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Image credit: Adrian Pingstone
This is the story of a british airways VC10 tail number gold alpha sierra golf kilo. The VC10 is an interesting aircraft, sure it has 4 engines at the back, it looks a certain way but to me the most interesting thing about the plane is its marketing. The official tagline of the airplane was “try a little VC10tenderness” which I have to say as far as taglines go is quite creative. On the 27th of november 1969 a VC10 was taking off from londons heathrow airport bound for new york. The takeoff was normal in the cockpit, nothing unusual, but in the cabin, specifically the back, the passengers and the cabin crew heard a strange rubbing noise. Now you have to remember the VC10 had 4 engines and all 4 engines were mounted at the back. The british needed a medium range plane to fly to parts of their empire, BOAC had 707s but they were too big for the job. The british needed a plane that could also land and take off from less than ideal runways. So the solution was to put the engines up on the tail so that debris wouldnt be an issue and to have 4 engines so that it could fly medium haul routes and thats how the VC10 got its distinctive look. So back to our story the plane took off and the crew carried out the noise abatement procedures and after that they pushed the engines back up to 94%. The plane continued to climb as the plane neared a navigational beacon in woodley, the crew flew into a cloud bank and they turned on the de-icing system as a precaution at 5000 feet. At 10:20 am as the plane was climbing the crew heard a loud bang and in the cockpit they got a warning that said that engine number 4, that is the right most engine, was on fire. Captain JH smurthwaite immediately called for a checklist on engine number 4, flight engineer R Frobisher had data that made the captain's day much worse. Engine number three was spooling down and could not be relit. They had lost all engines on the right side of the plane. As they were dealing with the failure of engine number three they got a fire warning on engine number three as well, it appeared that the right side of their plane was on fire. A fire in the air is never a good sign and so they needed to land as soon as possible.

The fire warnings were out but the crew had their hands on the engine fire extinguishers in case the fire came back. A person on the ground saw that the plane shedding bits, unknown to the witness they were watching the remains of the shattered engine. First officer smee immediately got on the radio with london control and requested an immediate return to heathrow.

The controllers asked the plane to turn to 060 degrees, they streaked back towards the safety of heathrow, but there was a problem, the plane was fueled up for a long flight and so was quite heavy they needed to dump some fuel to land, but with a potential fire at the back of the plane dumping fuel didnt seem like a good idea. I mean the last thing you wanted was a VC10 sized flamethrower. This meant that theyd be touching down weighing, 38,887 kilos or 85000 pounds. To compensate for the extra weight they'd have to land 25 knots faster than usual, at 168 knots. That was not all with two engines out of commision the B hydraulic line had failed and this meant that the right hand landing gear wouldn't work and so they had to do a gravity drop, or open the doors and let the gear fall and lock into place under its own weight. The left hand gear and the nose gear were powered by the A hydraulic line and so they worked. Due to the failure of the B line they wouldn't have brakes on landing. So they had to use a hydraulic accumulator to use the right hand brakes. The accumulator was charged and the plane touched down on the runway at Heathrow . They commanded full reverse thrust from engines 1 and 2 and braked