A Qantas Airlines A380 And A One In 100 Million Chance

OTR loves to fly. For twenty years before he retired, he took every opportunity to occupy the right seat in his agency's Cessna 340 and fly across the Southeast. In all the many hours of his "copilot" flying, the most serious in-flight incident involved a faulty landing gear light. At the same time he developed tremendous respect for people throughout the aviation industry and the operations they support. That's why today's report about the recent engine failure on a Qantas Airbus A380 flight is raising eyebrows.

Imagine having one of your four engines disintegrate shortly after takeoff accompanied by 54 messages on your visual display identifying system failures or pending failures. Your goal is to analyze the situation and return your aircraft and its 489 souls on board to the safety of the Singapore airport. This is an amazing event reminiscent of the uncontained engine failure on a United Airlines DC-10 over the Midwest in 1989. That anyone survived the United failure was a miracle. That all survived the Qantas failure may well speak to either a miracle of higher order, improved aviation safety systems or a combination of the two. OTR goes with the nice combination.