QF 1064 Struck By Lightning

[2impulsiv]

I've heard that QF 1064 PER-KGI was struck by lightning and forced to return to Perth earlier tonight. They have swapped the aircraft with another one and hope to be airborne by 22:00 if they can organize a full crew.

I flew out of KGI on QF1897 this afternoon and encountered this storm on our way to cruising altitude and it was rather rough and plenty of flashes of lightning around. I'm glad I'm not sitting at the airport waiting for QF1065 to PER which is the flight I normally take!!

This information has come from a friend who was on the flight..

Cheers.

 

[muffman]

there's an article on perthnow which relates, i can't post a link because of my post count but its on the main page.

 

[samh004]

Lightning strike diverts Qantas plane back to Perth from Kalgoorlie | Perth Now

A Qantas spokeswoman said there was no engineering support in Kalgoorlie, which is why the plane had to return to Perth for a routine maintenance check.

No one was injured, and the Qantas spokeswoman said it was likely passengers did not notice the aircraft had been struck by lightning.

 

[markis10]

Odd that a plane would fly for an hour with a possible fault rather than land at a remote site it was about to land at anyway?

 

[Simo]

Yep, but I was going TSV to BNE one night and we hit a bird when taking off from TSV and we where over nearly MKY and they said we have to go back to TSV as there was engineering support to fix plane and survey the damage.

The pilot then said we have been advised to proceed to TSV as there is engineering support there and if we land in MKY they will then have to get QF engineering staff to MKY and we would all be stranded for the night in MKY.

 

[2impulsiv]

Odd that a plane would fly for an hour with a possible fault rather than land at a remote site it was about to land at anyway?

It happened to me on boxing day last year, we were about 10 minutes into our decent and the first officer told us over the PA that they had an issue with a module not working and would have to return to Perth to have it looked at by an engineer. We sat in Perth for about an hour and then hit the sky's to KGI. The reason they didn't want to land in KGI was they would not have any engineering support and would most likely have to stay over night and not be able to operate the last flight from KGI to PER.

Cheers.

 

[pshepvic]

Yes but surely that is not the safest option. If a plane has a potential problem, where the engineering support is should not dictate where it lands. It should land at the first
safe location, even if that means they need to fly in engineering the next day to check the aircraft (in fact, the engineers could fly in on a replacement aircraft).


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[Solid]

Wouldn't it depend on the nature of the problem and be ultimately the captains call?

 

[Awesom Andy]

There are a lot of factors, and simply landing at the closest airport may be unnecessary. For example, if there's a landing gear fault, the plane can still be operated perfectly fine while in the air, so you would take it to somewhere with a longer runway, good levels of emergency services, and hopefully an engineering crew to look at it when you arrive.

 

[markis10]

There are a lot of factors, and simply landing at the closest airport may be unnecessary. For example, if there's a landing gear fault, the plane can still be operated perfectly fine while in the air, so you would take it to somewhere with a longer runway, good levels of emergency services, and hopefully an engineering crew to look at it when you arrive.

But we are not talking about a known fault in the landing gear here, any Jet operation must have good services at its destination by law so that's not an issue, it's seems from an outsiders perspective that commercial pressure is being applied as opposed to getting the plane safely on the ground in the shortest period of time. Aircraft get lightning strikes all the time, but if you are not sure of what damage has occurred why prolong the flight, there has been incidents where the aircraft was in worse shape than indicated after landing?

As to the sort of damage, this report makes for interesting reading as to the variety of possibilities:

http://www.caa.co.uk/docs/1357/F0000849Replyletter.pdf

 

[Mogul]

Not that long ago was flying from Perth to Syd on Virgin's XFB when it cracked two front screens above Esperance at 41,000 feet. We were diverted from Sydney to Melbourne for the screens to be replaced.

After descending to 20,000 feet we stayed at this altitude all the way to Melbourne. At the time I was wondering why we did return to Perth, but the captain and others had made the decision that the aircraft was safe enough to fly to Melbourne.

 

[samh004]

I guess I can see the issue, if the captain made the call that whatever went wrong was minimal, but would need to be checked on landing (and knows there’s no one at the destination to check it), then I can see why they'd return. But in a lightning strike it does seem more likely that the full extent of damage wouldn’t be known till you can walk around the a/c.