There was no shutdown of engines, Cathay says
Efforts by the government and Cathay Pacific to explain the chain of events leading to the emergency landing of an Airbus 330 plane on Tuesday raised new questions yesterday.
The airline said that at no point did both engines of the plane shut down before the landing in which six tyres deflated and caught fire.
But the director general of civil aviation, Norman Lo Shung-man, said data retrieved from the aircraft found there was a period when both engines malfunctioned.
Lo said later this was not necessarily a contradiction as airlines had very specific terms for such events.
According to Cathay Pacific's account, pilots of flight CX780 noticed a power fluctuation in the right-hand engine shortly after the aircraft reached cruising altitude following the take-off from Surabaya in Indonesia on a four-hour, 40-minute flight to Hong Kong.
But they decided to carry on as everything else was normal.
Twenty minutes before arrival the right-hand engine went into idling mode and they then found the second engine locked at a thrust level at 70 per cent of its full capacity - 20 per cent higher than the required level for landing.
'At no point was there a shutdown in both engines,' the airline's maintenance support manager, Dennis Hui King-wai, said.
'The second engine had power all along.'
Lo, however, told a radio programme yesterday that as the right-hand engine shut down, the left-hand engine also lost speed at one point as the pilots failed to alter the thrust level.
'Both engines malfunctioned within a certain period of time,' he said.
Lo said later that his account did not necessarily contradict that of the airline.
'It is a matter of interpretation of terms,' he said. 'The aviation business has a very specific meaning for shutdown, or idling, I am pretty sure we are really talking about the same thing.'
He did not explain, however, whether an attempt to adjust the thrust while the power setting was locked at a certain level could lead to engine failure.
The department has started an investigation into the incident but Lo said it did not see the need to ground the highly popular fleet of A330-300 jets at this stage.
Both Lo and Cathay Pacific hailed the performance of the crew members, who managed a safe landing against all odds and evacuated 309 passengers in less than two minutes, although eight suffered minor injuries while sliding down the emergency chutes.
But a pilot said the captain should have returned to Surabaya when he spotted the problem soon after taking off.
Affected passengers will get a refund for the flight tickets and earn a free trip within Asia from Cathay Pacific.
