How A Pilot Accidentally Flew A Passenger Jet Into The Ground | Kenyan Airlines Flight 431

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This is the story of Kenyan airlines flight 431. On the 30th of January 2000, a Kenyan airlines Airbus A310 was to make the flight from Abidjan in the Ivory Coast to jomo kenyatta international airport in kenya. The plane had 169 passengers and 10 crew members on board. Here's the thing though this plane should not be here right now, the crew had diverted here cause the weather at lagos was so bad that the pilots held over lagos for about 30 minutes and then diverted to abidjan. So a relief crew took over the plane and departure was scheduled for 9 pm. At 8:55 pm the pilots were in contact with the controllers and permission to start up was given. The crew were hard at work, going through checklists and the captain said flex sixty. This was to do with the engines power setting on takeoff. Then the two engines came online and the ground mechanic said ‘We have two normal startups” and then the plane was cleared to taxi. As they taxied the captain ordered the first officer to set the flaps to 15, the first officer was the pilot flying and the captain was the supervising pilot. As the plane began to taxi the controller updated them on the wind and the conditions at the airport and cleared them to takeoff and asked them to call the tower back when they reached 4000 feet, By 9:08 pm they were done with everything and the first officer said “Take-off checklist completed ... cleared for take-off”. Then once the plane was lined up the captain applied power to the engines and the engines. 9 seconds later the plane is at 100 knots. Seconds later the captain said V1 rotate the pilots were committed to this takeoff and then the plane took off. As the plane gained altitude the first officer said "Positive rate of climb, gear up", two seconds after that the stall warning sounded, the plane was low to the ground and just picking up speed, this was the worst time for them to be getting a stall warning. The auto pilot then called out 300 feet. The first officer asked “what's the problem”. Then the autopilot said “200, 100, 50, 30, 20 and 10 feet”. The plane then started with the “whoop whoop pull up alarm” but the first officer silenced the alarm, this time the autopilot said that they were 50 feet above the ground.The captain kept urging the first officer “go up”. The plane then made an automated callout for 10 feet. Then the voice recorder picked up the sound of impact, flight 431 had crashed into the waters off of the coast of abidjan.By 9: 10 pm the controller knew that something had gone seriously wrong and activated the crash alarm and the airforce was out searching the area for the plane. The wreck was not hard to find as the plane had gone down so close to the airport at abidjan.

Due to the proximity of the crash site to the airport getting the flight data recorders were not that hard and listening to the CVR told the investigators that the stall warning went off in the cockpit right before the plane crashed. Now the question is why? They had a few theories, it could be that the plane was misconfigured for takeoff, mandala airlines flight 091 anyone . It could be that the air speed fed to the computers were faulty, it could be that the the engines lost power, or that they retracted the slats too early , a sudden change in the center of gravity of the plane or a deployment of the spoilers. To get to the truth they needed to dig deeper. Now one of the things that they listed for on the CVR was the configuration alarm, As the name susgests the alarm is meant to alert the pilots to a misconfigured plane on takeoff. If the pilots did retract the flaps on takeoff then the CVR would have picked up the configuration alarm. But it did not pick that up. The wreck of the plane also showed that the flaps and slats were in the right place, right where they should be, so a flaps / slats issues did not bring this plane down. They then wanted to know if the pilots were being told the correct airspeed by their instruments, They knew how much the A310 weighed on takeoff, so they checked to see if the callouts made by the pilots made sense, like would the plane be going a 100 knots when the 100 knots callout was made during the takeoff run. They did the math and it checked out the pilots were seeing accurate information during their takeoff run, their instruments did not deceive them. The CVR also told them that the engines were at a high power setting all through out the short flight, had one or both of the engines spooled down you would have been able to hear that on the CVR but t