Guest fountainhall Posted February 25, 2009 Posted February 25, 2009 CNN has just interrupted programming to give information about the crash landing of a Turkish Airlines flight at Schipol. For a good 10 minutes it kept announcing that the aircraft was an A380. Had it in fact been the new super jumbo, the entire airline industry would be aghast. But then it announced there were only 35 people on board and showed a photo that was clearly of a much smaller jet! Now they are saying it was a Boeing 737. You'd have thought someone at such a large global news network would have checked either who flies the A380 (only 3 airlines so far I believe) or at least the airline timetables to avoid giving out such grossly inaccurate information. Quote
Guest MonkeySee Posted February 25, 2009 Posted February 25, 2009 AMSTERDAM – A Turkish Airlines jetliner plummeted out of cloudy skies and plowed into a muddy field on approach to Amsterdam on Wednesday, but remarkably some 125 people — the vast majority of those aboard — survived. The nine dead included both pilots. The Boeing 737-800 en route from Istanbul to Amsterdam broke into three pieces when it hit the ground about two miles (three kilometers) short of the runway at Schiphol Airport at 1031 a.m. (0931 GMT, 0431 EST). The fuselage split in two, close to the cockpit, and the tail broke off. But the wreckage didn't burn and scores of people walked away from it. Full story at: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/eu_netherlands_plane_crash Quote
Guest fountainhall Posted February 26, 2009 Posted February 26, 2009 It's odd there was no fire. This certainly avoided far more casualties. But it seems to suggest that the plane might have been out of fuel. There's not even any sign of foam on the wreckage, so clearly the emergency services reckoned there was no danger of fire breaking out. Quote
Guest fountainhall Posted March 4, 2009 Posted March 4, 2009 The accident investigators are now saying there was a problem with the plane's altimeter. Unusually, the pilots had elected to make a landing using the automatic pilot. Most pilots will disengage the automatic pilot prior to landing. When at 1,950 feet, the altimeter indicated that the plane had landed and the automatic pilot shut down the engines. The pilots tried to restart them, but it was too late. The plane lost speed, stalled and crashed. Apparently, this relatively new Boeing 737-800 had twice before had altimeter problems. Boeing has now been instructed to issue warnings about the altimeters on all similar models. Quote
