about making a visual approach in a 777 crashed at San Francisco International Airport on a visual approach in Asiana Flight 214’s Boeing 777. Specifically, he told NTSB investigators “it was very difficult to perform a visual approach with a heavy airplane.” The glideslope was not working at the San Francisco airport, and that was an instrument the (*undertrained) pilot was relying on. The plane came in so low the tail struck the seawall and broke off. The video below shows the plane rotate 360 degrees and catch fire by the runway.
Video with news commentary
Before impact, the relief pilot in the jump seat repeated several times “sink rate” trying to warn the pilots at the controls that the jet was too quickly losing altitude. One of the pilots said “It’s low.” Then there was a stick shaker alert (which occurs when the plane is about to stall from flying too slowly. I once had a pilot do a presentation that included the disturbing grinding of the stick shaker alarm as it violently vibrated the control yoke. It’s an alarming direction to the pilots to increase thrust.)
When the stick shaker went off, the instructor called for a go around. It went off four seconds before impact. It was too late.
Both the instructor and the captain were relying on the auto throttle, and both were unaware it was off.
I’m not discounting the wounds of the injured, nor those three deaths, nor the tragedy of one of the teen victims being run over by an airport crash tender. (That’s a whole tragedy by itself—who knows if she might have survived but for being so obscured by foam that she was not visible to crash responders—through the firemen who carried her out surely must have known she was there.)
A dozen critically injured, a hundred-sixty-nine injured, but only three deaths.
It’s nothing short of a miracle. Especially on inspecting the condition of the burned out shell of the hull. Especially on reviewing the just-released surveillance video that shows the plane splintering after impacting the firewall, cartwheeling like a crippled gymnast down the runway and dissolving into a cloud of dust and flame. No jet fuel fire here——leaking oil ignited as it poured on to a hot engine.
The Kazan crash (Tatarstan Airlines Flight 363) from November 17th is fresh in my mind. Everyone aboard–fifty people (forty-four passengers and six crew) all died. The plane just fell from the sky while landing at an impossible 75-degree-nose-down attitude, piloted by a pilot whose license is apparently fake. Everyone in that crash died. (Tatarstan surveillance below.)
Of course one can see the physics—that everyone on the Tatarstan flight received the full direct impact, versus how the rolling of the Asiana plane dispersed some of the impact energy. Still, there is tremendous force in a crash.
I know I should be talking about pilot training, because this is yet another crash that appears to be due to pilots becoming too dependent on technology. But I will focus on that another day. Right now, I am overwhelmed after looking at the crash tape.
Asiana—Cartwheeling Catastrophe
I am surprised that I have neither heard or seen choruses of amazement that all but three people survived the rolling catastrophe in San Francisco. Some credit should perhaps go to the rescue crew, quick actions of the cabin crew, performance of the emergency slides, and maybe even the aerodynamics of the 777 whose seats are required to withstand 16g of dynamic force.
Sure, there was error involved in this crash, but when you look at the survival rate, some credit is due to the 5.5 billion Boeing put into research, development and safety of the 777.
Transavia Airlines flight HV-9513 made a safe landing following a bird strike near Berlin Schonefeld Airport, Germany, on March 15th.
The incident happened when the Boeing 737-700 plane flying from Munich, Germany, was on final approach.
The plane continued for a safe landing. All passengers and crew members remained safe.
Airlinair flight A5-4326 had to return for an emergency landing in Lyon, France, on March 11th.
The plane operating on behalf of Hop! Airlines took off for Luxembourg, but had to return shortly afterwards due to a cracked windshield.
The plane landed safely. Everyone aboard remained unharmed.
The passengers were accommodated in other flights.
