Narrow escape for Emirates Plane!

I find this one very strange.. There must be an easy way of crosschecking fuel load against total weight .......

An Emirates Airbus disappeared off radar screens and only narrowly averted crashing into a heavily populated Melbourne suburb after a botched take-off in Australia's worst near miss.

The Airbus A340-500 only just cleared a perimeter fence as it took off from Melbourne airport bound for Dubai, and struggled to gain altitutde after pilots miscalculated its weight by 100 tonnes, according to The Australian newspaper.

Horrified air traffic controllers watched as the plane lumbered down the runway, too slow to take off, but too fast to stop, sparks flying as its tail hit the ground five times before the pilot was able to lift it over the perimeter fence.

Even then it struggled to gain altitude, and for whole minutes remained too low in the air to appear on radar screens. Traffic controllers waited in horror for an explosion in Melbourne's southern suburbs after Emirates flight 407, carrying 257 passengers and 18 crew, disappeared from their screens.

"This would have been the worst civil air disaster in Australia's history by a very large margin," aviation expert Ben Sandilands said. "There would have been no survivors from the plane and there would have been deaths on the ground also."

The incident, which happened in March this year, came about after a pilot setting the parameters for take-off incorrectly entered the aircraft's weight as 262 tonnes when in reality it was 362 tonnes - a discrepancy of over 100 tonnes.

It meant the pre-set takeoff speed could not possibly lift the plane off the ground. The only reason the plane was able to take off was that, at the last minute, the pilot took the controls and threw the engines into full thrust even as the plane, which had by now run out of sealed runway, raced along the grass leading to the perimeter fence.

"I knew we couldn't stop," the pilot said later of the seconds before he took control. "At that point I knew we just had to go. I thought I was going to die, it was that close."

In the cockpit, the crew realised the tail had been badly damaged during take-off, and they returned for an emergency landing at Melbourne.

On their return to Dubai, the pilots said Emirates officials handed them prepared letters of resignation. The captain and first officer have since resigned.

Emirates says it has put additional safeguards in place to ensure such a mistak could never happen again, including extra computer checks

The Australian Safety Transport Board will release its interim report on the accident at the end of next month.

Times