Official Report: Pilots Failed To Detect Fuel Leak…
The pilots of an Air Transat Airbus A330 that glided to a landing in the Azores in August 2001 responded incorrectly to a fuel leak over the Atlantic Ocean, according to the official report on the incident, released Monday. The pilots, reacting to what they thought was a fuel imbalance, fed fuel into the leak, and soon succeeded in inadvertently pumping all their fuel overboard, far from land. The report said the pilots acted from memory rather than utilizing a checklist, so they never saw a “Caution” note in the Fuel Imbalance checklist that might have caused them to consider that the real problem was not an imbalance but a fuel leak. “Although there were a number of other indications that a significant fuel loss was occurring, the crew did not conclude that a fuel leak situation existed — not actioning the ‘Fuel Leak’ procedure was the key factor that led to the fuel exhaustion,” according to the report. The fuel leak was the ultimate result of an improperly installed fuel line that fractured.
