1: As the pilots stepped into the cockpit, 440 passengers were preparing to board the eight-hour flight from Singapore to Sydney.
“Even before Captain Richard Champion de Crespigny stepped on board Qantas Flight 32, he was drilling his crew in the mental models he expected them to use,” Charles Duhigg writes in Smarter Faster Better..
Richard is a blunt Australian, “a cross between Crocodile Dundee and General Patton,” Charles notes.
“I want us to envision the first thing we’ll do if there’s a problem,” Richard said to his copilots on the shuttle from Fairmont Hotel to Singapore Changi Airport.
“Imagine there’s an engine failure. Where’s the first place you’ll look?” he asked.
Each pilot explained what they would do in that situation.
Richard “conducted this same conversation prior to every flight,” the author explains. “His copilots knew to expect it. He quizzed them on what screens they would stare at during an emergency, where their hands would go if an alarm sounded, whether they would turn their heads to the left or stare straight ahead.”
Later, Richard told Charles, “The reality of a modern aircraft is that it’s a quarter million sensors and computers that sometimes can’t tell the difference between garbage and good sense.”
“That’s why we have human pilots. It’s our job to think about what might happen, instead of what is.”
“Mark,” Richard said to one of the copilots, “if you see everyone looking down, I want you to look up. If we’re all looking up, you look down. We’ll all probably make at least one mistake this flight. You’re each responsible for catching them.”
After the visualization exercise, Richard shared what he considered his most important directive: “Everyone has a responsibility to tell me if you disagree with my decisions or think I’m missing anything.”
2: Like all Qantas pilots, Richard had to complete a thorough yearly review of his flying skills.
“So, on that day, there were two extra pilots in the cockpit, observers drawn from the airline’s most experienced ranks,” Charles explains.
“The review wasn’t perfunctory. If Richard stumbled, it could trigger his early retirement. As the pilots took their seats, one of the observers sat near the center of the cockpit, where standard operating procedure usually positioned the second officer.” Richard frowned.
“He had expected the observer to sit off to the side, out of the way,” Charles writes. “He had a picture in his mind of how his cockpit ought to be arranged.”
“Where do you intend to sit?” Richard asked the observer.
“In this seat between you and Matt.”
“I’ve got a problem with that,” Richard said. “You’re inhibiting my crew.”
There was an awkward silence. “This kind of confrontation was not supposed to happen between a captain and the observers,” the author notes.
“Rich, I can’t see you if I sit in Mark’s seat,” the observer said. “How can I check you?”
“That’s your problem,” Richard replied. “I want my crew together and I want Mark in your seat.”
“Richard, you’re being unreasonable,” the second observer remarked.
“I have a flight to command and I want my crew operating properly.”
“Look, Richard,” the evaluator said, “if it helps, I promise I’ll be the second officer if I have to be.”
Richard paused. “He wanted to show his crew they could question his decisions,” Charles writes. “He wanted them to know he was paying close attention to what they had to say and was sensitive to what they thought.”
“Fantastic,” he said.
“Once he said he would be the second officer, it fit into the plan I had in my mind,” Richard later shared with Charles.
3: It was time to take off. Richard focused on the controls and guided the plane away from the gate. Within minutes, the airplane began speeding down the runway and lifted into the air.
“The sky was cloudless, the conditions perfect,” Charles writes.
At 2,000 feet, Richard turned on the plane’s autopilot.
Then, at 7,400 feet, just as the copilot was preparing to turn off the cabin’s seatbelt sign, a boom sounded.
“It was probably just a surge of high-pressure air moving through the engine,” Richard thought.
“Then there was another, even louder crash,” Charles notes, “followed by what sounded like thousands of marbles being thrown against the hull.”
Alarms started going off. A siren blared in the cockpit.
“Investigators would later determine,” Charles writes, “that an oil fire inside one of the left jets had caused a massive turbine disk to detach from the drive shaft, shear into three pieces, and shoot outward, shattering the engine.
“Two of the larger fragments from that explosion punched holes in the left wing, one of them large enough for a man to fit through.
“Hundreds of smaller shards, exploding like a cluster bomb,” he notes, “cut through electrical wires, fuel hoses, a fuel tank, and hydraulic pumps.
“The underside of the wing looked as though it had been machine-gunned. Long strips of metal were bending off the left wing and whipping in the air.”
Then, the plane started to shake.
Richard tried to slow the aircraft. But when he pushed the button, the auto-thrust didn’t respond. Additional alarms flashed on the display.
“Engine two was on fire. Engine three was damaged. There was no data at all for engines one and four,” Charles reports.
“The fuel pumps were failing. The hydraulics, pneumatics, and electrical systems were almost inoperative. Fuel was leaking from the left wing in a wide fan.
“The damage would later be described,” he writes, “as one of the worst midair mechanical disasters in modern aviation.”
“QF32, engine two appears failed,” Richard relayed to Singapore air traffic control. “Heading 150, maintaining 7,400 feet, we’ll keep you informed and will get back to you in five minutes.”
It was less than ten seconds since the first boom.
Richard then cut power to the left wing to start anti-fire procedures. The shaking stopped briefly.
In the cabin, worried passengers pointed at the video screens on their seats, which showed the damaged wing from a camera on the tail.
“Inside the cockpit, alarms were blaring,” Charles writes. “The pilots began responding to prompts from the plane’s computers, speaking to one another in short, efficient sentences.”
Richard checked the display. Twenty-one out of the plane’s twenty-two major systems were damaged or completely disabled.
“The functioning engines were rapidly deteriorating and the left wing was losing the hydraulics that made steering possible,” Charles notes. “No one was certain how long it would stay in the air.”
“I think we should turn back,” said one of the co-pilots.
“Turning the airplane around in order to head back to the airport was risky,” Charles shares. “But at their current heading, they were getting farther away from the runway with each second.”
Richard began turning the airplane in a long, slow arc. “Request climb to ten thousand feet,” he said to air traffic control.
“No!” his copilots shouted.
“They quickly explained their concerns,” Charles notes. “Climbing higher might strain the engines. The change in altitude could cause fuel to leak faster. They wanted to stay low and keep the plane flat.”
Richard had logged more than fifteen thousand hours as a pilot. He had practiced disaster scenarios repeatedly in dozens of aircraft simulators.
“He had envisioned moments like this hundreds of times,” Charles observes. “He had a picture in his mind of how to react, and it involved getting higher so he would have more options.
“Every instinct told him to gain altitude. But each mental model has gaps. It was his crew’s job to find them.
“Qantas 32,” Richard said into the radio. “Disregard the climb to 10,000 feet. We will maintain 7,400 feet.”
More tomorrow!
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Reflection: Before an important meeting, conversation, or event, how often do you picture what might happen and what you would do if things don’t go according to plan?
Action: Before your next high-stakes situation, imagine one thing that could go wrong and how you would respond. Then ask someone you trust: What am I missing?