Exclusive interview
Saud Faisal Malik
Juan Browne, a commercial pilot from Nevada County, has drawn a large audience for his “blancolirio” YouTube video channel, where he shares his outdoors adventures and coverage of community events. Browne has produced more than 50 videos on the Oroville Dam Spillway incident and repairs.
He obtained his pilot’s license on his 16th birthday — and bought his own plane before his first car — and went on to fly tankers for the US Air Force. He currently flies for American Airlines. Browne, a commercial airline pilot by trade, Juan’s clearly a storyteller at heart.
Pakistan Observer (PO) interviewed Juan Brown about the PIA plane crash for its YouTube Channel. Here are questions and answers:
Pakistan Observer: As you already aware of the situation that happened recently the PIA aircraft PK-8303 went down and you said in one of your videos that it was one of the strangest crashes you ever came across so why the aircraft went around is shaping up. So can you tell us more about this incident?
Juan Brown: This is the first time I’ve heard of an aircraft hitting the runway with the gear up and damaging both engines to the extent that they ended up subsequently failed what we little know so far at this point and a lot of this is going to be corroborated once the cockpit voice recorder and the data recorder are recovered from this accident and that data is analyzed but it seems at this time that this started out as a very high and hot approach in other words the aircraft was approaching the airport from too high altitude and with high airspeed and for whatever reason that we do not understand yet it appears as if the landing gear was never properly lowered.
We don’t know at this time if that was because of crew problems or with aircraft problems. There is something with the Airbus that prevents you from lowering the landing gear at too high airspeed to avoid damaging the landing gear. The investigators will be looking at that nevertheless it appears as though the aircraft came in too high too hot landed long meaning they landed too far down the runway at fast speed. And it appears that they did not realize that the landing gear was still retracted until they hit the runway at about the halfway.
It appears they suddenly realized that the gear was not extended and in a reaction they went around in an effort to salvage the approach and come back around and properly lower the landing gear they may have also been keyed to go around ahead of time because they knew they were coming in hot and fast. All of this will be corroborated by the cockpit voice recorder and the data recorder once the aircraft hit the runway on at a high rate of speed.
It impacted on the bottom of the engines right located on the bottom of the engines are the accessory drive gear boxes if you damage those hard enough the engines will subsequently fail because inside these gearboxes are things like fuel pumps oil pumps hydraulics and that sort of things. The evidence of this is in the photograph that the Pakistan Observer took of the aircraft in flight after it was struck the runway. You can see damage to the bottom of the engines and you can see a thing called a ram air turbine extended out of the aircraft at ram air turbine extends automatically once both engines have been severely damaged to the point that they’re no longer producing electrical power generator power.
The aircraft came around to come back to land but the engines subsequently failed and the aircraft crashed.
It is like the fall of the pilot or do you think it’s technical issue within the Airbus, it’s gonna be too early to tell who’s at fault at this point. First we got to find out what happened before we can find out why it happened.
