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This is the story of united airlines flight 863. On the 28th of june 1998 a united airlines boeing 747-400 was flying from sanfranciso international airport to sydney international airport with 307 people on board. The 747 was very heavy for the long flight to sydney. That day it would be the first officer who would be piloting the plane. A bit past 10 30 pm local time the 747 lined up with runway 28R. The night was a bit foggy but visibility was good and so the pilots saw no reason to cancel the takeoff. The pilots advanced the throttes and the 747 was going down the runway picking up speed. Soon the first officer pulled back on yoke taking the jumbo jet into the sky. As the 747 entered a fog bank at the end of the runway the pilots felt the plane rumble as a loud thump rocked the airplane. At first they thought that a tyre had exploded but as they retracted the gear, exhaust temperatures on engine number three started rising.
They had lost an engine. Now that sucks but it isnt a massive emergency. The captain got on the radio and said “"United 863 heavy, we've lost an engine, we'll be proceeding out the 295 and returning to the airport.". As the seconds ticked by the vibration increased and the pilots worked on shutting engine number three down. As they did that the vibrations went down and the exhaust temperatures on engine number three went down. The cockpit had 4 pilots and so the non flying pilots handled the checklists for the engine shut down. The captain turned his attention back to the first officer who was flying the plane and as he did, the stick shakers came on. The stick shakers were an indication that the 747 was very close to a stall. In simple terms if they didnt do something the 747 would just fall out of the sky. But they shouldnt be in this position in the first place the 747 could very easily climb out with just three engines. This made no sense. All the other pilots in the cockpit were asking the first officer to watch his speed as the 747 was dangerously slow. But now they had a new problem. The terrain warning came on the 747 was headed right for the San bruno mountain, which rose to an elevation of 1300 feet. Somehow the 747 had drifted to the right of the prescribed path and was now headed right for a mountain. The jet was so low that it set off car alarms and sent people running for cover. Seeing that the ground was coming up the first officer pulled back on the yoke in an attempt to climb, but this just put the plane in an even more precarious position. The captain immediately took over from the first officer. He had a tough job ahead of him. He needed to avert a stall. The best way to do that was to drop the nose so that the plane could pick up some speed. But doing that might send the jet right into the mountain. In the tower the plane was so low that the controllers could no longer see the plane on radar for a short while . A controller said “ ..Is United 863 still ….Oh there he is, he scared me, we lost radar, I didn't want to give you another airplane if we had a problem." the captain carefully put the plane into a climb, trying not to stall the plane out. The plane cleared the mountain, by the smallest of margins. Some reports say that the jumbo jet missed the peak by about 100 feet. Once the jumbo jet was clear of the mountain the captain took it upto 5000 feet and the controllers gave the crew vectors to dump their fuel. The jumbo jet was fueled up for a 14 hour flight and so was too heavy to land right away. Over the next 30 minutes the pilots dumped about 187000 pounds or 84 tons of fuel. After the plane had shed quite a bit of weight the controllers cleared flight 863 for an ILS approach to runway 28R. After a while the 747 made an overweight but safe landing on runway 28R and I suspect that none of the 288 passengers even knew how close they came to disaster.
26 авг 2024