Wednesday, May 2, 2007

I heard Mr Lee insists that we post on the class blog, so here is my little story, which includes both fact and fiction. You can choose to believe it or not. It is not very exciting, and has some technical terms, so do be prepared. But I guess this still counts as a post.
Flight CO3004 took off early as Combined Sports Meet ended earlier than expected, in fact much earlier than expected, so the runway was clear, and all the passengers/crew were all available for the flight. The tower cleared the flight for its rehearsal of the route it would do during SYF on 10th May. The front part of the flight was routine, as each section of the jet rehearsed what it was going to do independently, with the exception of the guanyue section, as they were connected to the flight deck and the chief cabin crew members. XYZ (Xianyue Zu aka bowed strings section) and Tanbo (aka plucked strings) sections were operating in other parts of the jet. Lunch was served at 11.30am, but it took some time for all the people onboard to get back to their stations, so the next phase of the rehearsal was delayed.
Not long into the 2nd phase of the flight rehearsal, the pilot in command (PIC), Yong Lin notices the lights in the flight deck and the cabin behind him going off all together. Immediately, alarms began sounding, and the autopilot disconnected. Checking the announciator panel, our PIC noticed several red warning, requiring immediate crew attention. The jet suffered an AC generator failure, both AC buses were down. Somehow, the generators in the 4 jet engines were not feeding power to the buses and now the jet is running on its batteries. Because of this, the electrically driven hydraulics could not exert their full strength on battery power and not receiving full control of the flight surfaces, the AP disconnected. As the aircraft was trimmed for level flight, there was no major upset of the flight path. The PIC immediately went for the circuit breakers and found his flight engineer T*-A** struggling with the breakers. Guanyue was feeling too cold but didn't know that the air conditioning packs are controlled in the flight deck. Being a member of Guanyue, the T*-A** wanted to help her section mates, and tried to shut off one of air conditioning pack from the breaker panel. Unfortunately, she shut off the Main Current Circuit Breaker, cutting off the power to all the aircraft's systems, leaving the batteries to keep them up and running in a reduced state. As the main breakers must carry high currents, the spring in them are tight, and T*-A** was unable to reset the breaker. With the help of the PIC, AC power was restored and after a few moments of reconfiguration, all systems were back in their original state and the flight continued without trouble.
Flight CO3004 landed safely at 1930 hours. So back to the real world, Mr Lee is currently a couple of hours from home. UA895 is scheduled to land in Singapore at 2330 hours. There are currently no status updates on the flight, so we assume that it is cruising smoothly and happily. Hope you enjoyed this post full of aviation.

Yong Lin

-posted by 07S6K at 9:36 PM