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Hole Torn In Qantas Jet Forces Landing

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By MICHELINE MAYNARD

The New York Times

Published: July 26, 2008

MANILA, Philippines - The 346 passengers were cruising at 29,000 feet Friday when an explosive bang shook the Qantas jumbo jet. The plane descended rapidly. Oxygen masks dropped from the ceiling as debris flew through the cabin from a hole that had suddenly appeared in the floor.

It wasn't until they were safely on the ground after an emergency landing that they realized how lucky they had been: A hole the size of a small car had been ripped into the Boeing 747-400's metal skin and penetrated the fuselage.

The eerie scene aboard Flight QF 30, captured on a passenger's cell phone video-camera, showed a tense quiet punctuated only by a baby's cries as passengers sat with oxygen masks on their faces.

The jerky footage showed a woman holding tightly to the seat in front of her as rapidly approaching land appeared through a window. Loud applause and relieved laughter went up as the plane touched down.

The passengers, on a flight from London to Melbourne, had just been served a meal after a stopover in Hong Kong when they described hearing a loud bang, then their ears popping as air rushed out the hole.

The pilots put the plane into a quick descent to 10,000 feet, where the atmosphere is still thin but breathable.

"There was a terrific boom, and bits of wood and debris just flew forward" into the first-class area, passenger June Kane told the Australian Broadcasting Corp.

Another passenger, Phill Restall of Chippenham, England, said that he was awakened by the sound of what authorities said may have been an explosive decompression, but that there was no panic.

"It dawned on a lot of people that this was a major incident," he told the British Broadcasting Corp. "There was no screaming. It wasn't your typical television movie."

"Nobody had any idea what was going on," said George Kierans of Drogheda, Ireland. "I think most people were in a state of shock."

Many of those on board realized how serious the situation was only after they got off.

Photographs and video of the plane, which went into service in 1991, showed a gaping hole in the underside of the aircraft, just in front of its right wing.

The landing in Manila came only about 630 miles into the journey, a little more than an hour after the plane took off.

Aviation experts said the hole might have appeared when a part of the plane meant to reduce wind resistance pulled away from the fuselage, although they cautioned it was too soon to draw conclusions.

Boeing and the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board said Friday that they were sending teams to aid in an investigation by the Australian Air Transport Safety Bureau. Under international treaty, the United States, as the country where the plane was built, will be an official participant in the investigation.

The plane had recently undergone a major overhaul, in which engineers discovered a great deal of corrosion inside the cargo hold, The Daily Telegraph of Australia reported in today's editions.

In Washington, a senior counterterrorism official said there was no indication of terrorism in the incident.

The accident was a blemish for Qantas, which has one of the world's best safety records and prides itself on never having lost a jet in a major crash.

Qantas gave no information on the probable cause of the accident, but praised crew members for their calm handling of the emergency.

The hole appeared to encompass a part of the plane called a fairing, which is meant to smooth out the surface of the fuselage and reduce drag.

Older airplanes are subject to cracking as a result of the repeated stress of pressurization and depressurization, but a 747 typically flies for many hours between landings and has far fewer pressurization cycles.

Although metal fatigue has been blamed for similar emergencies, fairings, which are installed on various parts of an aircraft, do not normally have that problem, said Robert W. Mann Jr., an industry consultant based in Port Washington, N.Y.

That raised the question of whether the aircraft might have been damaged on the ground or from inside the cargo compartment, possibly when bags were being loaded, Mann said.

Pilots are trained to bring a plane down swiftly to 10,000 feet, where passengers and crew can breathe without assistance.

Given that the Qantas jet was at 29,000 feet, the plane dropped roughly a mile a minute, "not the kind of descent you would normally subject passengers to," Mann said.

Qantas has promoted its safety record, and in the 1988 movie "Rain Man," the autistic savant Raymond Babbitt, played by Dustin Hoffman, declared he would feel safe flying on Qantas because its planes "never crashed."

However, the airline suffered fatalities in its early years in business, when it flew propeller planes and flying boats, which take off and land on water.

Qantas also has had some close calls. In 1999, a Qantas jet ran off a runway in Bangkok while landing in heavy rain. There were no reports of serious injuries.

Information from The Associated Press was used in this report.

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