QF30: What went wrong
MANILA – A valve from an oxygen cylinder blasted a hole at least 20 centimetres in diameter in the floor of the passenger cabin of the Qantas 747 stricken in last week’s mid-air emergency.
“We recovered a valve from an oxygen cylinder,” Neville Blyth, a senior investigator with the Australian Transport and Safety Bureau, told a news conference. “It is likely that that valve is from the missing cylinder.”
The Melbourne-bound QF30 was on the way from London with 346 passengers and 19 crew and had just taken off from Hong Kong when it was forced to make an emergency landing in Manila last Friday.
When the Boeing 747-400 landed, a hole about two metres across was discovered in its fuselage. The cylinder has not been found, prompting a theory it was blown out through the fuselage.
An oxygen cylinder had never before exploded mid-air on a passenger aircraft, a Civil Aviation Safety Authority spokesman, Peter Gibson, said yesterday. He confirmed the oxygen cylinder was missing, and would be a key focus of the bureau investigation.
Last night, a Melbourne-bound Qantas flight had to return to Adelaide soon after take-off because a mechanical problem.
A Qantas spokeswoman confirmed that flight QF692 “performed a routine air-turn back … due to an indication that one of their landing gear doors failed to retract”.
“The aircraft (a Boeing 737-800) landed without incident and all passengers were accommodated on other flights. There was no safety risk at any time,” she said.
Source: The Age, Melbourne.
Ian Jarrett
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