RED ALERT - FIRE !

Morning all,

It has been an eventful night on board Speedbird744. Firstly we Collected 20 Tonnes of Orange Melons In Johannesburg for drop off at Gatwick in the early hours of Friday Morning. They are perishable so something else for the crew to consider in the cargo management of the aeroplane.

Then on the flight to Harare the aircraft encountered several serious failures. We had a fire on engine 2 at top of descent that required quick reaction handling. Once that was resolved a secondary fire occurred in the APU. The crew decided to declare an emergency and with the assistance of ATC were vectored in as number 2 for arrival ahead of other traffic. The situation appeared to be stabilised when under 10,000 feet the hydraulics for the flaps locked out and the autopilot failed. Again the crew dealt with the required actions expediently and though tired and emotional stabilised the aircraft once more. Finally on short finals Engine 3 developed an oil temperature fault which became full failure at just 200 feet and developed into fire on the rollout.

Andy and Malc navigated the plane to the remote apron away from the terminal area where fire services where waiting. Here are some shots of the "Engine Indicating and Crew Alerting System" screen during the last 20 minutes of the flight.

When Andy and Malc left the flightdeck in Harare they went into UK Worldflight Despatch and found someone sat at the instructor station looking really rather pleased with himself (because he had used the instructor station software to introduce all the failures the crew had experienced ! ).....

What goes around comes around. It didn't take long for the virtual Zimbabwean engineers to repair the aircraft and someone who should have been asleep not sitting at the instructor station was forced to fly his leg in his pyjamas. That might have been worse for Malc though !!

Thankfully the flight to Nairobi was extremely routine, instructor station has been locked away and the highlight of this trip was the excellent view of Mount Kilimanjaro during the descent towards Nairobi.

And as you read this Hoppie and Granville are now starting up the engines to depart Nairobi for Khartoum. Satellite Photo's show the teams on the ground together during pre-flight...