CGTN Europe speaks to David Learmount, Consulting Editor of Flight Global.
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00:00Well, something went very wrong with the airplane, we know that categorically, because the pilot did declare a mayday.
00:07He also made one attempt to land on this runway, and obviously decided that things were not going properly, so he went round again,
00:16and then decided to land on the same runway, but from the opposite direction.
00:21However, whatever it was that had gone wrong, possibly, we've heard about bird strike, and possibly the failure of one engine,
00:34and possibly even an incipient fire in one of the engines, but the pilot had his hands full.
00:39When he finally came in to land, the final time, the aircraft didn't have its undercarriage down,
00:47and I don't think that was an accident, I think they honestly couldn't put it down, because there were probably no hydraulics,
00:52because of the damage that had been done by the bird strike, or whatever it was, and they also didn't have the flaps down,
00:59those are the devices which enable the aircraft to land slowly, so the aircraft actually put down with no wheels,
01:06and very, very fast, much faster than normal, and what happened was that it went down, it was a beautiful landing,
01:13given the circumstances, wings perfectly level, and it slid the full length of the runway, almost undamaged,
01:21and it went over the very end of the runway, and less than 200 metres beyond it, it hit a wall,
01:29and that caused the aeroplane to break up and burst into flames, it was the wall that killed everybody, not the landing,
01:37if that wall had not been there, everybody would be alive now.
01:41It does rather beg the question then, why there might be a wall at admittedly the extreme end of a runway.
01:48It does, it begs the question in a way which, I've never seen anything quite like this before,
01:55because the wall was obviously incredibly substantial, and it wasn't just a wall,
02:02the instrument landing system antennae, the aerials which provide guidance to pilots in bad weather,
02:11to do precision approaches in bad weather without being able to see the runway until the last minute,
02:20those aerials are normally just stuck into the ground, and they are collapsible,
02:25so if anybody does run over the end of the runway, and hits these aerials, very little damage is caused by them,
02:32but in this particular case, it looks as if the aerials were embedded in a concrete structure,
02:39which was the cause of the disaster at the end of this accident sequence.
02:46It's easy to think that planes are so highly automated and sophisticated,
02:52that they can almost fly themselves, clearly not.
02:57No, I'm afraid we're still going to need pilots for a while, because you see, things can go wrong.
03:05Hitting a flock of birds, which we think was at least a part of the factor in this, it causes damage,
03:12it looks as in this case, it caused one engine to stop completely, and possibly to be very badly damaged,
03:19it might even have caused some damage to the other, giving the pilot less power,
03:24but when the pilot put the aircraft down, this aircraft down, although he didn't have the gear down,
03:30the undercarriage down, although he didn't have the flaps down, the touchdown itself was perfect,
03:36it was just very fast, and the aircraft skidded the full length of the runway on its belly,
03:41but you can survive that, aircraft often have, and it went off the end of the runway,
03:47and the disaster came when it hit this really strong structure, solid structure,
03:54just off the end of the runway, right in the middle of the extended centreline of the runway.
04:01I don't know what a structure like that was doing there.