Whilst we are observing fallout from the ET302 crash, I would like to mention to those who are new to following air crashes: have a look at the disintegration.

Those of us whose professional lives have involved studying crashes know what happens when physics operates. It's brutal and breathtaking. It scrambles brains.

Note how human witnesses, standing next to each other, will swear black and blue with opposite stories. So many transplant the inconceivable impact fireball to a few seconds earlier. Who could blame them? They are not trained observers and were not expecting to see what they saw when they left home that day. An immense fireball appears, and is gone seconds later:

“Did you see that?”

“See what?”

“See that big black mushroom cloud? There was a huge fireball!”

“Really, I was looking at my phone, what happened?”

With the Colorado Springs 737 crash (tail) there was a hole in the ground. ValuJet's DC9 vanished into a swamp, "and seemed to disappear" in front of the eyes of a light aircraft pilot. HERE

The same for SilkAir.

My point is that, to you, a 777 is large. To those of us who have spent years flying over the Indian Ocean, they are tiny.

You could park sixty 777s in a row along the runway at Dubai, and not even see them from 20,000 feet above.

And the oceans are larger than it is possible to imagine. Mind-numbingly boring, flying at 1,000 kph, for hours and hours and hours. In three hours, you have moved six centimetres on the plotting chart. Without fluffy clouds to look at, and flight attendants to feed them, pilots would go crazy.

When a large plane hits the earth from 35,000 feet, be it on land or sea, the disintegration is immense, (in my book on MH370 I cite SwissAIR 111 and Space Shuttle Challenger as examples as they both crashed into the sea).

A few frangible parts floated away, who knows?

Maybe excessive forces peeled them off just before impact. We can never know. High speed physics can do your head in. Just as those of us who have seen road crash victims. So often there is a lone shoe or motorcycle boot on the roadway. The laces are still tightly-tied.

Those searching for the debris of MH370 are targeting two engine cores, like the one in this picture, 1m x 1m x 2m. On a seabed four to six kilometers below the boat.

Which will only provide a starting-point.

The task is unimaginable, and everyone of them who has (or will) search(ed) for MH370 has my complete admiration.

And what we really want to know, as pilots or passengers or relatives, is: “how it would end”.

No doubt, as if the guy upstairs had just turned off your switch.

As happened to a mate of mine.

He was looking out his window at the sea and his favourite mountain range, with a Gin & Tonic in his hand. His wife turned back to the kitchen bench to get hers, preparing for the daily ritual; “Cheers”. She heard a thump as he collapsed, dead before he hit the ground.

Big switch: off. The heart is just a pump. And all pumps can fail, and do.

The best way to go, compared to languishing with disease as your life force, and dignity, drops away; and the kids sell your house from under you. But horrid for those around you, and those left behind.

All pilots have a few sleepless nights after each crash. What happened? Could I have done better?

‘Of course I could, I am better than them’ … you lie to yourself.

If you didn’t think like that, you’d never go to work.

Yesterday, one of our heroes, Charlie Whiting, died in a bed in his hotel in Melbourne. We are preparing for the F1 Grand Prix in Melbourne starting today, and he has been our touch stone since we were kids. He started every race. The calm head in a crisis, like we hope we’d be.

Still in shock, and sleepless because of ET302; another number that will, for future airline pilot ground school classes, be code for thousands of words of reports; we think:
“Compared to the poor bastards in ET302, and the shocked witnesses who saw a magnificent machine disappear in front their eyes, Charlie was lucky.”

Here’s to Charlie, *clink*, the victims of ET302, MH370 … and us.




15th March 2019


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Tags: MH370, ET302, Charlie Whiting