Miracle over the Azores: how Air Transat 236 flew 120 kilometres without engines

A crazy, chilling story. How Air Transat Flight 236, with 306 people on board, flew 120 kilometres without engines and landed.

A quiet night over the Atlantic

The night of 24 August 2001. An Airbus A330 of the Canadian airline Air Transat is flying from Toronto to Lisbon. It is still dark over the Atlantic and most of the 293 passengers are dozing. A crew of 13, an ordinary night flight.

Two people in the cockpit. Captain Robert Piché, 48, with more than 16,800 flight hours. First Officer Dirk DeJager, 28, with 4,800. An experienced crew, though neither had flown the A330 for long: Piché just under 800 hours, DeJager about 400.

What they don't know: at 04:38 UTC a fuel line in the right engine started leaking.

Strange warnings

At 05:03 the pilots see a rare combination on screen: low oil temperature and high oil pressure in the right engine. Everything else looks normal. It looks like a sensor fault, and the crew treats it as one.

In fact the sensors weren't lying. Fuel pouring out nearby was cooling the oil. But reading that from the cockpit indications was almost impossible.

At 05:36 a fuel imbalance warning goes off: the right tank holds noticeably less than the left. The pilots run the procedure from memory and open the crossfeed from the left tank to the right. In other words, straight into the engine with the ruptured line. Now fuel from both tanks is leaking away.

At 05:45 the crew decides to divert to Lajes, a military air base in the Azores.

Silence

At 06:13 the right engine stops: it simply has nothing left to burn. Lajes is about 150 nautical miles away.

At 06:26 the left engine stops too. A big passenger jet in the middle of the Atlantic becomes a glider. Main electrical power is gone; the emergency ram air turbine drops out of the fuselage, providing a minimum of power for instruments and controls. The airfield is 65 nautical miles away, about 120 kilometres.

At 06:31 the oxygen masks drop in the cabin.

I try to imagine what people felt at that moment. No engine noise. A half-dark cabin. Black ocean outside the windows, and nobody can promise there will be a runway ahead.

Twenty minutes of gliding

Now everything depends on how precisely the pilots hold their gliding speed. Any unnecessary manoeuvre means lost altitude, and altitude is now the only resource they have.

Piché brings the aircraft over Lajes too high. To bleed off the extra height he flies a full 360-degree turn, then a series of S-turns. Passengers see the lights on the ground, then dark water, then the lights again.

At 06:45 the airliner touches down. Speed about 200 knots, roughly 370 km/h, far above a normal landing speed. The first contact is hard, about 310 metres past the runway threshold. The aircraft bounces and lands again 850 metres in.

The anti-skid system isn't working. Piché brakes as hard as he can and all eight main wheels lock. The tyres wear through and burst within the first 140 metres; after that the aircraft rolls almost on its wheel hubs. It stops after using 2.3 of the runway's 3 kilometres.

All 306 people are alive. Eighteen were injured, mostly lightly. Two passengers were seriously hurt during the evacuation down the slides.

The small detail that started it all

The investigation was carried out by Portugal's aviation accident bureau. A few days before the flight, the aircraft had been fitted with a replacement right engine lent by Rolls-Royce. It was an older variant, and to install it Air Transat's technicians used an adapted part in the hydraulic system. That left only a few millimetres between a hydraulic line and the fuel line. Vibration made them rub against each other until the fuel line cracked.

But the report didn't stop at the technicians. The board named the crew's actions as the main causal factor: the oil warning was written off as a sensor fault, the crossfeed was opened without checking for a leak, and the crew believed for too long that the problem lay in the instruments rather than the aircraft.

What came next

Air Transat accepted responsibility and paid a fine of 250,000 Canadian dollars, the largest in Canadian history at the time. French and US aviation regulators required new procedures for fuel leaks, Airbus added a warning for abnormal fuel use, and Rolls-Royce issued a bulletin on the incompatible parts.

In 2002 the Air Line Pilots Association gave Robert Piché its Superior Airmanship Award.