Four hours of hell: flight becomes 'vomitorium' after hydraulic failure

[tuapekastar]

Flight becomes 'vomitorium' after hydraulic failure

Not my idea of fun.

 

[Major]

I have had a very bumpy (crosswind) landing into LAS but only for a about 10 min. Glad I was not on that flight.

 

[ozmille]

sounds disgusting!

 

[eastwest101]

Sounds like a hydraulic problem to me - if true - unable to dump fuel is apparently not a peculiarity of the A320 family and explains the long flight time but having to be towed off the runway is a sign that something was wrong. Obviously the pilots were comfortable flying the plane around like that although lots of figure 8 pattern flying could make motion sickness a good posibility. In all - a good landing ie. one that you can walk away from!

 

[midcoast1]

Sounds like a hydraulic problem to me - if true - unable to dump fuel is apparently not a peculiarity of the A320 family and explains the long flight time but having to be towed off the runway is a sign that something was wrong. Obviously the pilots were comfortable flying the plane around like that although lots of figure 8 pattern flying could make motion sickness a good posibility. In all - a good landing ie. one that you can walk away from!

Is it just that the A320's are not configured to dump fuel or because they were over land . I would have thought it would be a necessity to be able to dump fuel for emergency situations .

 

[tuapekastar]

Is it just that the A320's are not configured to dump fuel or because they were over land . I would have thought it would be a necessity to be able to dump fuel for emergency situations .

I could be wrong but ISTR reading somewhere that they cannot dump fuel.

 

[Robert K]

If they did all their maintenance in australia, this wouldn't have happened.

 

[JohnPhelan]

If you go back to the threads involving the QF30 incident in SIN, JB747 makes the point that on Boeing aircraft, you can dump pretty much all of the fuel, but on Airbus aircraft (including the A380), it only allows you to dump some of it.

I'm not a fan of Airbus engineering, and this sort of poor design is another reason why!

 

[straitman]

Sounds like a hydraulic problem to me - if true - unable to dump fuel is apparently not a peculiarity of the A320 family and explains the long flight time but having to be towed off the runway is a sign that something was wrong. Obviously the pilots were comfortable flying the plane around like that although lots of figure 8 pattern flying could make motion sickness a good posibility. In all - a good landing ie. one that you can walk away from!

Lots of holding patterns mentioned but no figure 8 patterns that I saw. The passengers did mention steep turns but I'm sure they don't really know what steep turns are. (Airliners are not good at steep turns)

Is it just that the A320's are not configured to dump fuel or because they were over land . I would have thought it would be a necessity to be able to dump fuel for emergency situations .

The A320 is not configured for fuel dump.

I'm sure the pilots would have done an overweight landing if they had any real concerns.

It sounds to me that they lost their hydraulic fluid and the mechanical screeching that was mentioned would be the hydraulic pumps running on air. From experience it is a horrible sound :!:

 

[eastwest101]

The A320 is not configured for fuel dump.

I'm sure the pilots would have done an overweight landing if they had any real concerns.

It sounds to me that they lost their hydraulic fluid and the mechanical screeching that was mentioned would be the hydraulic pumps running on air. From experience it is a horrible sound :!:

Sounds all correct to me! I also realized that A320's and some of the smaller B737 size aircraft cannot dump fuel either - they are designed to be able to be landed overweight if you really need to.

 

[serfty]

Fuel dumping was discussed in relation to this incident today on the "Ask the Pilot" thread:

http://www.australianfrequentflyer....stions/ask-the-pilot-30478-56.html#post633540