Three high resolution pictures of the British Airways B.777 crash landing at London Heathrow airport on Jan. 17th were published in the last days around the Internet. Those images were taken from a perimeter road by David Spalton who was taking pictures outside the airport when flight BA38 from Beijing crash landed short of runway 27L.
The pictures can be found here.
What is really interesting is that those pictures (which David immediately handled to the police in order to provide as much information as possible to the investigators) show the aircraft overflying the rooftops, touching the grass just inside the airport’s perimeter fence and the passengers escaping thorugh the emergency chutes.
The first picture of the series is very interesting: the aircraft is depicted in a very unusual pitch up attitude with both engines still running. Consequently, it confirms that the aircraft didn’t suffer a birdstrike induced engine flame-out or compressor stall; both engines failed to respond to an autothrottle request for more thrust needed to keep the desired rate of descent and speed. Previous pictures of the engine were not clear enough to determine if engines were running when the aircraft struck the ground.
BA038 crash pictures
Published on: January 23, 2008 at 4:51 PM
David Cenciotti is a journalist based in Rome, Italy. He is the Founder and Editor of “The Aviationist”, one of the world’s most famous and read military aviation blogs. Since 1996, he has written for major worldwide magazines, including Air Forces Monthly, Combat Aircraft, and many others, covering aviation, defense, war, industry, intelligence, crime and cyberwar. He has reported from the U.S., Europe, Australia and Syria, and flown several combat planes with different air forces. He is a former 2nd Lt. of the Italian Air Force, a private pilot and a graduate in Computer Engineering. He has written five books and contributed to many more ones.
Leave a comment
