The world's largest commercial airliner.
Is coming apart in mid air.
We're losing an engine.
There was fuel leaking from the aircraft.
There was damage to the aircraft flight controls.
Pilots face an avalanche of warnings.
What have you got for me now?
Critical systems are failing throughout the gigantic plane.
What's going on up there?
The lives of 440 passengers are at risk.
And the crisis quickly escalates from bad...
It's one system after another.
to catastrophic.
The computer says we can't make it.
Dammit.
This is like the simulator exercise from hell.
Mayday! Mayday!
Qantas Flight 32
is making a refuelling stop in Singapore.
The Airbus A380 is more than halfway
through a marathon 22-hour flight,
all the way from London to Sydney, Australia.
After 2 hours on the ground
the crew is nearly ready to get the plane back in the air.
Very few pilots are trained to captain an A380.
Former fighter pilot
Richard de Crespigny is in that elite rank.
Everyone ready for take off?
The A380 is the latest generation of...
innovation, automation and excellence,
and it's the largest, most complex aircraft in the sky.
The main duty on this flight for First Officer Matt Hicks
is to monitor the vast number of electronic gauges
and computer displays needed to fly this state-of-the-art plane.
Everything's looking good here, Richard.
All of us had flown together at some stage.
It just makes it easier
because there's no, first day greetings
or, you know, personality uncertainties.
Everyone knew each other pretty well.
Mark Johnson is the second officer.
Mark, any worries?
All good back here.
The 3 pilots will take turns
flying the plane during the remaining 7 hours of the flight.
The gigantic A380 is a true double-decker,
the first jet ever built
with 2 decks running the entire length of the plane.
It dwarfs every other airliner in the sky,
with enough space for as many as 525 passengers.
I hadn't realised the enormity of how large a 380 was.
The cabin, the inside of the A380, just everything seemed bigger
but more rows and upstairs.
On today's flight
Captain De Crespigny's performance is being evaluated.
It's a yearly requirement for every Qantas pilot.
The check captains performing the task
are veterans Harry Wubben
and Dave Evans.
Some people, are affected by checks.
They get a bit nervous
so we try to keep that, as easy as possible.
Okay, so everyone's happy.
Richard, obviously just being checked
he's a bit, you know, tentative in taxiing out.
Somebody asked if everything's, everyone happy.
I said...
Yeah, I'm happy. Just...
don't crash.
(Qantas 3-2 cleared for take off)
(runway 20 centre.)
Qantas 32 cleared for take off.
Okay, we're on the roll.
Thrust set. 80 knots.
The more automated aircraft get
it doesn't necessarily make them easier to fly,
just makes them different to fly.
The A380
is powered by 4 massive Rolls Royce engines,
Each can deliver 72,000 pounds of thrust.
They design wonderful engines, very reliable.
V-1. Rotate.
At 9:57 am local time
Qantas 32 lifts off right on schedule.
Passengers get a unique view of the take off.
Thanks to a camera mounted on the A380's tail.
The atmosphere in the cabin was, was perfectly casual.
We were chatting away the whole time since we,
we, since we were seated.
There are 250,000 sensors
monitoring every flight function on the aircraft.
Autopilot.
On.
This is by far the most automated passenger jet in the skies.
Climb out checklist, please.
Auto thrust is set and ECAM is clear.
The ECAM, or electronic centralised aircraft monitor,
keeps watch over the myriad of onboard systems
and alerts the crew
to even the slightest malfunction.
It's 10:01 am.
The pilots are just 4 minutes into the flight.
We're losing an engine.
It's like a backfire in your car.
There was a loud explosion. A huge explosion.
Everybody just said, 'what was that?'
My reaction immediately I think was...
'Oh, my goodness, maybe this is it.'
The first thought when you're, when it goes bang is...
engine failure, possibly severe damage.
We've lost number 2.
Holding 7,500 feet.
De Crespigny wastes no time taking over control
from the autopilot.
35 years of flying
tells him what to do next.
I pressed the altitude hold button
which would cause the nose to lie and the aircraft level.
Matt, ECAM actions.
On it.
The captain assigns Hicks
to decipher the ECAM data.
He needs to evaluate every message
and figure out how best to react to each one.
We had to work our way through it
and build up a picture of what was going on with the airplane.
While the Captain summons all his skills as a pilot,
Hicks needs to quickly master
the plane's ECAM computer.
He's facing a barrage of error messages
from seemingly unrelated systems throughout the plane.
You can't really tell how many messages you've got pending.
You know there's more coming
because the screen will give you an arrow at the bottom
indicating that there is another message.
It became very confusing initially
as to why we were seeing so many of them.
Captain De Crespigny needs room to manoeuvre.
Pan-pan-pan. Qantas 32.
Engine failure.
Maintaining 7,400 and current heading.
(Qantas 32, copied.)
(Please let us know how to assist.)
I declared a pan call
and what that does is tell everyone who's listening,
'we have a problem.'
It tells air traffic control,
'clear the airspace and to not annoy us with transmissions.'
'Let us solve the problem.'
But the ECAM warnings just keep coming.
Number 2's overheating.
Their damaged engine is dangerously hot.
This state-of-the-art plane is now in very real danger
of becoming a fireball.
Well we couldn't actually see the engine itself
because it was under the wing.
Oh, my God!
But we could see the stream of the fuel coming out.
The wings of an A380 are filled with tonnes of highly flammable jet fuel.
We were all just wondering what was going to happen next.
The crew wants to cut the flow of fuel
before the damaged engine catches fire.
Number 2 master switch to off?
Confirm.
But it's too late.
An alarm warns the crew the engine is on fire.
An in-flight fire is one of the most dangerous
and unpredictable emergencies any crew can face.
It's nearly always disastrous.
11 July, 1991.
Smoke begins seeping into the cabin of a DC-8
moments after take off from Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.
As the pilots try to land,
flames sweep through the entire cabin and consume the plane
killing all 261 people on board.
On Qantas 32
the crew's only hope of putting out the fire
is to activate the emergency extinguishers
inside the burning engine.
Fire number 2. Push button?
Confirm.
And keep their fingers crossed that it works.
The warning's off. I think the fire's out.
Let's find a way to confirm that, please.
It was stressful. It was difficult.
I mean if you had a fire burning out on the wing
for the duration of the flight you'd be landing pretty quick smart
rather than, taking your time flying around
trying to solve other problems.
Marion Carroll is sitting over the left wing,
giving her a front row seat to the unfolding calamity.
I could see the hole that was in the wing
that had been made by the explosion.
And it seemed from what I could see quite a large hole
like a couple of feet across
and all the metal was jagged and sticking up.
6,300 kilometres away
the Qantas operations centre in Sydney
is getting data transmitted live from the plane.
It's like nothing Engineer Alan Milne has ever seen before.
I'm getting some odd messages off flight 32.
When we saw the messaging coming in from the airplane
it was so diverse,
so many systems, we couldn't, we couldn't just put a finger on it.
Meanwhile, on Batam Island, Indonesia,
locals are finding evidence of an air disaster.
-Falling. -(Falling?)
(Speaking foreign language.)
The wreckage sparks media speculation
that a Qantas plane has fallen from the sky.
At the Australian Transport Safety Bureau,
Kevin Chapman gets word
of disturbing media reports.
If true, he knows he'll soon
be facing the biggest investigation of his career.
The Australian Transport Safety Bureau monitor the media
and we were well aware through the media coverage
that there was some sort of event.
The initial event described in the media
was an airplane had crashed off Indonesia.
Damn.
An A380's gone down in Indonesia. Qantas.
So we were quite concerned at that point.
Explosive engine failure has led to fatal tragedy in the past.
19 July, 1989.
A United Airlines DC-10
bound for Chicago loses an engine mid flight.
Shrapnel severs hydraulic lines
making the plane nearly impossible to control.
The crash landing in Sioux City Iowa
kills 111 of the 296 people onboard.
Back aboard the A380
First Officer Matt Hicks has begun working his way
through a growing avalanche of computerised warnings.
The crew must correctly react to each and every message
before moving on to the next.
Okay, I've cleared slate one and 2.
What have you got for me now? Hydraulics.
It was like taking plates off a serving machine in a restaurant
where you do one checklist and there's another one.
You do that and there's another one,
and another one, and another one, and another one, another one.
In a training environment
you probably only do 2 or 3 consecutive failures.
And in this case I think we had 58,
so it was, a lot more than I'd ever worked through before.
It's been 5 minutes
since the plane's number 2 engine exploded.
Qantas 32
is 70 kilometres south of Singapore
and heading out over the open ocean.
The pilots want to turn back,
but making a U turn is risky
without knowing how badly damaged their plane is.
The list of failures continues to grow,
taxing the pilots' abilities to respond.
One wrong move on their part
could lead to one of the deadliest air disasters
the world has ever seen.
Engineers at the operations centre
are also trying to make sense of the cascade of errors.
Qantas 32
seems to be failing in almost every conceivable way.
No one knows how long the plane can stay in the air.
It's one system after another.
My initial impression was that
it might have actually been an indication problem,
that the airplane was sending us false error messages.
What's going on up there?
Degraded pneumatics, hydraulics, electrics,
power to the left wing shut down.
Flaps, slats and ailerons are damaged but operable.
Dave, I need you to get on the horn to the passengers.
Let them know our situation.
Ladies and gentlemen
(we're just sorting out some engine problems.)
He was very calm and very reassuring...
and I mean it was his tone of voice that was very reassuring.
Captain De Crespigny knows he's running out of time.
The failures are mounting;
his plane may soon be un-flyable.
He needs to get the damaged plane on the ground.
That means turning around and heading back to Singapore.
Singapore, Qantas 3-2.
We require a left turn back towards Singapore.
(Qantas 32)
(Singapore.)
(Turn left heading zero-2-zero.)
Are we stable enough for this turn?
We'll know pretty soon.
De Crespigny takes it inch by inch,
knowing that he could lose control at any moment.
It takes time to prepare the aircraft to land,
to understand the airplane that we're going to land.
But as the time goes on things are getting worse.
So we don't want to stay one minute more in the air than we have to.
Singapore is the largest airport
within 350 kilometres.
Its massive runway
offers the best chance of landing the plane safely.
Singapore runway is 4 kilometres long
and we would normally need 1,800 metres to land on the runway
if we're at maximum landing weight.
But we are 40 tons over our maximum landing weight.
De Crespigny completes the turn back to Singapore.
The manoeuvre gives the crew confidence
that they have some control over this juggernaut.
Making a left turn is one thing,
landing the crippled A380 will be quite another.
The pilots need to know more about the damage
and its possible effects.
Mark why don't you go back and take a look at that wing?
On my way.
We couldn't see the wings from the flight deck.
We can't see the engines.
So Mark would be our eyes and ears to the aircraft.
After a couple of minutes the... one of the pilots came out
and was looking down each window.
And I called to him and said 'well, if you come down to my row'
'you'll get a much better view of the hole in the wing.'
The second officer gets a sobering view.
Johnson can clearly see that
the wing has been punctured straight through from below.
The cause of the damage is obvious,
the inboard left side engine is blown to pieces.
Is, is it bad?
No, we'll be fine. No worries at all.
What can you tell me, Mark?
Number 2's blown apart,
cut holes through the wing and we're leaking fuel.
Good to know.
It was invaluable to send someone back
to physically eyeball the damage on the wing
and to have a pilot come back to you and say,
'hey, look this is the situation,'
and especially someone who you trust,
that's as good as you having a look yourself.
The news helps explain why so many systems are failing.
Vital flight controls run through the wing.
Shrapnel from the demolished engine
has likely destroyed many of them.
There's obviously a lot of hydraulic components
that run through the wings
so that would make sense that
we have damage to the hydraulic system.
It sort of clarifies a lot of the information that you're seeing.
We had so many checklists, 100 in the air,
that it took Matt 55 minutes to stabilise the aircraft
so that this aircraft situation didn't get worse.
That is unprecedented in aviation history.
Knowing why the plane is failing
doesn't make it easier to fly.
The damaged electrical and hydraulic systems
could cause an unexpected failure
while the crew is trying to land.
The pilots decide to circle near the airport
until they can work out a plan.
Dave. I need you to run the numbers on this landing.
Check Captain Dave Evans is called into action.
3 engines, full load, all that.
He uses the A380 landing software
to calculate how much runway they'll need
to bring the huge plane to a stop.
The computer says we can't make it.
The runway's too short.
With the 9 failures that I put into the system
and the surface conditions in Singapore,
at our maximum landing weight
I couldn't come up with an answer.
The A380 is weighed down with fuel.
The plane has burnt almost none
of the 105 tons it took on for the flight to Sydney.
Can we dump some fuel?
That's a good idea but we can't.
The fuel transfer pumps are down.
Dammit.
Can someone tell me what is working?
The heavy load of flammable fuel
means any landing attempt will be extremely dangerous.
We were some 40 tons above our maximum landing weight.
And the heavier you are
the more runway and the higher speeds will be on your approach.
Evans tries his calculations again.
The computer has assumed a worst-case scenario.
He now plugs in some more optimistic numbers.
There is a belief in part of the industry
that computers are infallible
and you always believe a computer.
Now we've used our computers at home to know that's not true.
Okay.
It looks like we can do it
with 139 metres to spare.
139 metres surplus on a 4,000-metre runway is a slim margin
but it's better than a minus 139 metres.
What do we need for our approach speed?
146 knots.
146 knots?
That can't be right.
It's just too slow.
He gave us that speed
to input into our, flight management computer.
And before I input it I thought,
just had to think about it and I thought that just can't be right.
It's just too slow.
Maintaining the right speed on landing is critical.
Too slow and the plane will lose lift,
and plummet to the ground.
Too fast and they could run off the end of the runway and crash.
Add 20 knots. Can we still stop in time?
Good catch, Matt.
Yep. 166 works.
I'd like to think that
we sucked the brains dry of all the pilots in the cockpit
to make one massive brain,
and we used that intelligence to resolve problems on the fly
because these were, these were unexpected events,
the unthinkable events.
At the Qantas operations centre
Milne sees that Qantas 32
has begun its final descent.
Now all he can do is hope the crew
can safely execute this treacherous landing.
They're doing it.
QF 3-2's coming in.
He alerts personnel at the airport
to prepare for the emergency landing of the biggest airliner on earth.
A landing that could end in disaster
for 469 passengers and crew.
We know these guys personally. We know the cabin crew,
and you know it's a, it's, it's a worry.
Singapore approach,
Qantas 32.
We're gonna need a long approach.
And...
you better have fire services standing by.
We're leaking fuel.
(Roger Qantas 32.)
(You're cleared straight in on final 20 miles.)
The 5 seasoned pilots
now use everything they've ever learned about flying.
Flaps 3.
To try to land their plane safely.
Here we go.
De Crespigny still doesn't know
if his plane is capable of the precision needed for a landing.
4,500 feet.
He decides to find out while there's still room for error.
Okay. I'd like to do a control check.
An aircraft where the aerodynamic ability is unknown
you have to prove the aircraft to be safe to fly before you land
and they are called control checks.
Okay, let's see what you can do.
Captain De Crespigny rolls the plane carefully left
to simulate lining up with a runway.
We had degraded roll control.
We had lost 65 percent of our roll control.
So I knew that we had to certify the airplane ourselves
to fly before we landed.
Okay.
As he rolls the plane to the right
there's barely enough control to achieve the manoeuvre.
He's quickly learning the limits of his damaged plane.
If the few flight controls that we have remaining
are working to their limit
then clearly we have very little margin
for manoeuvre when we come to land.
When we did those control checks
I thought it was a bit sluggish at the time and...
I think Richard did as well.
The crew knows they'll only get one shot
at lining up with the middle of the runway.
There can be no last minute adjustments.
Now the crew discovers a potentially catastrophic obstacle.
Landing gear hydraulics are still offline.
The automated system for lowering the landing gear is damaged.
They can only release the gear,
and hope it falls hard enough
to lock itself in place.
-Landing gear down? -Confirmed.
If the gear doesn't lock,
the crew has no hope of landing safely.
For the landing gear
we just needed enough wheels to hold the aircraft
with enough brakes to stop us.
It takes a full 2 minutes
for gravity to pull the landing gear into position.
Full green. Confirm gear down.
You can hear the air noise change as the wheels extend.
That's always a comforting sound to hear them come out.
We're always told anyway that
the take off and the landing are more critical.
So one was...
one was conscious that
we were moving into a more dangerous time coming in to land.
Qantas Flight 32 is now just 2 minutes from touch down.
Better watch your speed, Richard.
Okay. Just a little bit slower.
De Crespigny adjusts the throttle
so that he'll touch down at the slowest speed possible,
making it easier to stop.
(Air speed low.)
Damn, not that slow?
(Air speed low.)
The Airbus is getting close to stalling.
The plane will lose lift and drop like a stone
if the airspeed falls any lower,
too fast and the plane won't stop
before reaching the end of the runway.
It's a precarious balancing act.
There it is. Speed is stable.
If we sped up 3 knots we would run off the runway.
If we slowed down one knot we'd get a speed warning.
De Crespigny's ability
to keep his plane lined up with the runway is severely limited.
Singapore, what's the surface wind?
(170 degrees at 5 knots.)
If the crew misses the runway
there's no way the crippled plane can go around for another try.
Everybody ready?
At the end of the day it just came down to
I think we've covered everything.
Can anyone think of anything?
No? Okay, let's go and do it.
Confirm fire services standing by.
(Affirmative.)
(100.)
You think about your kids, you think about your wife
and that's just what you do and then it was game on again.
(50. 40. 30. 20...)
Just a few feet from the ground
Flight 32's stall alarm
again warns of impending disaster.
So that threw questions up in my mind,
'What is our performance? Is our performance correct?'
'It doesn't appear to be.'
We as passengers were not aware
that so many things had gone completely wrong.
(Air Speed low.)
The plane is gobbling up 80 metres of runway every second.
We had lost one reverser.
We had half the spoilers on the wings not working.
We had the ailerons not making speed brake action.
If they don't slow down quickly
they risk overshooting the runway and hitting terrain
that could rupture the plane's heavily laden fuel tanks.
We just weren't slowing down.
Get into it!
Matt yelled out.
Get into it! Brakes.
'Brakes. Brakes, Rich. Put on the brakes.'
'Pump them. Push them.'
-Brakes. Full brakes, Rich! -I am.
I think I prompted him to brake harder. And he said...
My feet are flat to the floor!
Keep it in, Rich. Hammer them!
Finally, after a gruelling 2 hour ordeal,
Qantas 32
comes to a stop on the same runway it took off from,
with 150 metres to spare.
Hallelujah.
Beautiful.
Welcome to Singapore, guys.
I'm truly proud of everyone in the aircraft that day,
the technical crew, the pilots and the cabin crew,
and I'm really proud of the decisions we made,
the way we worked as a unified, cohesive team.
I thought all, as I'm sure all the other passengers did too,
that the, the crisis was over.
That we'd landed back safely.
It seemed like that was the end of the problems.
But with fuel leaking beside red-hot brake discs,
the danger is far from over.
There was smoke coming from the left hand under carriage.
And there was fuel pouring all around it.
The passengers could see the fuel coming out of the wing.
We had alarm bells in the cockpit now,
The situation was almost as bad as it was in flight
after that engine exploded.
A plane that made a narrow escape in the air
is now in grave danger of going up in flames on the ground.
I kept looking at my watch at that point.
It was quite tense, for me,
inside in that I couldn't see why we couldn't get off.
(This is the captain.)
I want the passengers in their seats
until the fire crew does its job.
Why are they taking so long?
So it was important
at that tense moment to lay foam
and reduce the possibility of fire as best we could.
While the fire crew lays down fire retarding foam
De Crespigny faces a difficult decision,
keep the passengers on board,
or evacuate the massive plane.
And the only answer I can give to anyone saying,
why did or didn't we evacuate is,
with someone in your home
are they safer in your home or are they safer somewhere else?
The argument for getting them off?
British Airtours Flight 28 in 1985.
A 737 abandons take off
after an engine overheats and bursts into flames,
The pilots brake and steer onto a taxiway.
An evacuation gets underway in seconds,
but the fuel fed fire is filling the cabin with smoke.
Firefighters respond quickly.
For many onboard though, it's already too late.
They've been overcome by toxic fumes.
Of the 137 people on the plane only 82 survive.
De Crespigny knows
that the plane's 16 escape slides
can get all the passengers off the plane in 90 seconds.
He also knows there's a high price,
5 to 10 percent of his passengers
will likely suffer a serious injury.
And, an evacuation, once that starts you can't stop it.
And we decided to keep them onboard
because the environment outside the aircraft was toxic.
For the time being,
De Crespigny thinks his passengers are safer on the plane,
than on the fuel soaked runway.
Turning engine master switches to off.
The crew begins the routine of shutting down their engines.
(Qantas 32 please shut down engine number one.)
A radio call from the fire chief
alerts them to yet another problem.
We have. We've shut them all down.
Dammit, he's right.
Number one is still running. Shut it down.
It's not...
I can't shut it down.
The damage to the left wing has cut through the controls
that should have shut down the outboard engine.
We now had an engine that we could not shut down.
And the situation is now just getting more toxic outside.
It's not meant to happen this way.
This was like the simulator exercise from hell.
Firefighters can't do their job
with one of the largest airplane engines in the world
still running a few metres away.
They call Qantas engineer
Alan Milne in Sydney
for advice on getting it shut down.
Well, blast it with all the water you can.
They fired one of their high rate,
water cannons straight down the front of the engine.
Remembering of course these engines are designed
to fly through some pretty torrential rain storms,
and no matter how hard they tried
they could not get that engine to shut down.
It takes a full hour
but emergency crews finally lay down enough foam
to eliminate the risk of a fuel fire.
They move stairs into place
which are safer than escape slides.
This will no longer be an emergency evacuation.
Ladies and gentlemen thanks for your cooperation.
(The aircraft is now secure and we can let you off.)
Oh, thank God.
It's finally safe for the passengers to get off the plane.
Blimey...
When we finally, finally walked off the plane
there was a great sense of relief
and I noticed my legs were shaking,
which I kind of thought oh why are my legs shaking?
I guess maybe I must have been a bit more nervous than I was aware.
All the passengers make it off the plane safely.
But engine number one still refuses to shut down.
-Yeah. -(We're not having any luck)
(with the fire hose.)
(What else can we do?)
Try fire fighting foam. See if that will shut it down.
Eventually we had really no option
other than to switch to the foam, the fire fighting extinguishing foam
and fire that down the front of the engine.
And that managed to shut it down.
3 hours after their dramatic landing
the pilots get the all clear.
(Qantas 32)
(I'm happy to confirm that the engine is finally shut down.)
Thank you Singapore. See you on the runway.
-Good job. -Well done.
Well done, Mark.
Minutes later the flight crew
gets its first look at the damage.
I was shocked.
I had never seen such extraordinary damage to an airplane before.
Later that day Qantas CEO Alan Joyce
makes a stunning announcement.
We will suspend those A380 services
until we are completely confident
that Qantas safe requirements have been met.
It was our CEO himself that asked the question.
'Can you assure me'
'that we won't have this failure again on one of our airplanes?'
And we couldn't answer yes to that.
The future of the entire Qantas fleet of A380s
now depends on understanding what went wrong inside one single engine.
There's really only a very select number of companies
that produce the large engines, the large turbofan engines
and Rolls Royce is up at the top.
What a disaster.
I've never seen anything like it.
Simon Grummett is a materials engineer
with the Australian Transport Safety Bureau.
Everywhere you looked there was,
there was shrapnel debris, and, and holes in this thing.
So it was quite significant.
And that was the initial response.
And from that point onwards we knew that
this was gonna be a big investigation particularly for the ATSB.
The severity of the damage
adds pressure to find answers.
An uncontained engine failure is a pretty rare event
even for an investigator to,
that's performing this line of work to actually,
this is a job, okay, this is the one that counts.
The debris that fell to the ground
includes a broken engine turbine disk.
It's made of nickel alloy
and is one of the most robust parts of the airplane.
Let's get this back to Rolls Royce see what their guys think.
We knew that we had a turbine disk failure.
The next stage was to find out
why the turbine disk had actually failed.
The 160-kilogram disk
is one of the most critical parts of the engine.
Its massive fan blades can reach the speed of sound
as they move air through the engine for combustion.
In the lab at Rolls Royce,
engineers compare the disk to its manufacturing records
and notice something odd.
The disk is larger than it should be.
It tells investigators that
it was spinning at an almost unbelievable speed,
so fast that it actually began to stretch and grow wider.
And it gets wider and wider and wider
until the ultimate strength of the material is reached
and the disk will generally fly apart.
It occurs with such violence
that the fragments are released with an infinite energy.
And what that means is that there will be nothing
which can stop those engine pieces.
It ripped through everything in its path,
wires, hydraulics, everything.
Investigators trace the path of the debris through the plane.
Pieces from the engine have clearly sliced through
the fuselage and the left wing.
No wonder they had so many failures.
Severing fuel lines, hydraulics and flight controls.
The damage explains why the pilots received so many error messages
after the engine exploded.
But it doesn't explain
why the disk was spinning so fast in the first place.
Investigators take the engine apart searching for anything
that could explain the catastrophic failure of the turbine disk.
The disk had failed from overspeed
and that there was no contributing factors
in regards to the manufacture or design of the disk itself.
At that point, the focus went back onto the engine.
They discover something disturbing.
Oil fire.
In a Rolls Royce engine.
The inside of the engine is burnt black
and covered with soot and oil.
The evidence tells Grummett
that the fire was fuelled by oil.
The engine must have suffered an oil leak.
Grummett examines the engine further,
searching for the source of that leak.
Kev.
It's at that point that actually the IIC,
walked in to the disassembly, area.
And I called him over and I said...
Kev, I think we got it.
At that point it was, it was wow.
This is, this is a really important moment of the investigation.
A narrow pipe has snapped off,
releasing oil into the area around the turbine disk.
The broken part is called a stub pipe.
This nearly brought down an A380.
Geez man.
Investigators believe that oil from the broken stub pipe ignited
and burned at more than 1,000 degrees Celsius.
Fire in number 2. Push button?
The fire damaged the drive shaft,
allowing the turbine disc to spin faster and faster
until it broke apart and tore through everything in its path.
There was nothing the crew could have done to prevent it.
Once a fire is established inside a gas turbine engine
it's nearly impossible to put out,
other than physically shutting down the engine.
In this case the, the internal oil fire happened so quickly
and accelerated that,
the crew had absolutely no opportunity
to shut down that engine before the engine failure.
Investigators now have a prime suspect.
But what caused a simple stub pipe
made by one of the world's,
most esteemed engine manufacturers to break
and nearly destroy a 400-million-dollar airplane?
Investigators send what's left of the stub pipe
to its manufacturer Rolls Royce,
where a disturbing discovery is made.
One side of the pipe is much thinner than the other.
That's what allowed it to break apart,
spraying the engine with oil
and causing a near catastrophic fire.
It's no wonder it cracked.
We're only talking, it was 0.35 millimetres in thickness.
It's a couple of sheets of paper.
Investigators study the manufacturer's report.
They learn why one side of the stub pipe
was so dangerously thin,
it was due to a manufacturing error.
The investigation was actually quite surprised
that such a mature organisation
such as the engine manufacturer Rolls Royce
could be in that situation.
The ATSB immediately takes steps
to alert other airlines that their A380's are at risk.
Just 29 days after the accident,
they issue a report
warning that a faulty stub pipe caused a fire
that led to uncontained engine failure
on Qantas 32.
They advise airlines to inspect their fleets.
The question that was put forward was,
'what are you going to do about this?'
ATSB Chief Martin Dolan
soon has an answer from Rolls Royce.
And if the problem is detected in any of the engines
those engines will be taken out of service.
There are 20 A380's with the same Rolls Royce engine
in service around the world.
34 engines are found to have suspect oil pipes.
As a result of this investigation
all engines that had non-conforming oil feed pipes
have been removed from service.
Rolls Royce have made significant changes
to their quality management system.
They introduced a software program
which basically will remove fuel from the engine
in a similar event.
Investigators conclude that Flight 32 ended safely
because the well trained crew
responded quickly and effectively,
even when aviation's most sophisticated technology
failed them.
Matt, ECAM actions.
He kept his calm.
He followed the procedures.
We worked the checklists.
What do we need for our approach speed?
146 knots.
That can't be right. It's just too slow.
Add 20 knots.
166 works.
Now they would have stalled at 146.
And then there's this gutsy move.
Okay. I'd like to do a control check.
The captain's decision to get a sense of
what his plane was capable of at a safe altitude
gave the crew valuable information
about how their aircraft would perform on landing.
What a crew.
A modern aircraft like the A380 is full of automation.
But like any piece of automation it can fail.
So the human element is always necessary.
You can see the whole team working together
to deliver an outcome under adversity in a situation such as this
and it's the right outcome.
It's not about me as a pilot in command of QF 32.
It's about aviation that for the last 110 years
has shared their knowledge and experience
to make aviation safer for the travelling public.
I think in every regard the Qantas 32 story
is one of aviation's finest hours.