Qantas 747 suffers decompression, lands Manila
Posted by: delusional in Automotive, Aviation, News
Qantas 747 similar to the one involved
A Qantas Airlines Boeing 747 departing Hong Kong for Australia today suffered a rapid or explosive decompression at altitude and was forced to make an emergency descent followed by an emergency landing at Manila in the Philippines. All passengers and crew departed the aircraft safely.
There were a total of 346 passengers and 19 crew on board the aircraft when a section just forward of the starboard mainwing leading edge despressurised the hull. The crew apparently then initiated an emergency descent, oxygen masks being dropped for the passengers. The emergency descent is made in order to reach a safe altitude at which it is possible to breathe normally without oxygen assistance.
The aircraft then made a declared emergency landing at Manila in the Phillipines where the extent of the damage was photographed by news agencies. It appears from photographs that the front-most part of the fusealage ‘blister’ which blends the starboard wing-root is completely missing with a smaller hole through the pressure hull into the baggage compartment. Some debris is evident in the hole looking rather like loose items of luggage. It is probably fair to speculate that some passengers may find they are missing some items.
Some interviewed passengers recall the captain stating that there was a hole in a ‘door’. As far as I know, there isn’t a door at this section of the fuselage but there appears to be creasing near the foremost edge of the cabin exit door above the damaged area. This may have lead to a ‘door open’ alert on the flight deck. It is possibly worth noting that this door is entirely distinct from the large R5 cargo door which separated from United Airlines flight 811.
Aircraft Identity (This is not definitive information, do not treat it as such!)
Some of the pictures show the letters on the nose gear door to be ‘JK’. On Qantas aircraft this appears to be the last two letters of the aircraft registration for the purpose of identification while parked on the apron. If this is the case, this would indicate that the aircraft is VH-OJK, a Boeing 747-438, construction number 25067 built 1991. [Source]
Flight Number
The flight number is now being widely reported as QF30
Media Response
I actually found some quite responsible, restrained media reporting at the BBC online website. BBC television news was, however, it’s usual irresponsible self with a presenter trying to lead an interviewee into relating a story which did not exist. It is fair to say that pretty much everyone the including crew would be scared, you’d be inhuman not to be, but there was no real evidence of ‘panic’ or ‘terror’ as some news outlets would have you believe by their headlines. During the descent into Manila, as evidenced by video shot by a passenger, people remained relatively calm. The BBC quotes one passenger:
“Everyone was fairly calm, partly because they didn’t realise the extent of it,”
France 24 probably gets my award as the least sensational reporters (as of this time) as, despite having a rather short article, they just relate the facts as they were known and nothing else.
Tags: 747-438, australia, depressurisation, emergency landing, hong-kong, manila, phillipines, qantas 747, qf30, vh-ojk
Entries (RSS)
A free-to-air television news report Saturday evening on Channel 7, Melbourne Australia, included vision of a hand-written maintenance document reported as being of the aircraft involved in the decompression incident. The registration number given on that document is VH-OJK which confirms the derived registration number given above.