Qantas jumbo jet in near-disaster

[KeithMEL]

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au...-23349,00.html

QANTAS faced a potential disaster on Monday when a jumbo jet en route from London lost all main electrical power and was forced to land on battery back-up.

Flight QF2 with 344 passengers on board was about 15 minutes from Bangkok when the highly unusual failure took place and a back-up system kicked in.

With the batteries providing power for up to an hour, aviation sources said the failure would have been a disaster if it had occurred further out to sea.

"If this had happened over the ocean in the middle of the night, it would probably have crashed," an experienced 747 pilot told The Australian last night.

...

[flo]

thank god everybody is alright.

[KeithMEL]

Eeek!

http://www.theage.com.au/news/travel...554696122.html

Readers have told Fairfax Online about two further possible instances of problems in the power generators of other Qantas planes.

Andrew Valentine said his Qantas flight was delayed at Changi Airport in Singapore on Saturday after the pilot told passengers the power had failed.

"The auxiliary power came on, there were lights were on the walkway and the exit lights came on," Mr Valentine said.

"We could see but the air-conditioning went off. It was eerily quiet.

"The pilot then came over the intercom, he stated that the power had failed, they were going to restart the system and if that didn't restart we would be towed back to the gates."

"Everyone was pretty calm, I've taken a couple of hundred flights and that's never happened."

He said that the 747-400 flight, QF 10 from Singapore to Melbourne, was towed back to the gate and departed ten minutes late. "The pilot told us that they'd try and restart," he said.

"Which after about 10 minutes worked OK and we continued onto Melbourne OK without any further incident."

Another Qantas customer, Dave D'Astoli, said a pilot on a Canberra to Melbourne flight yesterday told passengers that the auxiliary power unit had broken down.

"When we boarded the aircraft the tempreture was 40 degrees Celsius due to the fact that the APU was broken down," Mr D'Astoli said.

Hmm how common are such incidents in the industry?

[Lobster]

I've had it on a BA plane. We were still at the gate at LHR the pilot came on said he would have to reboot the system. It took about 10 minutes and then we were off.

[KeithMEL]

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au...-23349,00.html

QANTAS has revealed that water was responsible for a rare incident that robbed a flight from London to Bangkok of its main electrical power and forced it to land on Monday using a battery back-up.

Qantas executive general manager John Borghetti said the water entered a generator control unit, causing a loss of power and prompting the aircraft to automatically revert to standby power.

[flyguy]

seems as long as the 4 engines were running - its shouldnt really be such an "emergency". A resetting and pulling some of the circuit breakers would have enable the electrical system to come back on pretty soon as there are 2 or more redundancies built-in. Likely some mkedia sensationalism over this.