The forum’s Vice-Chairman Duncan Verity has assembled a collection of video presentations mainly dealing with the aviation industry.
On the 22nd of March he introduced one of his videos titled Choosing Sides.
The subject of the video was the crash of an airliner travelling from Heathrow to Belfast which suffered an engine failure en route and was diverted to East Midlands Airport but crashed onto the side of the M1 on its approach. The video started with a very realistic reconstruction of the crash followed by details of the crash investigation and the conclusions of the investigation team.
The aircraft was a Boeing 737-400 which was only one month old carrying 118 passengers and 8 crew members, 47 of whom lost their lives.
One of the plane’s two engines caught fire but the pilots shut down the healthy engine and didn’t realise their mistake until it was too late. The cause of the fire was found to be a broken fan blade in the engine but the crew’s error was blamed on the layout of the control panel.
The high loss of life was blamed on the method of anchoring the passenger seats and poor design of the overhead lockers.
A lively discussion followed with a forum member reporting that he had been a passenger on an aircraft in South Africa which suffered a similar failure although in this case it successfully returned to the airport.
