early afternoon in the sahara desert air algerie flight 6289 prepares to depart tamrasad airport in remote algeria with 97 passengers and 6 crew majority of which is algerian. as the crew go through the pre flight checks the plane is a 737-200. the wind is calm as they prepare for takeoff as they prepare to start the engines with the fo being the countries first female pilots despite being 44 in 2003. as they request clearence the crew are told about the soccer players in the back the captain is 48 and highly experienced. at 3pm they start the engines with 9800 kgs of fuel. the flight from tamarasat to shardaia and algeris with 3 hours flying time. they are cleared to depart runway 02 after back tracking. as they takeoff but almost immediately after they get airborne a loud explosion rocks the airplane and the captain insists on letting go of the controls but think hteres no problem until it stalls suddenly meanging they are too slow and the plane is already doomed and free falls to the ground almost imediately. the emergency response is immediate but only 1 person survives who was seated at the back without a seatbelt and thrown free but he survives the ordeal. the accident was the worse at the time in algeria with the loss of the football squad increase the tragedies releevance. the crew didn’t really announce the problem to the controller who noticed the explosion sound. the worry of it being terroism is clear as they were just out of a civial war but it was not the case. witnesses report the nose high pitch and the stall was obvious. the ntsb help the algerians with the investigation. they notice the gear was down despite them climbing. they check the load sheets abd find the fo made some corrections to the fuel weight which is understandable but they are in the safe limits which indicates she was attentive and wasn’t a worry. the maitence was up to date and no technical exemptions and they look at the weather which was a high 23 degrees with the desert and the altitude 4580 feet which is high for hot weather which combined could be a conern but the explosion makes that theroy unlikely. the wreckage is less than 300 feet from the airport with the rear section seperated and find engine debris on the runway. they look at which engine might have failed with the left engine was torn apart which means it failed and find engine blades had ended up on the runway. they find a fatigue cracks in the left engines and look at why it wasn’t caught earlier as it was an older engine and find it was overhauled 4 years ago with the hot section the year before with no proof of the fatigue cracks. the crews training is looked at and find they both had been trained within 4 months of the crash in engine failures. they find the engine failing was 5 seconds after takeoff when the fo requested gear up and the captain tells the fo to let him control and told her to let go of them which is alarming as the captain was the pilot monitoring and the fo realises they aren’t properally configured and the captain doesn’t responed and then the stall happens after she says theres a small problems and they don’t work together with the captain being authterian and being demanding and not letting the fo try and save the plane which doesn’t help with the crm (crew resource management). they don’t get a mention of engine failure. the fdr was an older model and doesn’t say anything and they have to go to boeing to get a better analysis. the data from the right engine flactuated which confuses the investigators which explains the fos comments because of the captains comments this leads to the stall as one engine not at full power can’t provide enough thrust at low altitude. the captains way of being demanding and not letting the fo help was a big factor and he even reduces thrust with the gear down dooming the flight. they find the fo was doing the pre flight work aithout the captain which is unusual and not really proper he only enters the cockpit after that as he was late. the third voice confuses investigates which is the chief and shouldn’t be in the cockpit at this point really and they talk about the soccer players instead of focusing on the pretakeoff speed recomendations and he even cuts her off before she finishes it. the crew were distracted and having non esentional conversations with the captain being too casual and even talking to the flight attendnat more then focusing on the briefing, the captain was trying to do everything himself which is never going to help which is too much for one man to handle leading to the fo not being able to do anything. the pilot was also trained on a 767 which is more suffisticated and the fo is more experienced and only flew the 737 so she should have flown the plane out of the problem. they discuss misagonyism as a factor and she was the first female pilot in the country so there was a lot of concern about that.
bext time a classic redone aeroperu 603 is the next expected one (which was covered in season 1 over 20 years ago) will we get more facts on it. after that htey have redone half of season 1 weirdly enough in two years time do we expect a swiss air 111 (don’t rule it out as they have redone jal 123 and the uberlinken crash which were done on seconds from disaster which covered swiss air), american 1420 or air transat 236 remake..
Harrison’s world 