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ST LOUIS BLUES
St Louis is the patron saint of air accidents, after Louis Bleriot—Ed
Here we have the wreck of an Airbus 340-600, in November 2007, that had never flown, brand spanking new, right out of the hanger, without a single hour of air time. Enter the flight crew. Nine employees of the airline were in the aircraft, but not one employee from Airbus was present. The crew taxied out to the run-up area. Then they took all four engines to take-off power with virtually an empty aircraft. This was their first mistake as they obviously didn't read the run-up manuals. They had no clue just how light an empty Airbus really is.
No chocks were set, not that it would have mattered at that power setting. The brakes will not hold it back at full power anyway. As it turns out, the takeoff warning horn was blaring away in the cockpit because they had all 4 engines at full power. The aircraft computers thought they were trying to takeoff but it had not been configured properly (flaps/slats, etc, etc). Then one of these brain surgeons decided to pull the 'Ground Sense' circuit breaker to silence the alarms. This fools the aircraft into thinking
it is in the air.
That was their last mistake as the computers automatically released all the brakes and set the aircraft rocketing forward - a safety feature so that pilots can't land with the brakes on. There was no time to stop and no one smart enough to throttle back the engines from their max power setting. So the rest is as you see it below.
Ken Spokes assures me this is a true story - Ed
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