By Scott Longman
Director Stanley Kubrick’s monumental film, 2001: A Space Odyssey anchored itself a place as one of the most acclaimed films of all time. It addressed multiple themes and subplots, with perhaps the most enduring one being that of machine against man: his fictional HAL 9000 computer went rogue and killed as many of the spaceship crew as it could. The film debuted in the spring of 1968. Given the technology of the time, although viewers thought HAL was cinematically horrifying, nobody actually believed that anything like that could ever happen.
Turns out, Kubrick’s prediction was only off by seven years.
On October 7, 2008, Quantas Flight 72, with service from Singapore to Perth, soared 37,000 feet over the Indian Ocean. The Airbus A300 carried 303 passengers and 12 crew.
Running the ship was Captain Kevin Sullivan, a deeply accomplished United States Navy aviator, and a graduate of the USN Strike Fighter Tactics Instructor Program, which also goes by the storied name of Top Gun. His career included all manner of aviation insanity, as the Top Gun name establishes.
The first sign of HAL was that the autopilot self-disengaged. That was shortly followed by a hollow, scary voice barking “Stall, Stall, Stall.” For those unacquainted, a stall alarm simply tells the pilot that the aircraft is going too slow, and as a consequence, is at risk of suffering a catastrophic loss of lift, where the plane goes all Kafka and metamorphosizes into a brick. But that was absolutely wrong: the airspeed was right where it should be, nowhere remotely close to a stall.
Then, insanely, came a strident overspeed warning.
An overspeed warning is just exactly what it sounds like: there’s only so fast you can take any aircraft before its component parts decide they can have a happier life washing up on a beach somewhere, and a good system tells you when you’ve overstayed the airspeed party.
But you can’t have both a stall warning and an overspeed warning at the same time—they are opposites.
And with that, the Ghost In The Machine went full HAL. In the words of
Captain Sullivan: “The automation tried to kill us. We were fighting for our lives.”
More precisely, it violently plunged the nose of the aircraft severely down.
That plunge was so abrupt, so extreme, that over 100 unbuckled passengers and crew were slammed to the ceiling. In the later words of a flight attendant: it was “like the Hand of God” had pushed the plane down. A more horrific illustration is that unbuckled passengers seated under overhead bins had their skulls and cervical spines punched clean through the bottom of the bins, leaving their bloodied faces up against their carry-ons. Some injuries were severe and life-changing.
Right then and there, being Top Gun mattered.
Hard to believe, but major aircraft have a set of circuits in them that will not only second-guess an accomplished pilot, but will lock that pilot out of aircraft control: the machine takes over. The real-life HAL was something called an Air Data/Inertial Reference Unit (actually, three of them) [ADIRU] and a flight computer fed by the ADIRUs.
The reaction of some huge percentage of pilots to a plane plunging at the sea would be to pull back on the stick. But right then, Sullivan went all Top Gun, and simply, if counterintuitively, released it instead.
That did it.
He immediately heard an extended thumping sound behind him. That was 100 people crashing to the floor. Yes, that sucked, but the airplane was no longer trying to kill them.
In a magnificent moment of sang froid, Sullivan turned, looked at the rest of the flight deck, and expressed gratitude for having made it through.
That relief was short-lived: two minutes later, HAL was back at it, with another violent plunge.
He again recovered.
Having been Top Gun, he had conducted exercises with the Aussies, and knew of airports close by, to include one called Learmonth. He declared mayday and received emergency clearance to set down.
The epic terror he was facing: what if the HAL 9000 did it yet again, but when he didn’t have sufficient altitude remaining to recover?
No choice. He went for it.
After an agonizing several minutes of descent through the danger zone, Sullivan successfully landed the A300, to the roaring approval of those aboard.
Queried shortly thereafter, he adopted the Austrian accent of a former actor whom we once highly respected but now wouldn’t hire for a job as latrine orderly: “Ya, a little bit of excitement, but otherwise a dull day.”
Captain Kevin Sullivan: Living proof as to why you want a Top Gun pilot in command of your aircraft.
SIDEBAR
The Australian Transportation Safety Board conducted an investigation of the ADIRUs/ flight computer at an exhaustive level. As it turns out, bizarrely, there had been similar failures in 2006 and 2008, both in nearly the same geographic place, off the Western coast of Australia. A fourth was narrowly averted in 2008, also in about the same place. What link that geography may have had to it has never been determined. And more importantly, although there are theories, nobody ever figured out what actually caused the computer to go all HAL 9000.
