Tale of the Airbus Aircrew

[brian day]

Bloody Hell!! Good reason to stick with BA, KLM, Air France etc !!!!
Who do you fly with Andrew?


The brand new Airbus 340-600, one of the largest passenger aircraft ever built,
sat in its hangar inToulouse, France without a single hour of airtime.
Enter the flight crew of Abu Dhabi Aircraft Technologies (ADAT) to conduct pre-delivery tests on the ground, such as engine runups, prior to delivery to Etihad Airways in Abu Dhabi .

The ADAT crew taxied the A340-600 to the run-up area.
Then they took all four engines to takeoff power with a virtually empty aircraft.
Not having read the run-up manuals, they had no clue just how light an empty A340-600 really is.
The takeoff warning horn was blaring away in the cockpit because they had all 4 engines at full power.
The aircraft computers thought they were trying to take off but it had not been configured properly (flaps/slats, etc.)

Then one of the ADAT crew decided to pull the circuit breaker on the Ground Proximity Sensor to silence the alarm.
This fools the aircraft into thinking it is in the air.
The computers automatically released the brakes.
The ADAT crew had no idea that this is a safety feature designed to prevent pilots landing with the brakes on.

In the raidly accelarating empty aircraft, not one member of the seven-man crew,
was smart enough to throttle back the engines from their max power setting,
so the $200 million brand-new aircraft crashed into a blast barrier, writing it off.

The extent of injuries to the crew is unknown, for there has been a news blackout in the major media in France and elsewhere.


Finally, the photos are starting to leak out -

Airbus $200 million aircraft meets blast wall and the wall wins....

[colin keightley]

that is fairly old there are photos of it all over www.jetphotos.net and www.airliners.net