Oxygen cylinder suspected in Qantas explosion
Monday, 28 Jul 2008 10:07
Investigators looking into last week's close call on Qantas Flight 30 are considering whether an exploding oxygen bottle ripped a three-metre hole in the hull, forcing the plane to plunge 20,000 ft after the cabin depressurised.
The Australian Air Transport Safety Board (ATSB) have not formally confirmed whether this latest theory is correct but it has been reported that pieces of a missing cylinder were found in the hold.
"It's too early to say but one of the cylinders that provides back-up oxygen [to the cockpit] is missing," ATSB's Neville Blyth told reporters.
Meanwhile Qantas is urgently inspecting oxygen bottles in all its Boeing 747s, Australia's Civil Aviation Authority (CASA) has confirmed.
The ATSB has already ruled out sabotage and metal corrosion as causes of the near fatal incident on the 17-year-old aircraft.
Captain John Bartels, who was at the controls and made an emergency landing in the Philippines, told an Australian newspaper he acted "almost automatically".
"As soon as we realised this was a decompression, I immediately pulled out my memory checklist," he said in a statement to the Sunday Herald Sun.
"There were three of us in the cockpit and we all worked together and focused on doing what we had to do to get the aircraft down safely, which is exactly what we are trained to do."