Miracle on Qantas Flight 32 – How Australia's Worst Aviation Disaster was Averted? On the morning of November 4th 2010, a Qantas Airbus A380 suffered an uncontained engine failure, shortly after leaving Singapore Changi Airport.
While Qantas has never had a fatal jet airliner accident, the Australian national airline suffered losses in its early days before the widespread adoption of jets in civilian aviation. These were mainly biplanes or flying boats servicing routes in Queensland and New Guinea.
On Wednesday afternoon, QF144 issued a mayday as it was flying over the Tasman Sea, when its left engine failed, forcing pilots to land the Boeing 737 with just one engine. Flight radar data shows the plane lost altitude and speed during the flight, but the mayday was later downgraded.
“A relief to know that QF144 has landed safely,” she tweeted. “Well done to the highly experienced crew for getting the plane safely home. “Australia's aviation industry is among the safest in the world because of the dedicated staff working on planes and behind the scenes”.
On 4 November 2010, the aircraft operating the route, an Airbus A380, suffered an uncontained failure in one of its four Rolls-Royce Trent 900 engines. The failure occurred over the Riau Islands, Indonesia, four minutes after takeoff from Singapore Changi Airport.
With just these two notable incidents in almost 15 years of commercial service, and no fatalities or hull-loss accidents against its name, the A380 is a beacon of modern aviation reliability.
Of the 16 passengers and 2 aircrew aboard the flight, all but one perished in the crash. Sixteen-year-old John McCafferty was returning from Florida and his parents were waiting for him at the Owls Head Airport.
As a result, flying over water really is no riskier than flying over land. So next time you take your seat for a flight across the Atlantic or Pacific, take comfort in knowing that rigorous plans have been put in place for the duration of your flight to ensure that you're kept safe.
In the middle, at the back
Nonetheless, a TIME investigation that looked at 35 years of aircraft accident data found the middle rear seats of an aircraft had the lowest fatality rate: 28%, compared with 44% for the middle aisle seats. This logically makes sense too.
It was thus considered that the crew of flight 123 never had any chance of making a safe landing — they were doomed from the moment the bulkhead failed.
Nearly 1,000 Boeing 737 MAX aircraft are currently active across the skies.
The collision with the antenna caused the nose and right wing landing gear to collapse, the nose landing gear being forced back into the fuselage. The aircraft slid along in a nose-down, right wing low attitude, causing some further damage to the nose and damage to the two right engines and their mountings.
How much does a Pilot make at Qantas in Australia? Average Qantas Pilot yearly pay in Australia is approximately $131,906, which is 28% above the national average.
Once again, Australia held its own with Qantas named the world's safest airline, followed by Air New Zealand and Etihad.
4 Qatar Airways
Like Etihad, the airline has never had a fatal accident, and its only hull losses have come about due to hangar fires during maintenance. Qatar Airways' planes, particularly its widebodies, are some of the industry's newest designs, and its fleet as a whole has an average age of 10.9 years old.
Which airplanes crash the most? Cessnas and Pipers. In fact, the top 15 aircraft models in total crashes are all made by those two manufacturers – and nine of the top ten are Cessnas. The Cessna 152 was involved in nearly 800 more crashes than any other aircraft.
Plane crashes are extremely rare. The odds of dying in a plane are about 1 in 205,552. If you want to feel safer, some seats that have a better track record during crashes than others.
If anything goes wrong, the likely result is a runway accident, which can have deadly consequences. According to a study published by Boeing Commercial Airplanes, nearly half of all aviation accidents occur during the final approach or landing and 14 percent occur during takeoff or initial climb.
Most flights are intended to spend as little time as possible over water, since storms are more common over the ocean than on land. An aircraft would not be safe to fly over the Pacific Ocean due to the stormy weather and frequent lightning strikes that occur there.
If all of an airplane's engines fail simultaneously, the pilot will perform an emergency landing. As the airplane descends and decelerates, the pilot will begin to search for a safe area to perform an emergency landing.
Although, it may “feel” like we face more turbulence when flying over water bodies, it is not really so. Unless, of course, we are passing through a patch of cyclonic weather. In general, chances of turbulence are highest when we pass over mountains or cities with high-rises.
Some 83 aircraft have been declared “missing” since 1948, according to data compiled by the Aviation Safety Network. The list includes planes capable of carrying more than 14 passengers and where no trace — bodies or debris — has ever been found. Related Graphic: Where Could Flight 370 Be? >>
Countless lives were spared thanks to their heroic actions, but all on board Flight 93 were lost.
On September 1, 1983, the flight was shot down by a Soviet Sukhoi Su-15 interceptor. The Boeing 747 airliner was en route from Anchorage to Seoul, but owing to a navigational mistake made by the crew, the airliner drifted from its original planned route and flew through Soviet prohibited airspace.