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Pilots feared UK-bound easyJet flight would be shot down!

by Babel-Fish | August 25, 2009 at 01:26 am

224 views | 16 Recommendations | 6 comments

The pilots of a holiday jet which suffered a potentially catastrophic electrical fault refused to divert to a nearer landing spot because they feared they would be shot down by military craft.

The easyJet Airbus A319 lost all radio contact with the ground when its systems failed, an official report concluded yesterday.

The captain was forced to fly manually after the instrument screens in the cockpit went blank.

There is definatly a need to have a secondary electric source and a secondary radio on civil aircraft in this day and age it should be easy to instal.

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sara star

at 04:10 on August 25th, 2009

Something stinks about this story..

Of grave concern would be "Why" did it stop functionally, usually because of a fire. If this was truly the case they should have landed immediately.

BTW the real story is in the comments ....

The air defence system would not order the shootdown of an airliner just because it lost its comms and radar, although it would certainly be monitored as a potential emergency. Aviation security measures mean that hijack is the least likely scenario compared to equipment failure...there are aircraft emergencies every week, most of them precautionary or due to minor unservicabilities. The pilots are right to reinforce this as a concern though, so that the incident receives attention.

...Of more concern is the appearance that the pilot(s) appeared not to have used the standard operating procedure of entering the four digit code (for comms failure) into the SSR (Secondary Surveilance Radar) Transponder to alert the controllers to a complete V/UHF radio failure.

Also puzzling is that at least one of the radios should have been able to draw power from the aircraft's battery (default fall back should all electrical power generation be lost).

Babel-Fish

at 19:11 on August 27th, 2009

I thought it was strange that there was not a secondary system and of course there is, the story does stink and that's for sure

sara star

at 04:36 on August 25th, 2009

Here is a video on radio failure procedures.

Grant Smtih (not verified)

at 07:42 on August 25th, 2009

Normal 0 21 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Tableau Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:#0400; mso-fareast-language:#0400; mso-bidi-language:#0400;} Low cost company are well known for the mistakes of their pilots.. last example i read www.lalsace.fr/fr/article/1888702,1202/EuroAirport-samedi-deux-avions-ont-failli-entrer-en-collision.html

Babel-Fish

at 19:25 on August 27th, 2009

After reading the comments of the source, I am beginning to think the article was a bit of creative journalism.

Planes just can not land at airports with out contact permission from the ground unless its a real emergency. I don't see any report of that within the story. I really wished journalist would not stoop to creative journalism.