British Airways flight BA038 from Beijing (China) to London crash landed short of the south runway at Heathrow Airport on 17 January 2008 causing major disruption to flights and local traffic.
All 136 passengers on board the Boeing 777 were evacuated, with reports of four people suffering minor injuries.
The incident happened as British Prime Minister Gordon Brown was due to leave Heathrow for China and India, but was delayed because of the incident.
The most popular theories on the cause are
1. fuel starvation - the plane ran out of fuel due to only having just enough to get in and then having to stack before landing. This appears to be discounted as the preliminary report says there was fuel spilt on the runway, which miraculously failed to ignite when the plane’s wings split on landing. Some pilots and technicians are saying this may be just tank residue as the fact there was no fire was pretty amazing.
2. fuel contamination - probably with water, either in the refuelling in China or some mid flight malfunction. Pilots say however that this is unlikely to have taken out both engines.
There is a third theory coming up the rails - electromagnetic interference (EMI) , either on board (mobile phone or GPS etc in customers possession) or from the ground (from an antennae etc) or even from Gordon’s Brown’s security alarms, which were jamming signals around the Prime Minister’s motorcade and plane to prevent terrorist attack.
The PM’s security apparatus has been ruled by most authorities as the pilot reported problems started 600 feet from land. However EMI cannot be completely discounted as there are other incidents on records where EMI appears to have caused a similar engine failure to that reported by the BA pilot, and again involving Boeing planes, in particular the crash of EgyptAir 990 in 1999.
The earlier failures were on Boeing 767s, BA flight 038 was a Boeing 777. Both types of plane are heavily digitised and their systems could be subject to electronic interference, although the main body of the aircraft should act as a Faraday cage and only the windows would allow in signals, an area thought to be too small for any major disruption to the plane’s electronics internally.
There are of course a number of small external communications devices attached to the exterior of a plane.
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