Air Crash Investigation..

You may remember the crash of a Boeing 777-236ER on its short final approach to London Heathrow Airport from Beijing back in January 2008. In Mr Pilot's class yesterday, he went through the incident in detail.

To try and improve our airmanship, we were told about the incident and were taken through the details of the crash. He then implored us to read through the accident report in our own time and begin to analyse the chain of events and apply the theory that we had learnt in the hope of coming up with own own thoughts on what we would do in a similar situation.

Obviously, it is impossible to try and imagine oneself in a similar situation where there are great stresses and a limit to the thinking time available. The hope was to try and get us to begin thinking of how the aircraft behaves and to appreciate how it responds to demands of the pilot.

So, I began reading the article today. It's quite scary to think that the entire incident lasted all of 56 seconds between the first fault being identified and the aircraft making its touchdown short of the runway.