What really happened to British Airways Flight 38?
The 136 passengers and 16 crewmembers on British Airways Flight 38 from Beijing to London thought their Jan. 17 flight would be uneventful. But it wasn’t. As the Boeing 777 approached the airport, something happened that still can’t be explained: both engines died, causing the airplane to crash approximately 1,000 feet from the runway.
(Here’s a set of amazing photos of the crash-landing and evacuation.)
Although no one was killed, investigators are still trying to figure out why the engines failed. British Authorities suspect the plane’s fuel flow became restricted somewhere
between the engines and fuel tanks, reports the Washington Post.
Investigators also thought that there was a computer glitch, leading to a reduction in thrust. But flight data recorders showed no such errors. When they opened the engines, they saw that the engines lacked fuel, so fuel flow was somehow blocked. Bill Voss, president of the Flight Safety Foundation, an organization that advocates for improving aviation safety, says he’s baffled by Flight 38.
This is a great mystery, and I never expected this accident to be this difficult to solve, given the state-of-art tools on the plane and the fact that the aircraft was largely intact. This has potentially broad implications that go beyond this one airplane, depending on what they find.
You can read the British Air Accidents Investigation Branch preliminary report on the accident (PDF). Obviously, further testing still needs to be done as to why fuel wasn’t flowing to the engines. Until a definite cause is determined, everything is still speculation.
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