Topic: | Re:: Boeing nearly landing on the A4 | |
Posted by: | David Giles | |
Date/Time: | 23/01/08 20:58:00 |
It happened in on 21st November 1989 so I am sorry if I didn't remember the details To quote from one of the links quoted above. "On November 21, 1989, a British Airways 747 came within quite literally a stone’s throw of the ground at London Heathrow Airport in thick fog before reversing its descent on an unsuccessful instrument approach. The huge aeroplane was far enough to the right of the runway centreline that when Capt. William Glen Stewart discontinued the approach, he was actually outside the airport fence, paralleling a highway crowded with morning commuter traffic and only five feet higher than a nearby airport hotel the roof of which is exactly seventy feet above the ground. As the 747 thundered past the Penta Hotel, half in the mist and half out, car alarms all over the parking lot began to chirp and wail, their sensors set off by the four enormous turbofans spooling up. "Stewart, 53, the 15,000 hour British Airways captain in command of 747 G-AWNO ‘November Oscar’, as the aeroplane has been referred to ever since – routinely landed out of the second approach through the same fog. Phones at British Airways’ head quarters were ringing even before he had parked at the gate, and that would be Stewart’s last landing., for he never flew again. He lost his job, and more." |