LONDON, Aug. 14 (UPI) — A British Airways flight made an emergency landing at London Heathrow airport in March when the pilots became starved for oxygen in the cockpit, an official government report said.
The pilots aboard the Boeing 777, headed for Seattle with 235 passengers and crew, were forced on March 6 to wear oxygen masks and open the cockpit door, in violation of the policy to keep the door closed after the Sept. 11 2001 terrorist hijackings, to get some air into the small space. Two cabin crew members and “the ‘heavy’ co-pilot” stood by the front of the open cockpit door for security, the report said.
Instead of continuing the flight, the crew decided to turn back to Heathrow wearing their oxygen masks as their main supply of air, Britain’s Air Accident Investigation Branch found.
“With the flight deck door open and one pilot using his oxygen mask, they decided that they could not continue the flight,” investigators wrote in the report. “The pilot believes the flight deck door had been open for a maximum of 15 to 20 minutes.”
The pilots first notice the low airflow in the cockpit during taxiing, but it continued through take off and climbing. At the same time, the cabin was getting hotter. At a cruising altitude of 34,000 feet, the symptoms took over.
“The symptoms included headache, nausea, light-headedness, a constant urge to take deep breaths and difficulty maintaining concentration,” the report said, adding they alleviated outside the flight deck.
The report noted the same plane had been investigated for inadequate airflow on Feb. 18 and Feb. 26, but engineers thought they fixed the problem. Technical records show across the B777 fleet, pilots have reported similar airflow problems, “but were sufficiently rare that it could be concluded that such problems were not endemic.”
While investigators can not say for certain what caused the low airflow, it was “almost certainly caused by the migration of debris which had accumulated in the underfloor ducting from an unknown source at a time which could not be pinpointed.”
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