A380 Incident at Hong Kong

[Guest fountainhall]

I was about to board a Cathay Pacific flight from Taipei to Hong Kong early yesterday evening when an announcement was made that there would be a delay of at least 30 minutes. Hong Kong was operating on one runway and so all flights not yet in the air were being held prior to departure.

 

Turns out the reason was the Emirates A380 from Bangkok had suffered a failure of some anti-skid device on landing at Hong Kong late afternoon. This resulted in two blown tyres on exiting the runway and the wheels being ground down to the axle! The aircraft was thus disabled and it took about an hour for the passengers to be deplaned by mobile stairs. The runway was closed for about 4 hours.

 

My flight got the a stand about 90 minutes late. I noticed that whereas there are normally two Emirates A380s side by side at that hour, there was only one. And the departure Board stated the Bangkok flight was delayed. When I got to my hotel I saw on Emirates website it had been cancelled.

 

All a bit worrying as I am supposed to take that Emirates flight to BKK tonight! I hope they have flown in another plane!

[Bob]

All a bit worrying as I am supposed to take that Emirates flight to BKK tonight! I hope they have flown in another plane!

 

The good news is that planes usually only crash once. The bad news is that it's pretty difficult (not impossible, just difficult) to fix a broken wheel with a wad of duct tape! But trust you made it okay.

 

The only somewhat-scary incident I was ever involved with was on one of those small commuter planes (one of those French planes with the struts holding the wings up) going from Detroit to my home city. Those planes only had two seats on one side and a single seat on the other side of the dinky aisle and, altogether, probably didn't hold more than 30 people or so. Anyway, I boarded and sat in the single seat right across from the door opening (which means I was about 30 inches at most from the door) and then I watched in amazement while two dim-witted ground personnel repeatedly tried to shut the door (they weren't happy with how it was latching). After they did this 20+ times, I just leaned over and sarcastically offerred: "If you want, I could just hold the door shut." Finding no humor at all with that, they continued to open and slam the door a few more times. What bothered me is I could hear their last comments when one said "Do you think we got it now?" and the other Einstein answered "Heck if I know!" I don't think they realized we could hear them talking in the plane. I kept my eye on that door the whole damn flight.

 

That spooked me a bit but what topped that off was that very same plane flipped over in Detroit the very next day. Never read about the cause but my money's on the damn door! [Those French strut planes were later banned by the FAA due to too many accidents, several involving icing problems with the planes.]

[kokopelli]

[Those French strut planes were later banned by the FAA due to too many accidents, several involving icing problems with the planes.]

 

Was it this one?

[Guest]

This seems like an unacceptable failure mode in this day & age.

 

I would have thought backup ABS systems should be in place. Then, why do TWO wheels suffer the same failure mode?

ABS technology is cheap enough to be fitted in the tiniest cars on sale in Europe as standard. No doubt the aircraft versions are more expensive, however I would expect a minimum of one independent actuator per wheel, therefore a maximum of one wheel should fail.