When both engines of Transat Flight 236 from Canada to Portugal died out midair over the Atlantic Ocean in 2001 due to a fuel leak, it was still 120km short of an airstrip. The pilots glided the plane to safety, creating a world record and saving 306 people onboard, in what is now known as the Miracle on the Azores.
“Mayday, mayday, mayday. We have lost both engines due to fuel starvation. We’re gliding now,” transmitted 28-year-old First Officer Dirk DeJager over the emergency frequency. It was August 24, 2001, and Air Transat Flight 236, an Airbus A330, with 306 people onboard, was in distress. It was powerless, and flying at 39,000 feet over the Atlantic Ocean, and still 120 kilometres short of the nearest runway in the Azores archipelago, 1,400 kilometres off the Portuguese coast and about 1,500 kilometres from Lisbon, the scheduled destination.
The plane was on a 7-hour flight from Toronto in Canada to Portugal’s Lisbon. It was almost 5 hours into the flight that the pilots realised that a fuel leak had killed one engine.
Thirteen minutes after the right-hand engine flamed out, the second engine died out too.
What followed was not a crash but a miracle, now known as the Miracle on the Azores. An emergency descent over the dark, freezing Atlantic, with a plane gliding for 120 km with two flamed-out engines.
The trans-Atlantic flight could land safely only because of the sheer brilliance and composure of Captain Robert Piche, with First Officer Dirk DeJager backing him every second of the way, in what is now known as the Miracle on the Azores.
All 306 souls on board, including the crew, survived. It was a textbook glider landing and created the world record
Unlike the famed “Sully” landing on the Hudson River in 2009, when both engines failed due to a bird strike shortly after takeoff, the Air Transat flight lost power mid-Atlantic and had to glide for nearly 120 kilometres before landing.
Air Transat Flight 236’s landing sounds easy now. But inside that aircraft, the calm was paper-thin. The passengers had been told to brace for a ditch. The Atlantic below was black, cold, and unforgiving. Most believed they were about to die. And yet, in the cockpit, Piche and DeJager fought back against a total engine flameout, hydraulic system loss, electrical failure, cabin depressurisation, and the challenging physics of a powerless descent.
Nearly a quarter-century later, aviation scares have made their momentary appearances in news headlines. That’s after the crash of Air India Flight 171 in Ahmedabad, where a Boeing 787 Dreamliner plunged just 32 seconds after takeoff, killing 241 on board and 29 on the ground, with only one survivor onboard. The investigation into the Air India crash is on and India’s Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau has released a preliminary report.
According to an analysis by Dilip Desmond, a former Indian Navy pilot who also flew the Boeing 777, the pilots of Flight 171 faced a situation that no aviation course prepares crew for. The plane’s digital control system, Fadec, overrode the cockpit crew, and the pilots valiantly tried to reverse the situation by moving the fuel switches from RUN to CUT to RUN even as the plane started to lose altitude. Their effort actually might have worked had the plane gained some more height.
“Had they been just a bit higher in altitude, these two men might well have been hailed as superheroes,” Desmond, wrote for India Today Digital.
Despite the news of recent scares, aviation remains one of the safest and efficient modes of travel, and pilots do everything in their capacity for a safe and relaxing flight.
That’s what the pilots of Flight 236 did in 2001 when they realised that both the engines had flamed out with the nearest airstrip still over 100 kilometres away.
“When you don’t have that other engine, sooner or later you’re going to go down, you know… That’s just about it. You don’t have time to think about anything else than taking care of the safety of the passengers. You do as you’ve been taught,” Captain Piche said after returning to Canada.
On Flight 236 from Toronto to Lisbon, quick thinking, skills, and calm came together to glide the 250-tonne aircraft for nearly 120 kilometres, engine-less, over an open ocean, and land it safely.
FUEL TROUBLES OVER MID-ATLANTIC TURNED AIRBUS A330 INTO A GLIDER
Air Transat Flight 236 took off from Toronto Pearson International Airport at 52 minutes after midnight on August 24, 2001, for Lisbon, Portugal’s capital. There were 293 passengers and 13 crew members aboard the Airbus A330-243, one of the most advanced twin-engine jets at the time.
Everything appeared normal until the aircraft crossed into the mid-Atlantic stretch.
It is a stretch of sky where aircraft are farthest from any airports, runways, or even remote, unpaved landing strips. It was here that the pilots began noticing unusual fuel imbalance warnings.
What the pilots didn’t know at the time was that a fuel pipe on the right engine had started leaking, caused by an improper maintenance replacement of the hydraulic pump system.
Instead of shutting down that engine immediately, which would have isolated the leak, the crew attempted to correct the fuel imbalance by transferring fuel between tanks. The transfer of fuel to the leaking engine only worsened the situation.
No fuel left to burn, the right engine died out soon. The pilots declared a fuel emergency and began descending toward Lajes Air Base, a military-civilian airport on Terceira Island in the Portuguese Azores, some 130 kilometres away.
But six minutes later, disaster truly struck. The left engine too flamed out.
With both engines dead, the A330 lost its main source of electrical power and hydraulics. Though a backup Ram Air Turbine (RAT), a small wind-powered generator, was deployed to provide emergency power, the aircraft had now effectively become a big powerless glider.
