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BFU File Code: 5X004-0/01
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This is the story of an Airbus a320. Well i'd love to tell you more about the plane and the operator but the german investigators are surprisingly tight lipped about the who the operator was, I mean ive read a few reports of theirs. It's how they do things, I'm just glad that they publish the reports and that its in english. No complaints here. We do know that this occurred on the 21st of march 2001 and the a320 was flying from Frankfurt to Paris with 115 passengers.
The pilots arrived at the airport a bit early as they had some extra preflight checklists to do today. The captain had 9300 hours of experience and even had an acrobatics rating on his license. The first officer had about 2000 hours of experience. That day the airplane that they'd be flying had been in maintenance for the past few days and so they'd need to conduct a few extra checks to make sure that the plane was fit to fly. Once the engines were started the and before they started taxing the pilots conducted a flight control check to make sure that everything was working as intended. They noted no irregularities and so they started to taxi to runway 18. The plane lined up with the runway and the pilots added power. The takeoff was normal and once they hit the rotate speed the captain pulled back taking the a320 into the sky. Right after takeoff the captain noticed that something was wrong. The plane was banking to the left just a tiny bit. He tried to correct it, but that only seemed to make the problem worse. As the captain tried to stabilize his plane the bank to the left grew. Eventually they were banking to the left by about 22 degrees. Just feet off the ground. The captain said “ I cant do anything any more!” indicating that the plane was not responding to his inputs in the way that he expected the plane to. The first officer said I have control and pushed the takeover button, from the right hand seat he was able to control the plane much better. The crew took the plane upto 12000 feet to try and troubleshoot the problem. The captain tried to control the plane from the left seat, but to their dismay the plane did the opposite of what the captain was commanding. If the captain commanded a left turn the plane would go right. But that problem did not exist on the other sidesidstick. With such peculiar behavior the pilots had no idea what else could go wrong with this plane and decided that landing back at Frankfurt was the best thing to do. The first officer then took control and landed the a320 back at Frankfurt with no further issues.
Now this incident does not sound like it was that bad, but looking at the flight data showed how close they came to disaster. This graph shows that their maximum bank was 21.42 degrees now that's not too extreme. But right below that they show you the readout from the radio altimeter. They were banking to the left at almost 22 degrees when they were barely 10 feet off the ground. The slightest mistake then would have sent this plane crashing back down. The only reason it wasn't worse than it was was because the first officer had been instinctively commanding a right bank before he took over from the captain. Had it not been for his moderating inputs this would have been bad. Once the plane was on the ground they handed the plane over to the ground staff who did a flight control check. When they did that they found that the ailerons initially moved in the right direction but then for some reason moved in the opposite direction something was very wrong with this plane.
