Flight In Europe
Flight In Europe
British European Airways Flight 548 (BE548) was a scheduled British European Airways (BEA) commercial flight from London Heathrow Airport to Brussels, Belgium, operated by a Hawker Siddeley Trident 1C airliner (registration: G-ARPI ). At 16:11 GMT on Sunday, 18 June 1972, less than three minutes after departing from Heathrow, the aircraft crashed near the town of Staines killing all 118 persons onboard. The accident became known as the Staines disaster , and was the worst air disaster in Britain prior to the Pan Am Flight 103 bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988.
The finding of the public inquiry, based on data recovered from the flight data recorder, was that the crash resulted from a deep stall caused by the pilot's error in configuring the aircraft; however, a secondary factor of pilot incapacitation was noted. The process and findings of the inquiry were considered highly controversial among British pilots and the public – extremely poor industrial relations at BEA were suggested as the real underlying cause of the accident, and that the flight crew, headed by an experienced and respected senior captain, was wrongly assigned the role of scapegoat. An elaborate, unofficial version suggests that poor maintenance of a stall recovery system and unreliable airspeed sensors misled the flight crew.
The recommendations from the public inquiry led to the mandatory requirement for cockpit voice recorders to be installed on heavier, British-registered airliners. Another recommendation was that greater caution should be exercised in allowing off-duty flight crew members to occupy flight deck seats. Two memorials in Staines were dedicated on 18 June 2004 to those who died in the accident.
Industrial relations background
The International Federation of Air Line Pilots' Associations (IFALPA) had declared Monday 19 June, the day after the accident, as a worldwide protest strike against aircraft hijacking which had become commonplace in the early 1970s. Support was expected, but the British Air Line Pilots Association (BALPA) left its members to decide whether to back the strike or not. Because of the impending strike action, many air travellers amended their plans to avoid disruption and as a result Flight BE548 was full, despite the service operating on a Sunday, traditionally a day of light travel.
BALPA was also in an industrial dispute with BEA, concerning issues of pay and working conditions. The dispute was highly controversial, with clearly defined protagonists (mainly, but not exclusively, younger pilots) and antagonists (mostly, but not only, older pilots). At the time of the accident, BALPA had organised a confidential postal ballot to ask its members at BEA whether they wanted to strike.
A group of 22 BEA Trident co-pilots known as Supervisory First Officers (SFOs) were already on strike against BEA, citing their low status and high workload. To compensate for a temporary shortage of fully-qualified co-pilots, SFOs were instructed to occupy only the third flight deck seat of the Trident and to act in the capacity known as "P3", involving operating the aircraft’s systems and assisting the captain (known as "P1" on the BEA Trident fleet) and the co-pilot (known as "P2") who between them handled the aircraft. In other airlines and aircraft, the job of BEA Trident SFO/P3s was usually performed by flight engineers. As a result of being limited to the P3 role, BEA Trident SFOs/P3s were denied experience of aircraft handling; a measure which led to their losing some pay and which they resented. In addition, their status led to a regular anomaly; more-experienced SFO/P3s could only assist while less-experienced co-pilots actually flew the aircraft.
Captain Key's argument
Tensions and hazards resulting from the positions in which BEA Trident SFOs and young co-pilots were placed came to the fore shortly before the accident. On Thursday 15 June, a captain complained vociferously that the inexperienced co-pilot whom he had been assigned "would be useless in an emergency". Upset, the co-pilot committed a serious error on departure from Heathrow. The mistake was noted and remedied by the SFO who later related the event to his colleagues as an example of avoidable danger. At the time of the accident, this event was becoming known among BEA pilots as the "Dublin Incident". A mere hour and a half before the departure of BE548, its rostered captain, Stanley J L Key, was involved in a quarrel in the BEA crew room at Heathrow’s Queen’s Building with a First Officer named Flavell. The subject of Key's outburst was the threatened strike which Flavell supported and Key opposed. Both of Key's flight deck crew members on BE548 witnessed the altercation, and another bystander described Key’s outburst as "the most violent argument he had ever heard". Shortly afterwards Key apologised to Flavell and the matter seemed closed. Key’s robustly anti-strike views had won him enemies in the weeks before the accident, and graffiti directed personally against him had appeared on the flight decks of many BEA Tridents.
Operational background
While technically advanced, the Trident (and other aircraft with a T-tail arrangement) had potentially dangerous stalling characteristics. If its airspeed was insufficient, and particularly if its high-lift devices were not extended at the low speeds typical of climbing away after take-off or of approaching to land, it could enter a deep stall (or "superstall") condition from which recovery was practically impossible.
The danger first came to light in a near-crash during a 1962 test flight when Hawker Siddeley pilots Peter Bugge and Ron Clear were testing the Trident's stalling characteristics by pitching its nose progressively higher, thus reducing its airspeed: "After a critical angle of attack was reached, the Trident began to sink tail-down in a deep stall." Eventually it entered a flat spin and a crash "looked inevitable", but luck saved the test crew. The incident resulted in the Trident being fitted with an automatic stall warning system known as a "stick shaker", and a stall recovery system known as a "stick pusher" which automatically pitched the aircraft down to build-up speed if the crew failed to respond to the warning. These systems were the subject of "one of the most comprehensive stall programmes on record", involving some 3,500 stalls being performed by Hawker Siddeley before the matter "was squared off to the satisfaction of ... the ARB" (Air Registration Board). Due to their very nature, however, the stall warning and recovery systems tended to over-react: of ten activations between the Trident entering service and June 1972, only half were genuine, which led many BEA Trident pilots to distrust them. Questioned informally, more than half of them said they would disable the systems in case of activation, rather than let them do their job.
Previous incidents
The propensity to deep stalling resulted in the crash of Trident 1C, G-ARPY , on 3 June 1966 near Felthorpe in Norfolk during a test flight, with the loss of all four pilots on board. In this event, the crew had deliberately switched off the stick shaker and stick pusher to perform their tests. The Confidential Human-Factors Incident Reporting Programme, an experimental voluntary non-attributable and informal system of reporting hazardous air events introduced within BEA in the late 1960s, and later taken up by the Civil Aviation Authority, brought to light two earlier near-accidents involving the Trident’s deep stall characteristics.
In the first incident, the captain of a Trident 1C departing Paris-Orly Airport for London in December 1968 attempted to improve climb performance by retracting the flaps shortly after take-off. This was a non-standard procedure (the Trident had a sluggish climb performance which earned it the nickname of "Gripper" or "Ground Gripper" among its pilots). Shortly after, he also retracted the leading edge droops. This configuration of high-lift devices at a low airspeed would have resulted in a deep stall, but fortunately the co-pilot noticed what had happened, increased speed and re-extended the leading edge devices, and the flight continued normally. The event became known as the "Paris Incident" or the "Orly Incident" among BEA pilots.
In the second near-accident, a Trident 2E climbing away from London Heathrow for Naples in May 1970 experienced what was claimed by its flight deck crew to have been a spontaneous uncommanded retraction of the leading edge devices which remained unnoticed by any of them. The aircraft’s automatic systems sensed the loss of airspeed and lift and issued two stall warnings. Since the crew did not initially detect anything wrong, they disabled the automatic devices. While doing so, they claimed to have then noted and immediately remedied the error and the flight continued normally. Investigators into the event found no mechanical malfunction that could have caused the premature leading edge device retraction, and stated that the aircraft had "just about managed to stay flying". The layout of the controls came under suspicion, however. The event became known as the "Naples Incident" or the "Foxtrot Hotel Incident" (after the registration of the aircraft concerned) at BEA.
Previous accident to G-ARPI
An accident affecting the particular Trident operating BE548 had occurred on 3 July 1968. An Airspeed Ambassador freight aircraft, G-AMAD , deviated from the runw
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