American Airlines Virtual

Wow. When will the cockpit vid make YouTube? Would sure like to see what was going on in the cockpit on this one.

I've read this is accurate. an uncontained explosion. Shrapnel made a hole in the wing and smaller holes into the fuselage. in fact i've read that the hole in the wing the cut hydraulic and electrical lines. no use of slats, reverse thrusters, and usinig NO2 bottles to deploy the landing gear. experts say it's amazing they got her down safely with all the failure indicators that must have went off at once.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/20/world ... antas.html

They are lucky they had 5 pilots onboard. Normally they would have had 3 but the captain of this flight was getting a line check done by a company check airman and the checkairman was getting checked by his boss. So they had 4 captain qualified pilots and one FO. That redundancy in pilot skill helped make up for the apparent total loss of redundancy in systems damaged by the failure of the #2 engine.

Scary stuff.

LAX had 4 A380's sitting on the ramp when I was there the other day; all with ALL their engine access panels open. I'm not going to be surprised if this doesn't end in a total recertification of the 380.

Cheers