CHAPTER 28

Deja Vu

A police guard protected our path from the waiting press into the Fairmont Hotel. I asked the hotel manager to cordon off a section of the main bar and close the curtains so the cabin and technical crews could talk privately among themselves after the day’s events. I also asked if hotel security could be posted around the bar to block the media.

Michael von Reth had already received authorisation from Qantas to spend $400 at the bar, and he began to take orders. I received the following SMS message from Captain Murray Crockett, the A380 fleet manager:

Richard, please pass on my sincere thanks to all of the crew on a job well done. All of you appear to have handled a very serious event in the best tradition of Qantas pilots. Please buy a celebratory drink for everyone on me. Look forward to hearing the details on your return. Best regards, Murray.

Murray was on holidays and so, like most other people in Australia, I didn’t think he knew all the things that had gone wrong on our flight.

I approached Michael at the bar and said: ‘Murray has just given me permission to buy a drink for everyone. Bugger that – these people need to de-stress!’ I told Michael to put the $400 back in his pocket and said to the barman it was my shout. ‘Give all the crew whatever they want for as long as they want it. And please bring lots of plates of snacks!’

The 29 of us were in the bar until midnight, debriefing each other while the enormous wall-mounted TV shared continuous surreal coverage of our flight, with amazing graphics re-enacting the explosions and images of our aircraft rolling around. My bar bill was just over $4000 that night; money well spent to help everyone unwind. These people had done a remarkable job under incredible stress for the passengers and Qantas, and they deserved to have a couple of drinks without having to reach into their own pockets.

By 10.28 pm I was conscious Coral was still keen to contact me, so I texted her: ‘I’m still in the bar getting the crew relaxed. I’ll call when I get to the room.’

I went to my room at about midnight. It was the same room I had had the night before. I called Coral and spoke to her for two hours, and then I tried to go to sleep, but (cortisol) energy was still coursing through my body, keeping me awake. I was very concerned about the whole incident: Did I carry out every activity correctly? Were the passengers okay? Did I embarrass Qantas? Was there something else I should have done? Who should I have called?

I knew I had to sleep, but my mind was racing and I couldn’t relax. I am not sure how much sleep I got that night, but I was certainly not rested in the morning. I was tired, I had no clean clothes or toiletries (my suitcase didn’t arrive until 6 pm the following night) and I felt dirty.

I’d arranged with the four other pilots to meet for breakfast and go over things. As I was making my way to the restaurant at 8.30 am I received a call from Peter Wilson, the chief pilot at Qantas. Peter congratulated us on handling a very challenging event, but he was also concerned about our wellbeing. He’d seen the data feeds from QF32, and he told me we’d processed 58 checklists from the ECAM and that we had handled the complex incident very well. But I think many more checklists and alerts that we actioned were not logged by the aircraft data systems, and that we had cancelled the master warning bell about 100 times in flight and about twenty times on the ground. It was possible our ECAM checklist tally was in fact closer to 120. However, I appreciated Peter’s comments and his praise for the crew, for it was an extraordinary team effort.

The phone call only took about two minutes, and in retrospect he was probably probing my mental state and deciding whether I was in a fit mood to take a call from Alan Joyce, Qantas’s CEO. Sure enough, two minutes later Alan Joyce rang, congratulating me and the crew, and saying that Qantas was proud of the team effort.

I went out and bought a phone charger and some toiletries, and I had slightly shaking hands as I shaved back in my room. I was starting to experience the memories of the flight with unnerving clarity in a sort of video loop.

I was still in one piece and so was everyone on that flight, but I was finding it hard to process all the information: the wing damage, the landing gear damage, an engine explosion, two speed warnings below 500 feet and a stall warning as we flared for landing. A stall warning, how could we ever have got close to the stall! And then, as we’d sat on the runway, we’d watched, horrified, as 3 tonnes of jet fuel had poured out of the holes in the wings and around a set of wheels that was at least 1000 degrees Celsius, and the aircraft electrics, radios and systems collapsed.

I should have felt elated: I was the captain on a severely damaged aircraft with 469 people on board, and I’d brought it down without a single injury – not even a broken toenail. But I felt overwhelmed, exhausted and melancholic. And beyond the stress was confusion about what had happened: it couldn’t really have happened, could it?

It was dawning on me that QF32 might be talked about as a ‘black swan’ event – an unforecast event that has significant consequences. I decided to write down what we’d dealt with on that flight. The list went something like this:

Engines: Engine 1 degraded, would not shut down on ground; Engine 2 failed; Engine 3 alternate mode; Engine 4 degraded. One less thrust reverser for landing; runaway Engine 1 on ground (two shutdown systems faulted); Engine 2 failed then fire warning; no over-thrust protection on Engines 1 and 4. Three out of four fire extinguishers inoperative on left wing.

Hydraulics: 25 per cent pumps operating – GREEN system failed, and YELLOW system operating on two of four pumps.

Electrics: two generators failed in flight; 50 per cent AC buses failed in flight; 1 per cent emergency services available on ground; ram air turbine failure.

APU: pneumatics and electrics failed.

Flight controls: operating program degraded to alternate law; 60 per cent less lift devices (slats, ailerons); 64 per cent roll control lost; wing damage – about 10 per cent lift lost; 50 per cent spoilers lost. Spoilers reducing stall margin.

Landing gear: half computers failed; reduced sensors; gravity extension; no retraction available.

Brakes: auto-brakes failed; anti-skid failed; wing gear on emergency accumulator only; 64 per cent braking.

Fuel: a mess. Two lateral imbalances; one longitudinal imbalance; six fuel pumps failed; no transfer; no jettison; more than fourteen fuel leaks; eight out of eleven tanks unuseable; both fuel computers failed.

Weight: centre of gravity well aft for landing; 42 tonnes over maximum landing weight.

Flight instruments: probe heating failed; air data computer failed; incorrect minimum speed calculations and pilots’ displays; speed and stall warnings activated.

Auto-flight: auto-thrust failed; no auto-land capability; autopilot disconnected many times.

Pneumatics: 50 per cent failed (leaks isolated). APU backup pneumatics failed.

Avionics: both Ground Proximity Warning Systems failed; system overheat. On ground: six out of seven radios failed; nine out of ten screens failed.

Cabin: multiple lighting failures; indication failures; manage­ment computer failures.

Performance application: incorrect stall speed calculations, incorrect speed margins; incorrect approach speed.

Airframe: greater than 70 penetrations under wing; seven pen­etrations on top of wing; about 500 impacts on fuselage.

All up, there were at least 130 minor faults logged and about 120 master caution alarms (perhaps checklists) spread over two hours.

But in addition to the horrific list of damages to the aircraft was my lingering memory of what had happened as we were about to touch the runway. The speed and stall warnings lurked in my imagination like a monster, and by the time we’d been on the ground 24 hours and I was readying to return to Sydney, I’d gone through the approach and landing a million times in my mind: the computers and flight instrument displays were wrong! They let us approach at too slow a speed, too close to the stall. This issue haunted me, and continued to haunt me for a number of months.

I knew I had to pull myself together and get some sleep as, prior to the accident, I had volunteered to help Qantas celebrate their 90th birthday in Sydney on Saturday 6 November (the next day) by talking about the A380 as guests watched our A380 take off for Los Angeles.

Having fielded calls from friends and media all Friday (nearly all the passengers protected my number and refused to give it to the media), I took the hotel bus to Changi to catch the QF6 night-flight into Sydney. I was given a comfortable seat on the 747–400, on the upper deck next to the right emergency exit door. I remember looking around me and seeing Matt Hicks to my left, and I believe Michael von Reth was behind me somewhere on the upper deck. We barely made eye contact with each other – we were spent.

We took off and I could feel the stress leaving my body as we climbed into the night sky. Then, at 2000 feet, there was a loud bang and a brief shake of the airframe. A flame shot out of a left engine for a few seconds: it was a compressor blade failure. The blade failure was not dangerous but the engine would have to be repaired. So we’d take an hour to dump fuel to get our landing weight within limits, then make our approach to land back to Changi. There’d be an hour sitting on the tarmac, and then we’d be taken back to the Fairmont Hotel.

I looked to my left, where Matt simply rolled his eyes, pulled his eye-shade down, reclined his seat and went to sleep. Somewhere in the plane I could hear a female yelling. My heart sank, not because of the yelling woman, but because I wouldn’t be going to the Qantas birthday party and I doubted the airline would be able to host a big birthday party just after two engine failures in two days. This was a PR disaster for the airline. We couldn’t win a trick and I felt so tragically sorry for everyone involved. I found out later that they de-rated the birthday party, cancelled the interviews, called off the press and shredded all the PR material. It was a washout.

It didn’t go very well on board QF6 either. In the back of the plane, a female cabin attendant had flipped out and started yelling, ‘Brace, brace!’ to the passengers after the engine failure. She shouldn’t have done it and no one else in the crew knew what she was doing, and sitting at the back of the Jumbo was a big group of Germans who had no idea what she was talking about. In these situations, one person makes the call and the other cabin crew repeat or relay the message down the plane. The other crew simply ignored her until a more senior person could get down the back and disarm the situation.

After the passengers had left the plane at the terminal, I joined the cabin crew from QF32 on the lower deck. Many of my crew were already in a stressed state when they boarded the QF6, but then they had been sitting in the back, spread out around the cabin among the confused Germans, and they were either upset with the incident or angry with the attendant who had freaked out. One of our passengering QF32 crew members was crying, so I sat and held her hand and had a chat with her. Another male attendant was not responding to conversation – the whole thing had made him shut down. We were all affected one way or another; some were depressed, all of us were exhausted. Unless you have experienced it, you just can’t appreciate the different ways people respond to severe stress. I could sense rapid mental deterioration from many of them. Michael could sense it too and he told me that his crew weren’t flying anywhere until they’d had some professional psychological help. That was a great call.

Michael – who was staying at the adjoining Stamford – called Qantas and demanded that the crew spend an extra day in Singapore and be given access to a psychologist specialising in trauma. Qantas was fantastic. They had already dispatched a team from Sydney to assist the crew, and that help was gratefully received. I asked to stay behind in Singapore and support the cabin crew, but I was ordered to fly back to Sydney on the next plane. So that’s what I did. As I dragged myself onto the flight that Saturday morning, I felt I was abandoning my crew – I felt absolutely deflated.

*

I have never been in the public eye. I had no idea how to handle journalists and I really didn’t understand the extent of emotion that would be around after the QF32 incident. Even before I flew back to Sydney, Singaporeans who had seen me in the newspaper and on TV would point at me in the street. I had no idea how to respond to that since I saw myself as a person just doing his job.

I sent Coral an SMS message at 8.46 am on 6 November. It read: ‘Looking forward to coming home. As per normal coming home checklist, please have mattress strapped on back!’

Coral replied to my SMS at 9.03 am: ‘Acknowledge normal coming home checklist: mattress strapped on back. Please ensure you are the first person through the door!’

By the time I flew in to Sydney on 6 November (on another flight named QF32), Coral had been fielding calls from journalists and they’d camped outside our house – this at a time when she’d been half-crazy with worry. She’d had a tip-off from a friend at a newspaper that the photographers knew I was coming in on QF32, as when I’d been checking in at Changi a photographer had walked up close to me and started taking photos – one right in my face, which made me wince with the flash.

Coral rang Qantas and warned them that I was going to be ambushed, and, with all the media already around the house, had said she wanted me protected. They didn’t believe her but she argued strongly, and so when I arrived, Qantas security escorted me out the consular exit and into a car. I’d flown with Qantas for 25 years and finally I got to see how the diplomats and politicians arrive and depart Sydney Airport without being seen by the media. They drove me along airside roads to the Qantas building where Coral, Dad, Mariea, Alex and Sophia, and our good friends, the Ford family, were waiting for me.

Coral was very happy to see me. As the wife of a pilot she lives in dread that something like QF32 will happen, and now she’d had to deal with me on two failed-engine flights, two days in a row.

I knew from Singapore there was some interest in me because of the flight, but nothing like the scrum that had apparently assembled at Sydney Airport and around our house. I was not feeling well and I didn’t want to feel trapped in my house, nor did I want my family becoming stressed. So we took refuge with our best friends Julie and Simon Ford, and their daughters (Alexandra, Erin, Kirsten and India) for four nights until our neighbours reported the coast was clear.

We had a great low-key evening with friends; a few wines and a bit of a chat. But when I rose in the morning, I sprinted for the toilet and threw up. It was a post-stress reaction, and I knew that it was something that would happen for a couple of days as the cortisol slowly left my system and my sugar (energy) levels subsequently plummeted.

But the day got worse by the hour, ebbing to a terrible low. I had no energy and no optimism, and there was a wretchedness hanging over everything. I wanted to get my thoughts on the record, so I recorded a conversation with a journalist friend about the flight. It didn’t help.

I thought rest and the presence of my family would be enough, but when Monday morning came around the stress of the situation had taken its toll. During the flight, and in the terminal and then at the hotel, I was concerned about either the passengers or the crew or both. Even on the aborted QF6 flight on the Friday night I’d been settling into deep relaxation when the engine surge forced me back into the role of worrying about everyone else’s welfare. And then, on the Saturday morning flight into Sydney, I’d been concerned about Coral.

By Monday I was starting to take some interest in my own welfare. I felt deflated, exhausted and unable to concentrate. I was kidding myself that this was an extended adrenaline–cortisol come-down, but it was more than that – I could feel it.

My mind was running in a two-hour continuous loop, replaying that flight. I couldn’t stop the loop. It was debilitating.

Dad and Mariea were also staying at Simon’s, which was great because, Dad being a pilot, I could discuss things with him.

*

I realised that I was too stressed to fly. With deep regret I picked up the phone and rang fleet manager Murray Crockett. I was due to make a delivery of the latest A380 from Airbus head­quarters in Toulouse, France, in three weeks’ time. It was a privilege I’d been extended because of the handling of the delayed QF32 flight at Heathrow on 7 July 2010. I really, really wanted to make that delivery flight. However, I told Murray I wasn’t in a suitable state and he told me to take it easy.

I was on a roller coaster: manic about details and research one minute, and then completely mentally exhausted the next. I realised the severity of my unpredictable emotional state the next day, on the Tuesday, when I went to the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB). They’d planned to interview me for only one hour, but when they started off by asking, ‘Richard, tell us what happened after you arrived at the counter to check out of the hotel that Thursday,’ my answer to that simple question took over four hours.

Experience shows us that there is a need for post-crisis management (PCM) for every person who experiences a crisis or traumatic stress. Good PCM identifies the symptoms and acknowledges the human after-effects from a significant event, deals with them and ensures that the sufferer is fully supported and assisted along their journey back to full health. PCM prevents emotional ‘broken wings’.

Those who are fortunate to never experience a crisis usually underestimate the significance and duration of the effects to the victims. Some critics volunteer that those who suffer stress after an incident should simply toughen up. Most people do not realise that even for people who do not show overt symptoms of stress, these symptoms exist but are masked or submerged only to resurface up to decades later with severe consequences.

Here is my PCM story.

My recollection of events at the ATSB enquiry was fine and controlled until I recounted the episode twelve minutes after the engine failure, when I had asked to turn back to Singapore and got clearance to climb to 10,000 feet. As I approached this element of the story, I lost composure and cried for about fifteen seconds. I was shocked at my response. I didn’t know why I was crying, it had totally ambushed me. I was choked up, unable to continue, needing a minute to gather myself before I could resume the conversation. This was the first time I had cried since my mother died 37 years prior, when I was seventeen and in my final year at school. So I was unprepared for my emotional response with the investigators and confused when it happened.

This emotional unpredictability wasn’t a one off. Immediately after the ATSB interview, I visited the Qantas Crisis Centre to meet and thank the staff who had assisted us during the crisis. During my address to the twenty support staff, just as my discussion turned to describing the inbound path, I broke down and I had to leave the building. I soon discovered that every time I recalled that specific part of the flight I would choke up and cry. I found it very confusing and I was worried why I was reacting so unusually.

I was embarrassed about it to start with. I worried that someone at the ATSB or Qantas might think I had gone nuts, report me, ground me and finish my career; I worried about what people would think of me and I worried that I was losing my mind.

I’d always seen myself as an alpha male – a sportsman, motorcyclist, military man, pilot, father and husband, someone with ‘the right stuff’. Now I didn’t know where to put myself, and in my panic I decided not to confide in Coral.

It was a mistake.

Steve Anderson, the Welfare Officer at AIPA (the pilots’ union), recommended I contact a psychologist who deals with pilots and with trauma and stress-related disorders.

The psychologist helped me understand that when I broke down and cried that I was returning to the point in my memory when my emotions had been overwhelmed. He told me it was natural and the best solution was to accept my reaction, and that its effect would gradually reduce.

Over the next month I found myself revisiting the sensitive spot in my memory and reacting. But the reaction diminished, and soon I wasn’t crying any more. However, the entire episode was still ‘looping’ endlessly in my mind.

I remember driving with Coral from Sydney to Dungog and back in one day, a three–hour journey each way. For the entire time my mind was in a furious, intense replay of the two-hour loop of the QF32 flight. For those six hours in the car alone with Coral, I spoke to her only once, and then it was briefly. Coral was frustrated but knew she had no power to get me out of this loop. She was very worried for me.

I heard ‘SPEED, SPEED’ and ‘STALL, STALL’ warnings on the approach – warnings that should not have triggered, warnings that indicated to me that there were errors with our performance data and flight instrument presentations. I was worried that news of these warnings would be released to the media and would cause additional concern in what was an already very delicate situation.

Confused and exhausted, I finally told the psychologist about the loop. With his help and advice, I eventually managed to extract myself from the loop. Today I consider myself healed psychologically. I think it took two months; Coral thinks it took five.

I volunteer my experiences and I share them happily so that readers might learn from them and seek professional help if they find themselves in a situation similar to mine: it’s called post-traumatic stress. It’s real and there is a way to fix it.