CHAPTER 9

747–400

Flying in civil aviation is all about seniority and pecking order. All Qantas pilots have a seniority number, which they are allotted the day they join the company. The most senior pilot has a seniority number of 1, the next senior, 2. So a pilot will start his employment with a seniority number that will get closer to 1 with every retirement or resignation. The seniority number determines who gets on the next promotional course for higher rank, who converts to a new aircraft type, and who flies a particular flight. The pilot with the seniority number closest to 1 gets preference if too many pilots are bidding for a course, flight or day off. The pilot who joined recently will be assigned an activity no one wants.

I was fortunate. I bid for the 747 first officer (FO) pro­motion course as soon as I joined Qantas and completed it two years later. I was now trained to take the first officer’s right-hand seat, but a temporary oversupply of FOs meant I would take the intermediate position of senior second officer until an FO’s seat became free. The first officer has a fantastic job in aviation; you take almost all the benefits that come with command without the onerous legal responsibilities, you share the flying and you’re in command while the captain is resting. So I spent six months as a senior second officer, keen to take a right-hand seat but blocked because of staffing levels.

My luck was about to change. As 1988 drew to a close, I learned more about the impending 747–400. Again, here was a revolutionary new design from Boeing – this was the biggest aircraft, the most advanced and the best – and just as I wanted to fly the F-111 in the Air Force, now I wanted to be part of the 747–400 operation at Qantas. The problem was that, as a new first officer, all the other first officers would surely beat me to the first 747–400 conversion courses. I might have to wait years to get to the 400.

Soon after, I was amazed to discover that none of the FOs were bidding for the 747–400, which meant the pecking order for the conversion course could drop all the way down to someone as junior as me. The pilots were reluctant to bid for new aircraft. I hadn’t seen this in the Air Force. In the military, the pilots and the seagulls (pilots who didn’t want to fly) sort themselves out pretty quickly – those keen to fly get lots of it. There was never a shortage of pilots vying to fly the latest and greatest aircraft. But in all the major international airlines, Qantas included, many captains and first officers avoid flying a new aircraft straight out of certification trials that has not been ‘case hardened’ or proven in extensive airline operations. There was always the worry that a problem that had not been detected during certification might pop up and cause an accident that would put the pilots at fault. The pilots also didn’t want to fly an aircraft where the pay and conditions were unresolved.

I was never worried about the remuneration on the 747–400. Most of the pay scales in the airlines are constructed around the weight of the planes you fly and the number of passengers you carry. A380 pilots are paid more than 747 pilots, who are paid more than those flying 737s.

The 747–400 was the leading edge in technology; a revolutionary departure from the Classic. It had been talked about and was the subject of so many unfounded rumours that when positions opened for technical crew on the new 400s that would be delivered in 1989, I was one of only two first officers out of 300 who applied for the conversion. I was also the most junior. It was such a poor response that Qantas assigned pilots to the aircraft. The Pilots’ Union got angry on the basis that you shouldn’t force a pilot to fly a plane they don’t want to, and won a reprieve that the new pilots could convert back to their previous aircraft after twelve months if they didn’t like the 400.

Me? I just wanted to be on a 747–400. I had read about their new onboard computer systems and their revamped engines, and I assumed they would be the new industry standard for long-range flying, while the Classic – as nice as she was – would be phased out. I had bid before the security of pay and conditions for the 747–400 were agreed by Qantas, but I didn’t care – you make your own luck. I knew Qantas ultimately had to provide competitive salaries for the new 747–400 or they would lose pilots to other airlines offering better conditions.

I also knew you could spend years preparing for an opportunity only to see it vaporise at the last minute – as I had learned with F-111s in the RAAF. There is no such thing as security. You have to be aware of your options and not be afraid of change or failure. In fact, change is vital – a company that is not changing and improving is going out of business. So, while some pilots are creatures of habit and don’t like converting to new aircraft, I take the opposite approach and go for it – it’s better than being made redundant.

I commenced the first officer’s conversion course for the 747–400 in mid-1989. The older pilots thought only a lunatic would accept the 400 slot before pay and conditions were agreed, so I just pretended I had been assigned to the 400 and kept my mouth shut.

The 747–400 conversion took almost four months, which meant lots of time in simulators, studying manuals and sitting in front of Kodak carousel slide projectors.

I needed two licences to operate the 747–400, the first being a ‘Command Instrument Rating’ from the Australian Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA), which proves I know the aircraft and the instruments well enough to operate it privately, and the second a Qantas licence, which cleared me to operate as a first officer to fly a Boeing 747–400 on Qantas routes.

The other first officers who were converting to the 400 had already flown sectors as FOs in the right-hand seat on Classic Jumbos, but I hadn’t. I’d been trapped in the limbo of senior second officer. I needed to fly a sector in the 400 before I would be granted my Qantas licence. One sector, anywhere. To my delight, I was tasked to fly an empty 747–400 for one sector. The captain asked me where I’d like to fly. ‘Hobart sounds nice,’ I replied. So the Melbourne–Hobart–Melbourne flight plan was submitted and off we went – just two of us and a brand new 747–400. There were a few engine problems climbing out that required us to return to Melbourne, but it was great fun. And I was then a first officer, rated for the 400-series Jumbo.

I was the inaugural first officer to ‘check out’ and fly the 747–400. My first operational sector in the 747–400 was from Sydney across the Pacific to Los Angeles with Geoff Westwood, an infamous senior captain who had been instrumental in forming the Pilots’ Union in the late 1970s. The four-person flight crew met at Sydney’s airport for a pre-flight briefing before we took off, and Geoff asked each of us what our experience was. Only one of us, Geoff included, had ever flown an operational sector in the 400 and that person was a second officer. We had a laugh; we were not exactly overconfident, but we were excited.

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The 400 series was a wonderful plane, but in those early days its computers were not reliable and 50 per cent of our flights departed late. None of us were used to these new systems and booting up the aircraft from a cold state proved very challenging. The problem was determining in which order to start the 100 computer systems; the Boeing engineers had not produced a reliable sequence. If the engineers booted up the plane in a slightly different sequence, or missed one of the 100 steps, one computer would hang, which would, in turn, hang the rest of the process. In a notable case in Los Angeles, our problems began when we were in the flight deck trying to reboot an aircraft that had been shut down the previous night. It should have taken fifteen minutes to start the computers the next morning, but in our case it took four hours. The expensive fix for the next few months was to never de-power the aircraft. The auxiliary power unit (APU) would run continuously whenever the engines were shut down.

The computers were very glitchy on that first flight across the Pacific with Geoff Westwood. Just before we were cleared for take-off, after a 90-minute delay, I was going through the systems as we taxied and saw the computers had altered the cabin temperature of the plane to 2 degrees hotter than the Qantas settings. I was about to attempt a fix on it when Geoff said, ‘Don’t touch it! For God’s sake, don’t touch it!’ So we flew all the way to Los Angeles with the passengers complaining about the heat.

Another time early in the 747–400’s life, Captain Graeme Cant and I were climbing out from Los Angeles for San Francisco when the flight management computers (FMCs) decided to switch from metric to imperial without prompting. The FMCs display the weight of the plane, which allows us to set the engine thrust, and calculate fuel usage and landing speeds, and so on. All we could see were astronomically large numbers displayed on the FMCs. Then the auto-thrust failed. A few bells and warning lights activated that added to the distractions. The FMCs weren’t making any sense but the aircraft was flying beautifully, and that first commandment, ‘Aviate’, flashed to the front of our thoughts. Graeme and I looked at the thrust that had advanced uncommanded to the ‘maximum continuous’ setting. There were plenty of opportunities to be confused and to become distracted, but I’ll never forget Graeme’s response once we’d worked out the problem: ‘Let’s see what she’ll do,’ Graeme smirked as he rode the very light 747–400, climbing like a Saturn V rocket up into the heavens.

The 747–400 required no flight engineer as the job was taken by central maintenance, flight warning and reporting computers. Hundreds of other system computers communicated with each other to provide a level of automation that had never been experienced before.

Despite the challenging introduction to service, the airline, pilots and passengers loved the 747–400. It offered enhanced safety, efficiency and comfort. Once the glitches were ironed out, the computers worked superbly and seldom failed. The flight controls were also improved. A ‘turn coordinator’ was installed that automatically put in rudder deflection in a turn, the first step towards reducing the pilot inputs required during flight and the first hint of what fly-by-wire flight controls had to offer.

With the engineer gone, it was the job of EICAS (Engine Indication and Crew Alerting System) to notify the pilots of failures and the checklists needed to resolve the failures. EICAS displayed system failure and checklist messages on the pilots’ central display. We’d go to the 747–400 QRH (quick reference handbook), which was a bible of 240 checklists for every conceivable failure on the plane.

The 400 marked the dawn of the period of ‘automated’ aircraft that people are so worried about today. You could fly all the way to LA without really touching too many controls: it had an excellent mechanical autopilot, and the flight management computer presented performance indices to warn the pilots of an impending stall and also to prevent flight into ‘Coffin Corner’ (a situation when flying above the aircraft’s maximum altitude where engine and airframe limitations reduce the safety margins). The computers and automation were a great flying aid but they were not fool-proof. The pilots still needed to carefully read and interpret the computers and flight instrument displays.

I remember once on the way to London, we were in the 747–400 at 35,000 feet, very close to our maximum altitude. Meanwhile, a 747–400 from another airline came from behind and 4000 feet above us. Our instruments showed we were cruising with a speed margin of plus/minus 5 knots. We would get supersonic buffet if we sped up 5 knots, and we might stall in a turn if we slowed down 5 knots. We didn’t know the performance of the 747–400 behind us, but we figured (since it was also flying from Asia to Europe) they were also heavy and so shouldn’t be that high. They must have had no speed margin to play with. We then passed a waypoint where the route turned through a 40-degree angle, an unusually large change in direction. The G force came on as our aircraft banked into the turn, and our speed tapes showed the previous 5-knot margin was now pinched down to almost zero. The thrust increased to the maximum cruise limits and, bit by bit, we nudged our way through that turn. We were fine but the same was not true for the trailing 747–400 – they hit and then penetrated Coffin Corner. The speed tapes must have already shown little margin when they were flying straight. But now, in the turn, their speed margin reduced to zero and the engine thrust at the higher altitude was insufficient to counter the increased drag. With stalled wings and insufficient thrust they only had one place to go – down!

‘PAN PAN PAN – [callsign] in an emergency descent to 35,000 feet.’ They plummeted down through those 4000 feet in about 30 seconds.

It was a terrible example of airmanship. The engineer in a 747 Classic would have warned the pilots not to climb so high, but the engineer had been replaced by computers and the pilots didn’t understand their jet’s performance. They probably understood the yellow no-go speed zones on the speed tape, but they didn’t know the autopilot would mindlessly bank the aircraft into a 20-degree banked turn at high altitude. They could have negotiated the turn more safely if they knew they could limit the bank angle, but they were clueless.

There’s one potential problem with automation: that it will be accompanied by complacency and ignorance.

The 747–400 would consign the older Classic Jumbos to ‘legacy’ status, but at a cost to the industry. As the Classic drifted into history, it took with it the manufacturers’ philosophy of building aircraft around the captain and engineer. The Classic’s captain and engineer knew every part of their aircraft intimately: how it was designed, how to operate it. When the systems failed, these legacy crews knew how to diagnose the problem, apply a remedy and avert a disaster. Their legacy aircraft might have been simple, but the crews could save their jet whether it was stalled, spinning, inverted, falling apart or on fire.

Today, jet engines fail on average about once in every 300,000 engine hours. For a four-engine aircraft, that means only one in every three and a half pilots will ever see an engine failure in their entire career. Well, that’s the theory. In practice the die rolled differently for me. I’ve experienced three engine failures while I’ve been in the seat and two engine failures when passengering. Surely I must be protecting the odds for others!

The first engine failure I experienced was a textbook example. It was on 1 October 1993 and I was flying out of Frankfurt for Bangkok with Captain John Pickhaver – a gentle man, a great mentor and a fantastic pilot – and Second Officer Des Howson. John’s son John and daughter Anne were both on the flight deck observing the sector. We had taken off at our maximum take-off weight of 397 tonnes; the auto­pilot had levelled the aircraft at 6000 feet while waiting for aircraft to pass above us. All of a sudden, an EICAS message ‘ENG 2 – LOW OIL PRESS’ displayed on our centre console. This message was not normal, but it was also not alarming.

As Des read through the QRH checklist, I felt my yoke (steering wheel) start to rotate – the autopilot had inadvertently wound in about half of the aileron roll control. This was unusual! We looked at the engine instruments closer and then it dawned upon us. Engine 2 had failed at an idle thrust! The failure was so gentle neither John nor I had detected it – even when we were at maximum take-off weight. John was cool; there was no rush. We continued on towards Munich, trying twice to restart the engine but without success. We then spent an hour dumping 100 tonnes of fuel to get our weight back down to our maximum landing weight before we made our approach and landed back at Frankfurt.

John and Anne were amazed. They watched their father and me take our time and methodically go through all the processes to try and restart the engine before we decided to give the flight away and return to the airport. It was a controlled, zero-stress flight, and it was a delight to have experienced this under John Pickhaver’s excellent command.

My second engine failure was not so pleasant.

It was January 1994 and Captain Warwick Tainton and I were at Bangkok airport about to fly a 747–400 to Sydney. When we arrived at the aircraft in the afternoon we discovered it was unserviceable. Engine 4 had two 30 foot-long fire loops that surround the engine to detect an overheat condition between the engine and the engine nacelle (cover). We could depart with one fire loop failed, but on that day both fire loops had failed and the aircraft was grounded, awaiting spare parts. There were no spare fire loops in Bangkok, and so the aircraft would be delayed five hours awaiting the replacement parts to be flown in from Singapore.

While Warwick was talking to the passengers in the airport lounges, I watched over the aircraft. Over a period of two hours I reviewed the flight history of the aircraft, both in the technical log and in the history files stored in the central maintenance computer (CMC). What I found alarmed me. The CMC had been logging continual exceedances for the past 20 hours. The vibration sensor for the high-speed rotor in Engine 4 was recording the maximum value. What made the research more distressing was that the two fire loops that had failed in Bangkok had failed during the previous sector in Frankfurt, and the aircraft had been delayed a few hours while replacement loops were found in Europe.

I was very uncomfortable! I went down to see the engineers at the engine and asked to view the failed fire loops. Along its 30-foot length, both loops had fractured side by side. I asked the engineer: ‘Does this look like a vibration fracture to you?’ He answered, ‘Perhaps.’ I added: ‘Well I don’t want to fly this aircraft, because the vibration sensor shows a full-scale deflection even at idle RPM and the engine is clearly showing signs of distress. It’s trying to tell us something.’

I went to see Warwick and told him of my concerns. We talked to the engineers and agreed that after the loops were replaced we would start Engine 4 and then make a decision.

A few hours later, we started Engine 4 with the new fire loops installed. I’ll never forget it. The engine sounded like a lawnmower with an angry ‘buzz saw’ type growl. The vibration sensors for the engine went to full-scale deflection. We refused to take the aircraft, but pushed the thrust up slightly to 20 per cent to enable the CMC and the aircraft logging systems to record the engine parameters.

We had only had the engine at 20 per cent thrust for about ten seconds when . . . KABOOM!

A compressor blade in the high-pressure compressor fractured. Flames shot out of the engine, reaching as far forward as the cockpit. The flash that night illuminated the precincts at Bangkok airport. We now needed a new engine, which was a challenge to the Boeing 747 fleet worldwide as no one had ever ferried (fifth podded) a spare 747–400 engine before on the wing of a 747–400. We were stranded in Bangkok for five days before the replacement engine could be installed and enable us to return to Sydney.

The lessons from this incident were obvious. I had followed my instincts, tempered by years of study, training and experience. I was confident and sure of my decisions. We were the last line of defence to protect the passengers from threat. Be prepared, be confident and don’t compromise.

And I’ll be extra careful the next time I hear an engine sounding like a lawnmower!