A large airplane carrying 448 people was seconds away from disaster as the crew believed the plane was higher than it actually was, narrowly avoiding crashing into a Moscow suburb.
The crew of an Emirates Airbus A380, the world’s largest passenger airliners, descended far below the intended flight path after mistakenly believing that the plane was much higher than it was.
In order to correct this, the crew of Flight EK-131 entered a rapid descent. However, they were wrong about their initial assumption that their glidescope, a landing instrument, was showing them the incorrect information.
Investigators in the United Arab Emirates portrayed the incident as that latest to demonstrate pilots’ failure to stay up to date with modern automated flight technology.
An Emirates Airbus A380 came within 120 meters above a Moscow suburb before the crew initiated an emergency maneuver to avoid crashing into the town
‘The [first officer’s] action in attempting to join the glideslope from above was because of the false indication that the aircraft was high due to the invalid glideslope deviation, and his perception that the aircraft would be established on the localiser very soon,’ an inquiry into the incident said.
‘In fact, the actual aircraft position was already below the glideslope, and the aircraft would have established on the localiser far beyond his expectation.’
They took the plane down to 504 feet (153 meters) above ground as it was travelling at 195mph and dropping at a rate of 1,600 feet per minute while still 8.5 miles away from Domodedovo airport. It was just 25 seconds away from hitting the ground.
Despite the controller ordering the pilots to stop their descent, the Russian had to repeat his instructions three times due to his command of English.
At this point, with automated terrain warnings blaring, the the captain realised the error and took over the controls, pulling the plane up in an emergency maneuver to avoid crashing into Moscow’s Gorki Leninskiye suburb below.
Weighing over 300 tonnes and banking in a turn, the plane still lost a further 109 feet (38 meters) before it began gaining altitude again, meaning the plane was just 395 feet (120 meters) above the suburb.
At its lowest, the plane was only one and a half times its own wingspans above the ground. The passengers on board had no idea how close they came to their deaths, and details of the near-miss have only become publicly available after the inquiry.
Airbus A380s weigh over 300 tonnes and are the world’s largest passenger airliners. They have a wingspan of 80 meters and can carry over 800 passengers when full
The inquiry found that the plane, flying from Dubai to Moscow in September 2017, was travelling in good weather and in the dark when the incident occurred.
At the time, the co-pilot, 39, was at the controls while being monitored by the 54-year-old captain. The co-pilot, who had been under a heavy workload, lowered the ‘superjumbo’ to intercept the landing system’s signals that guide an aircraft to the runway.
However, the co-pilot had started this process too early and the plane was too far away from the airport for the signal to be reliable. According to investigators from the United Arab Emirates Civil Aviation Authority, he continued to descend thinking he was on the normal path, but failed to check altitude with his instruments.
‘The commander […] was concentrating on communications with air traffic control to such an extent that his situational awareness of what was occurring in the cockpit and of the actual aircraft state was significantly degraded,’ the report said.
According to The Times, It took the crew a third attempt to land due to further errors made in setting up their automated system causing the crew to abort a second landing before touching down safely on their third attempt.
An image shared by UAE’s General Civil Aviation Authority shows the key moments during the incident which saw the Airbus A380 come 25 seconds away from crashing into a suburb
No voice recording was available to investigators due to the crew not reporting the incident quickly enough. The return flight to Dubai overwrote the recording from the first flight. The report criticised the crew for not reporting it quickly enough to preserve the recordings.
Instead, they had to piece the incident together with what was available on the black box and the recordings from the airport’s traffic control.
While the investigators said this incident was another demonstration of pilots not being able to keep up with modern flight automation technology, the report also blamed the crew for its poor judgement due to ‘insufficient communication and co-ordination between them’.
The report added that while the captain’s role of monitoring his co-pilot was not helped by the first officer’s decision to ‘improvise’ in order to intercept the flight path, it added that ‘no action by either flightcrew member took place to stop the aircraft from descending.’