Two people have died after a Boeing 747 cargo aircraft collided with a ground vehicle and plunged into the sea while landing at Hong Kong International Airport, and an expert has weighed in on what may have gone wrong.
The cargo flight, which had arrived from Dubai and was being operated for Emirates by a Turkish airline, reportedly struck a car on the tarmac before veering off the runway in the early hours of Monday morning.
Vision from the scene shows the aircraft partially submerged with its tail section snapped off.
All four crew members survived and were taken to hospital for assessment.
Aviation expert and former commercial pilot Captain Byron Bailey told Sky News his theory as to what may have gone wrong.
“At first it appeared, and I looked at the map, that they had struck a vehicle halfway down the runway, but that may not be the case,” Captain Bailey told Sky News.
“When you land one of these 300-plus big cargo airplanes, you’re landing at about 270 kilometres an hour and you need about 3,000 metres to stop. That’s a 4,000-long metre runway, that northern runway. I’ve landed on it a few times.”
He explained that at such high speeds, once the aircraft touches down, there is no option to abort the landing.
“Once you touch down and the lift up deploys and the auto brakes come on and then you have reverse thrust, then you’re committed. There’s nothing you can do,” he said.
“You can’t abort the landing; it’s too late. And if you see a vehicle on the runway ahead of you, there’s nothing you can do.”
However, later reports suggested the incident may have occurred when the aircraft was slowing towards the end of the runway.
“It appears when they switched over to nose wheel steering – where you steer it with a steering wheel with your left hand like you would drive a car – that they’ve appeared to have lost control,” Captain Bailey admitted.
“I’m still waiting to see if there was a strong crosswind or something like that. But the crew, you know, it’s … a night flight from somewhere, they might have been fatigued. Really, there’s a lot of factors that could have gone into this particular crash,” he said.
Mr Bailey noted that cargo operations often push aircraft and crews to their limits due to the timing and weight of flights.
“These cargo planes tend to operate right through the night,” he said.
“Passengers don’t like flying so much at night. But yeah, when you’re carrying cargo … you’re generally landing at maximum landing weight. It means you’re touching down at about 270 kilometres an hour, and you’re operating right on the limit in terms of brakes and wheels, and you know, perhaps a tire blew.
“We don’t know. It’s going to be very, very interesting.”
Mr Bailey said Hong Kong’s airport, which is built on reclaimed land, has water on either side of its runways – which may have reduced the risk of an even greater tragedy.
“It was built on an island,” he said. “But the fact that you end up in the water is probably better than sort of hitting buildings or you know, as other objects where you might just break up the airplane and catch fire.”
The veteran pilot said the most likely scenario is that the aircraft veered off the runway after control was lost in the final stages of landing.
“My feeling at the moment is the crew lost control towards the end of the landing roll because the map shows they veered off halfway down the 4,000-metre-long runway,” he said.
“It must have been towards the end of the landing roll when they were switching over to nose wheel steering from aerodynamic steering, which you do with the rudder at higher speed,” he said.
Investigators are now piecing together what went wrong in the moments before the aircraft struck the vehicle, leaving two ground crew dead.
Flight data from FlightRadar24 showed that the 32-year-old aircraft was originally built as a passenger jet before being converted into a freighter.
Hong Kong’s Civil Aviation Department said it had reported the incident to the city’s Air Accident Investigation Authority, and it would support the investigation.
