CANBERRA - A PACKED Qantas jetliner lost the use of crucial flight instruments after an oxygen cylinder exploded in its hold last week, blasting a large hole in its fuselage, an air safety investigator said yesterday.
The explosion last Friday during a flight from Hong Kong to Melbourne caused the Boeing 747-400 to rapidly descend thousands of feet and forced the pilots to make an emergency landing in the Philippines. The flight originated from London.
Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) director of aviation safety Julian Walsh said investigators found that the jet's three landing instrument systems and its anti-skid system were not working on arrival in Manila.
'However evidence indicates that all the aircraft's main systems, including engines and hydraulics, were functioning normally,' he told reporters.
Another ATSB investigator, Mr Ian Brokenshire, said later that the failed instruments would have made landing 'extremely difficult' if conditions over Manila had been cloudy or foggy.
Mr Walsh did not say what had caused the failures. But he did say part of the oxygen tank blasted into the passenger cabin through the floor, smashed into a door handle and was embedded in the ceiling.
Qantas is inspecting all its oxygen bottles aboard its fleet as a precaution, he said.
'All of the evidence at the moment indicates the damage to the aircraft being caused by the failure of this bottle,' Mr Walsh said.
'This is a unique event. It's not happened before that we're aware of.'
Qantas has never lost a jet plane due to an accident.
