[00:00] I was a pilot in command of Qantas Flight 32 that had an engine failure over Singapore, putting the lives of 440 This is everything I'm authorized to tell you.
[00:17] the electrics, hydraulics, pneumatics, brakes, slats. these failures came about. And we call events like these a black swan event.
[00:30] I realized we were entering into something that I had never experienced before, of our limits.
[00:45] Qantas Flight 32 was a flight from Singapore It was an Airbus A380. We were taxiing out from the terminal in Singapore to the runway.
[01:02] Clear skies, no wind. It was four minutes after takeoff when engine number two exploded. It was actually two explosions like boom boom.
[01:15] The passengers in the back were unsure what was happening. The aircraft shook and all of a sudden alarms started sounding. 40 alarms were queued up in the first second alone.
[01:29] About one minute after that explosion, I made a PAN call to air traffic control saying Pan, pan, pan. Qantas 32 engine failure maintaining 7400ft.
[01:42] Stand by for instructions. So a Pan message is a notification to air traffic control that we're about to say there is a problem and we're going to need priority.
[01:57] If they hear a pan call, they go quiet so that they don't interrupt us. Air traffic control did stop talking to us until we were ready to talk to them.
[02:09] because there were more checklists queued behind. The center panel was a sea of red lights.
[02:22] there was a jackhammer pushing me down into the chair.
[02:34] to Matt, the first officer, my copilot, ECAM actions. It's a computer program that monitors sensors and parameters
[02:48] Eventually, after about three minutes in proceeding away from Singapore, could we please head back towards Singapore?
[03:01] So I told Matt to stop actioning the checklists. and then we positioned to enter a holding pattern near Singapore Airport. So when I was flying and doing something different, Matt would have to monitor me.
[03:16] And when the aircraft was in stable flight, I would be monitoring Matt. we try to maintain what we call a mental model of the airplane.
[03:30] It's a mapping of what state the airplane is in and something goes wrong. But that mental model was getting challenged as each successive checklist arrived to say that more parts were damaged.
[03:44] When you're overloaded by alarms and distractions, the amygdala in the brain can fire off the fear response, which is fight, flight, or freeze. This is not a good response if you're in charge of heavy, high tech equipment.
[03:57] We have to try and avoid the fear response We have to aviate, navigate, communicate, and then when the cortex in the slower then we can assess the aircraft, keep our mental model
[04:15] When we saw blank screens, data had crosses on it instead of numbers and symbols. So I knew that sensors had been blown off the aircraft.
[04:29] We'd lost about 650 wires that were broken. Out of 22 systems on the aircraft, 21 were affected.
[04:41] Engine number two, it exploded and it created shrapnel like a cluster bomb. The only system not affected was the oxygen system, but we didn't need that because we were below 10,000ft.
[04:56] So in every system, there was between moderate and extensive damage. was about 15 minutes after the engine exploded. There were so many failures and the failures had knock on effects,
[05:11] so two failures might come together to make a third failure. It became very impossible to track not just the primary failures, I lost my situational awareness for the aircraft and what we could do.
[05:25] And I call that reversing the logic. It was Gene Kranz at Houston, at NASA in the 1960s.
[05:38] In the 1970s, when the astronauts are going to the moon Gene Kranz stood up, saw that his mission controllers were overloaded, and he said, gentlemen, stop wondering about what's broken and focus on what's working.
[05:55] When you invert the logic, we just needed two wings. Not flaps and slats and not the electrics just to get us flying.
[06:09] It was like we were doing a junkyard wars We didn't have sensors for the brakes, for brake temperatures, with hydraulic systems,
[06:24] When the checklist came up to transfer fuel or to turn off critical hydraulics, we didn't just blindly follow the checklist. to see a second source of instrumentation to say,
[06:41] There were many decisions we made that probably half We stayed up in the air for two hours so that we could understand
[06:53] how the aircraft had been damaged and what we had left. And so we did a dress rehearsal of the landing. Before we made our approach, we proved the aircraft safe to fly at 4,000 feet,
[07:07] slowed down with the flaps out, and again, It wasn't in my aircraft manual. The pilots are trained to study all the other emergencies out there
[07:20] so that if we meet them again, we can survive them. So the control check that we did before we landed because as we came into land, we were saving speed warnings and stall warnings.
[07:35] The aircraft has duplicated systems for redundancy, so if we lose one engine, we have spares, but in many systems There were no checklists for those cases and we certainly haven't trained for them.
[07:51] so I requested to climb in the holding pattern near Singapore. So if we lost all the engines, we could glide back to Singapore with no engines.
[08:09] into the left hand seat in command of a passenger jet. I had served in the Royal Australian Air Force for 11 years,
[08:21] and I had been flying in Qantas for another 24 years, and the military experience is exceptional for getting you used to flying aircraft to and beyond their limits.
[08:34] You actually lose control of the aircraft often when you do dogfights and you have to recover, you have to push your aircraft to the limit. One type of pilot doesn't have too much interest in the engines,
[08:48] and expects the engine to start, and that's all they need to know. If you really want to understand the system so that you can recover it.
[09:02] If it's breaking, you have to know everything down to its base foundations. The preparation needed to be an airline Standard operating procedures won't help you in a crisis
[09:16] It's looking at all the threats, calculating the risks, There are 40 million commercial flights every year around the world,
[09:29] So we're naturally solving problems and stopping crises. All pilots also receive extensive training in simulators.
[09:44] and a simulator taken to hell and back They're difficult. Sometimes you don't action them correctly, so you go back,
[09:59] you have to adjust and retry, and you have to keep practicing So you practice engine failures until they don't stress you.
[10:14] The crew of QF 32 was an augmented crew. as part of the normal crew. one of my seven license renewals that we have to do every year as a pilot.
[10:31] So there were two additional captains on board, and their job were to check me the passengers, and we obeyed air traffic control.
[10:43] was actually training the other captain, Harry Wubben, to check me out. is quite different to what you would see in a business or a committee.
[10:56] We had three captains on board QF 32 that day, one I was a pilot in command, and even though there were two other captains on board, they would be supernumerary to me and they would support us many times
[11:11] I said stop to the crew because there was something wrong. If you demand the right and the privilege to say stop to your team, then you must also give your team the right to say stop to you.
[11:24] The pilots in the cockpit said, stop. This is not an abuse or a threat to the ego of the person in charge.
[11:36] This is everyone trying to add their ideas into the mix and get the best outcome. When I said ECAM actions, that gives instruction to Matt to start actioning checklists, he now starts going head down, focusing on the screens,
[11:51] looking at the checklist, checking the systems, moving switches. I'm now flying the airplane and talking to air traffic control. If you think you're going to die, a mayday call received by air
[12:06] traffic control will say, shut down departures. Get ready for 440 passengers to come to the operating theatres, So sometimes beyond, I was absolutely confident that as a team
[12:22] So we declared a pan and it was never upgraded to a mayday. Every five minutes we checked the fuel on board to make sure we had sufficient. the aircraft on the ground, or should we continue with the checklists?
[12:40] I'm really proud to say that I think of the 100 decisions we made that day. It's because of the team of the five pilots
[12:54] and decision making to come up with what I think were perfect decisions.
[13:06] now put yourself in the passenger's seats. open up, a bit of fire in the wing. fly past is saying fuel and hydraulic oil streaming out the back of the wing.
[13:22] dirt road, and all the alarms are going off around them. The cabin service manager tried to contact us in the cockpit. He couldn't because the intercom had been destroyed by the explosion.
[13:38] was to send Mark, the second officer, back to give instructions face to face. Or I could press the public address button
[13:50] and send a message out to the all the passengers and all the cabin crew. Pilots find it very amusing to watch movies about air disasters, because none of it is really based in facts.
[14:05] I think the movie Die Hard had a picture of an aircraft taking off. Someone lit a match of fuel on the ground and a chased the aircraft Really, only 2 or 3 aircraft out of 40 million are crashing.
[14:21] remarkable safety record. I don't think people realize just how often pilots have to correct the system. Sewage systems are emptied on the aircraft.
[14:37] All these systems have to be amalgamated to get all these people And things go wrong all the time. And what passengers don't realize is that when everything's perfect,
[14:53] the technical crew or the pilots will operate the aircraft and you'll be safe. And when things go wrong, it might be an engineering problem or dirty fuel, These are the things the pilots fix all the time.
[15:10] I debrief the passengers saying what had happened, why? And I told them that the engines only fail one in every 350,000 engine hours.
[15:25] That means that only one pilot in four of a four engine aircraft will ever see an engine failure in the whole career. There could be fuel problems or hydraulic problems or weather problems,
[15:38] but really the I would say you wouldn't have a major problem Even though I've retired from aviation, I think our lives are in the best hands
[15:50] possible, and I have the highest respect for everyone Pilots are always empathetic and compassionate, and we always try and help people who say they have a fear of flying.
[16:05] is to tell people, tell the cabin crew and they will try and help you. And during my time flying on the A380, I would walk around the cabin
[16:17] during the cruise on my time off, and if people had a fear of flying I would take them for a walk around the aircraft for two hours and I could fix their fear of flying in two hours.
[16:33] It's worth $400 million. It was one part of the A380, a little stub part about this long. and one side of the pipes wall was thinner than the other.
[16:50] So when that stub pipe fractured oil it got hot. It caught fire. It weakened the hub for the intermediate turbine.
[17:06] The turbine ripped itself off the shaft, oversped and exploded. Pieces came off that disk at two and a half times the speed of sound. When the engineers determined the cause of the failure on board QF 32 engineers
[17:22] around the world inspected all the Airbus A380s that had the Rolls-Royce engines, that had faulty produced stub pipes. So those engines were pulled off and the stub pipes changed
[17:37] There are now checks made where you can use cameras to look at these stub pipes and make sure that they're safe, but also the engine has been changed so that these failures are not expected to happen again while we're in the air.
[17:51] If I knew that the crisis center in Qantas would have been convened and it had, and there were people amassing in a room of all backgrounds political, mechanical, financial, and they're all there to add value
[18:04] Now, they couldn't talk to us because the satellite phone on board People in the crisis center trusted the pilots in the flight deck of QF32 to get that aircraft down on the ground and in the flight deck.
[18:19] We trusted the people in the crisis center to prepare for our arrival. about 100m short of the end of the four-kilometer-long runway.
[18:36] Police. Triage. Fuel was gushing out of the wings. When we're sitting on the runway, faster than it was gushing out of the wings
[18:49] and noticed that there were no fire services approaching the aircraft. Matt was saying to the fire services put foam over the fuel,
[19:02] discussing on the ground, put water over the hot brakes to cool them down. We said we have. They said, no, you haven't. and I noticed that even after using three devices to try and shut down
[19:17] engine number one, that engine number one was still turning on the outside. We had an uncontrolled engine that we couldn't shut down.
[19:35] criticize perhaps the decisions to keep passengers on board. think it was more dangerous on the ground than it was in the air. There were so many threats
[19:48] outside that it was safer on board the aircraft than outside. There was fuel gushing around the aircraft, four tonnes on the ground. If passengers walked through the fuel, they might put a spark
[20:00] of engine number one that was still running and get sucked into it. I had done studies of passenger evacuations,
[20:13] and I knew that passengers will get injured in an evacuation. are higher than the doors on any other aircraft in the sky.
[20:25] If we put your grandfather down the slide, and maybe he used a wheelchair to get on the aircraft, but now he's going down a 45 degree slide down through eight meters onto a hot concrete runway.
[20:37] maybe someone will concertina into him and break his hip. So there was massive risk in just evacuating down the slides. We used stairs for people to go down the stairs to get off the aircraft.
[20:52] of the disembarkation of the aircraft that I'm particularly proud about is the management of the passengers and their onboard luggage. Michael Von Reth was the customer service manager.
[21:05] in the overhead lockers, and it was critical they did it. with his stroller bag. And Michael said, I told you not to bring your stroller.
[21:20] Michael picked up the hand luggage and threw it across the aircraft and said, get off this aircraft. No one disobeyed any of the cabin crew's instructions.
[21:34] Everyone got off in an orderly way, and there was no injury. In Russia, about ten years ago, a super jet crashed on the runway the aisles with cabin luggage before they got off.
[21:49] We've seen the JL flight in Japan recently, where all the passengers left their luggage in the overhead lockers, and the evacuation went perfectly. them, having seen this engine failure, probably reduces
[22:04] the likelihood of their neighbors or family ever seeing an engine failure. Now, after we landed, the CEO of Qantas asked the chief engineer, can you be sure that the failure that's happened about QF 32?
[22:18] The engineer said no. And so the CEO made a brave decision to say that I'm now Then Qantas, they found some more engines that did have the failure,
[22:35] but they never took off. crisis, the body reacts with cortisol that floods the blood.
[22:47] I had a cortisol high during the QF 32 event, and for the following two days, until I arrived home in Sydney, and now I found myself with a body that was totally depleted of energy.
[23:00] And I then went into a state of post-traumatic stress. I was going through a stage of looking at the what ifs. You know, maybe I did something wrong.
[23:14] and when I slept, the incident kept circulating in my mind. I would dream about QF32 for the two hours in the air, two hours on the ground.
[23:27] But I sought psychological help. I grounded myself to the chief pilot, saying, I'm not in a position to evaluate
[23:40] if I'm safe to fly, which means you must ground me. Some pilots thought they could persist. It took a long time to cure.
[23:54] In my case, I had mine solved within four months and went back flying. Mental health is a very serious problem in aviation, but it's no more serious than anywhere else in the community.
[24:07] you know what? Now, the problem in aviation was, yes, you could always say you need a week off
[24:19] and the airline would happily have you on the ground. the air is so enormous by the regulators
[24:31] that the consequences are people simply don't declare that they're unfit to fly because of mental trauma. Now, in America, there's recently been the Mental Health in Aviation Act of 2025,
[24:44] and this is going a long way towards trying to get the both companies and the regulators, which is the FAA in America, to change the system, to try and get pilots back in the air quicker once the pilots say they're fit to fly.
[24:59] What you have to restore is trust, because at the moment, there is no trust between the pilots Trust takes years to build and it can be destroyed in a second.
[25:15] So this act in the American government is very good step. and it's going to control our lives more every day.
[25:31] auto thrust, navigation systems, you name it. The problem is with the automation, we are more of a servant to the box.
[25:45] So either you have to turn it off or you have to find a way to work around it. So automation presents more problems for pilots, not less, to identify a faulty computer system and know how to turn it off.
[26:02] The world is suffering its greatest pilot shortage ever. but the number of pilots coming into the profession is not increasing. caused by the low cost airlines where people are expecting to fly
[26:17] for almost no money across the country, and so the incomes, less the pilots salaries, are going down and young people are deciding won't support them for their life.
[26:32] So all the lead times are great and airlines need to be proactive, not reactive, and they just simply have to give the incentives to have pilots commit to a career in aviation.
[26:45] People ask me if I think that aviation is getting safer or not. When only 2 or 3 out of 40 million aircraft crash in a year, it's hard to imagine how you can really get much safer.
[26:57] than the chance of winning the best lottery in America. Now we can't take that for granted. their manual flying skills in case the automation fails.
[27:13] AI, as it stands today, is not threatening pilots in the cockpit at all. So until we say sentient computers,
[27:25] which are computers that have thought, awareness, consciousness, and prediction until we see sentient computers in the workplace, and those pilots will save aircraft every day from minor
[27:41] and major disasters, and the passengers will continue to be safe. about safety when they're talking about companies like Boeing and Airbus.
[27:53] And airlines are different, and you can be comfortable that you will get to destination. Now, I have been hard on Boeing because I think the board of Boeing
[28:06] has lost the principles or the values of what Boeing was. And Bill Boeing started a company which was an engineering company. Boeing was an engineering company that built aircraft.
[28:21] The problem was they lost the focus on the technology. to have constructive destruction, to get rid of old things and bring in new. So when they do updates to that aircraft, it's like getting an old 1960s
[28:37] Mustang and saying, well, let's turn it into an F1 racing car. get rid of the old to make way for the new, because the technology is now totally different with fly-by-wire.
[28:51] And really, to fit an old aircraft with fly by wire is sort of incompatible. Let's start with the non fly by wire machines, which is what we've always had.
[29:03] It's a bit like the tractor in your field. You turn your steering wheel. and the axles and the shafts turning to make the wheels turn. When you get to fly by wire, you take out that connection
[29:17] between the steering wheel, for example, and the wheels, And then computers will move the wheels with actuators for the steering.
[29:30] So now you've got electronics and computers and actuators to do that link between what you're commanding and what happens at the back end. And now the modern aircraft all fly by wire because they're easier
[29:43] to design, the easier to build, the easier to maintain. And they actually perform better lifting bigger weights or doing more action. Boeing, of course, is now making fly by wire aircraft.
[29:55] The 777 will be a great aircraft and Boeing will recover. You see, the thing is, sometimes we feel the leader in a high tech industry. because your customer doesn't know what they want.
[30:09] They produce what the technology lets them produce This is what Airbus did. And so they've built this fleet of fly by wire aircraft,
[30:23] And Airbus has kept the focus on being an engineering company. I've seen many articles saying the turbulence I think the problem is
[30:37] that there's more congestion in the air space and more aircraft in the sky, and maybe aircraft can't divert to miss bad weather Aircraft are being pushed as close together as they can possibly get.
[30:53] So I think it's just there's more aircraft in the sky I was planning to fly until I turned 65 years of age, at which point the regulations state that I can't fly internationally.
[31:07] But another black swan hit Covid. So in 2020, aviation came to a standstill. Pilots were retrenched and I found myself again put under under stress.
[31:24] And I walked home to my wife, Carol, and said, I don't have a job anymore. Now it's time to put it into practice again. You know, you have to expect in this world of change and disruption.
[31:42] I'm touring the world, presenting to companies and organizations around the world about resilience. So I've just started a podcast called Fly the Elements of Resilience
[31:57] at their personal, corporate, national and the next extension resilience and I'm interviewing the most remarkable people from around the world. This is all about building confidence and courage.
[32:12] You know, anxiety and resilience are on the opposite ends of the spectrum. who are anxious, it's even called the anxious generation.
[32:24] people, taking risks, making change and surviving. I'll have to keep adapting or I will surely perish.
[32:37] And that's what all of us must have a responsibility to do. If you enjoyed this video, then please subscribe and comment
[32:49] with more topics that you'd like us to cover in this series.