- 6 minutes ago
Captain Richard de Crespigny is the Qantas pilot who safely landed Qantas Flight 32 on November 4, 2010, after one of its engines exploded shortly after takeoff, tearing through vital systems and leaving hundreds of lives in his hands.
A former Royal Australian Air Force pilot and senior captain on the Airbus A380, de Crespigny has since become one of the world's leading voices on crisis leadership and aviation safety.
When a plane begins to break apart in midair, survival depends on split-second decisions, mechanical precision, and the steady hand of the captain. But what actually happens in the cockpit when things go catastrophically wrong — and how do pilots train for the unimaginable?
De Crespigny speaks to Business Insider about how he safely landed the plane and evacuated 440 passengers and 29 crew after an engine failure. He also explains how safe manufacturers like Boeing and Airbus are.
Now retired from commercial flying, de Crespigny continues to advocate for safety and resilience in aviation. He hosts the podcast "Fly: The Elements of Resilience," in which he shares insights from decades in the sky.
For more:
Richard's podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/33NHiXAqZxw8Lg9OChadgQ?si=c5cf70ce058a467d&nd=1&dlsi=17ff32bb686e4d54
Richard's books:
https://www.penguin.com.au/books/fly-9780670078738
A former Royal Australian Air Force pilot and senior captain on the Airbus A380, de Crespigny has since become one of the world's leading voices on crisis leadership and aviation safety.
When a plane begins to break apart in midair, survival depends on split-second decisions, mechanical precision, and the steady hand of the captain. But what actually happens in the cockpit when things go catastrophically wrong — and how do pilots train for the unimaginable?
De Crespigny speaks to Business Insider about how he safely landed the plane and evacuated 440 passengers and 29 crew after an engine failure. He also explains how safe manufacturers like Boeing and Airbus are.
Now retired from commercial flying, de Crespigny continues to advocate for safety and resilience in aviation. He hosts the podcast "Fly: The Elements of Resilience," in which he shares insights from decades in the sky.
For more:
Richard's podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/33NHiXAqZxw8Lg9OChadgQ?si=c5cf70ce058a467d&nd=1&dlsi=17ff32bb686e4d54
Richard's books:
https://www.penguin.com.au/books/fly-9780670078738
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FunTranscript
00:00My name is Richard the Crepney.
00:02I was a pilot in command of Qantas Flight 32
00:05that had an engine failure over Singapore,
00:08putting the lives of 440 passengers and 29 crew at jeopardy.
00:13This is everything I'm authorised to tell you.
00:17There was an engine fire with the failure of the electrics,
00:20the hydraulics, the pneumatics, brakes, slats.
00:23It was one after the other these failures came about
00:27and we call events like these a black swan event.
00:31I realised we were entering into something
00:34that I had never experienced before
00:36and it would challenge me and my crew to the edge of our limits.
00:46Qantas Flight 32 was a flight from Singapore to Sydney
00:51on the 4th of November 2010.
00:53It was an Airbus A380.
00:56The start of it was just like any other flight.
00:58We were taxiing out from the terminal in Singapore to the runway.
01:02It was a perfect day to go flying, 30 degrees, clear skies, no wind.
01:06It was four minutes after take-off when engine number two exploded.
01:11It was actually two explosions, like boom, boom.
01:15They were loud and certainly unexpected.
01:18The passengers in the back were unsure what was happening.
01:21The aircraft shook and all of a sudden alarms started sounding.
01:2640 alarms were queued up in the first second alone.
01:29It was really confusing.
01:31About one minute after that explosion,
01:34I made a PAN call to Air Traffic Control saying,
01:37Pan, Pan, Pan, Qantas 32 engine failure, maintaining 7,400 feet,
01:42maintaining a heading of such and such, standby for instructions.
01:46So a PAN message is a notification to Air Traffic Control
01:52that we're about to say there is a problem and we're going to need priority.
01:57Other aircraft listening in the sky, if they hear a PAN call,
02:00they go quiet so that they don't interrupt us.
02:04Air Traffic Control did stop talking to us until we were ready to talk to them.
02:09We tried to cancel the alarms, but they kept coming back
02:12because there were more checklists queued behind.
02:16So it was very distracting.
02:18The top panel was a sea of red lights.
02:20The centre panel was a sea of red lights.
02:22Every time we started to action at checklists,
02:24it felt like there was a jackhammer pushing me down into the chair.
02:29After the first 30 seconds, I said to Matt, the first officer, my co-part,
02:39ECAM actions.
02:41Now, ECAM is the Electronic Centralised Aircraft Monitoring System.
02:45It's a computer program that monitors and sensors and parameters on the A380
02:49that will say if things are wrong.
02:51Eventually, after about three minutes in proceeding away from Singapore,
02:55Matt stopped actioning the checklist and he said,
02:59could we please head back towards Singapore?
03:01And that was an excellent suggestion.
03:03So I told Matt to stop actioning the checklist.
03:06I got clearance and then we positioned to enter a holding pattern near Singapore Airport.
03:12So when I was flying and doing something different,
03:14Matt would have to monitor me.
03:16And when the aircraft was in stable flight, I would be monitoring Matt.
03:25As pilots, we try to maintain what we call a mental model of the aeroplane.
03:30It's a mapping of what state the aeroplane's in and something goes wrong,
03:35what we do about it.
03:36But that mental model was getting challenged as each successive checklist arrived
03:42to say that more parts were damaged.
03:44When you're overloaded by alarms and distractions,
03:47the amygdala in the brain can fire off the fear response,
03:50which is fight, flight or freeze.
03:52This is not a good response if you're in charge of heavy, high-tech equipment.
03:57We have to try and avoid the fear response that would have us doing the wrong thing.
04:03We have to aviate, navigate, communicate.
04:05And then when the cortex in the slower part of our brain comes online to assess the situation,
04:11then we can assess the aircraft, keep our mental model and work out the right actions to do.
04:17When we saw blank screens, data had crosses on it instead of numbers and symbols.
04:25So I knew that sensors had been blown off the aircraft.
04:29The level of damage was extensive on board QF-32.
04:32We'd lost about 650 wires that were broken.
04:35We'd lost half our networks.
04:37Out of 22 systems on the aircraft, 21 were affected.
04:41Engine number two had exploded and it created shrapnel like a cluster bomb.
04:46400 pieces of shrapnel hit the aircraft.
04:49The only system not affected was the oxygen system,
04:52but we didn't need that because we were below 10,000 feet.
04:55So in every system there was between moderate and extensive damage.
05:01The peak of stress for me during QF-32 was about 15 minutes after the engine exploded.
05:07There were so many failures and the failures had knock-on effects.
05:11So two failures might come together to make a third failure.
05:15It became very impossible to track not just the primary failures but the knock-on effects
05:20and I was overloaded.
05:21I'd lost my situational awareness for the aircraft and what we could do.
05:25But then a very strange thing happened and I call that reversing the logic.
05:31Reversing the logic is not my idea.
05:33It was Gene Kranz at Houston at NASA in the 1960s and the 1970s
05:39when the astronauts are going to the moon.
05:41During the Apollo 13 crisis when the oxygen tank exploded,
05:45Gene Kranz stood up, saw that his mission controllers were overloaded
05:49and he said, gentlemen, stop wondering about what's broken
05:52and focus on what's working.
05:54Instead of looking at the hundreds or thousands of failures,
05:58when you invert the logic, we just needed two wings.
06:01We just needed enough brakes to slow down.
06:04We needed enough flaps and slats and enough electrics just to get us flying.
06:09It was like we were doing a junkyard wars building of a basic aircraft
06:15from junk in a scrap heap.
06:17We didn't have sensors for the brakes, for brake temperatures,
06:22for hydraulic systems.
06:24And so a lot of the checklists that came up were incorrect.
06:27When the checklist came up to transfer fuel or to turn off critical hydraulics,
06:32we didn't just blindly follow the checklist.
06:34We looked at other synoptic systems on the airplane
06:37to see a second source of instrumentation to say,
06:41is this indication correct and does it make sense?
06:44There were many decisions we made that probably half the pilots
06:47in the world would disagree with.
06:49We stayed up in the air for two hours so that we could understand
06:53how the aircraft had been damaged and what we had left
06:57when we would come in to land.
06:59And so we did a dress rehearsal of the landing before we made our approach.
07:04We proved the aircraft safe to fly at 4,000 feet,
07:07slowed down with the flaps out.
07:09And again, that wasn't in any Airbus manual.
07:14It wasn't in my aircraft manual.
07:16But pilots are trained to study all the other emergencies out there
07:20so that if we meet them again, we can survive them.
07:24So the control check that we did before we landed was a critical part
07:29in the safety of the flight.
07:30Because as we came into land, we were receiving speed warnings
07:34and stall warnings.
07:35So many things had gone wrong.
07:37The aircraft has duplicated systems for redundancy.
07:41So if we lose one engine, we have spares.
07:43But in many systems we were losing the primary and the secondary.
07:47There were no checklists for those cases
07:49and we certainly haven't trained for them.
07:51I was uncertain whether the engines would stay flying.
07:54So I requested to climb in the holding pattern near Singapore.
07:58So if we lost all the engines, we could glide back to Singapore with no engines.
08:04And it takes about 15 years to get a pilot from off the street into the left-hand seat
08:14in command of a passenger jet.
08:17I had served in the Royal Australian Air Force for 11 years
08:20and I had been flying in Qantas for another 24 years.
08:25And the military experience is exceptional for getting you used to flying aircraft to and beyond their limits.
08:34You actually lose control of the aircraft often when you do dogfights and you have to recover.
08:40You have to push your aircraft to the limit.
08:42I think there are two types of pilots.
08:44One type of pilot doesn't have too much interest in the engines or maybe the deep mechanics.
08:50He just turns the switch and expects the engine to start and that's all they need to know.
08:55I'm different.
08:56I have to know the aircraft from the ground up.
08:58If you really want to understand the system so that you can recover it if it's breaking,
09:03you have to know everything down to its base foundations.
09:07The preparation needed to be an airline pilot or to survive a crisis is intense.
09:13Standard operating procedures won't help you in a crisis because it's not a standard time.
09:18It's looking at all the threats, calculating the risks and it's practicing the things that scare you.
09:24There are 40 million commercial flights every year around the world.
09:29And in a lot of those flights, things go wrong.
09:32So we're naturally solving problems and stopping crises.
09:36Pilots get lots of practices with emergencies.
09:39All pilots also receive extensive training in simulators.
09:44For my airline, we did four simulator trips every year and a simulator taken to hell and back for four hours
09:52where you practice things that are uncomfortable, they're difficult.
09:55Sometimes you don't action them correctly so you go back, you have to adjust and retry
10:01and you have to keep practicing these things that are difficult until you build habits.
10:06So you practice engine failures until they don't stress you.
10:14The crew of QF-32 was an augmented crew.
10:18I was in command of the Airbus A380 and I would have two extra pilots as part of the normal crew.
10:23But on this day, this was an additional check as part of one of my seven license renewals
10:28that we have to do every year as a pilot.
10:31So there were two additional captains on board and their job were to check me,
10:37to see if the flight went normally, to see if I looked after the aircraft,
10:40the passengers, obeyed air traffic control.
10:43This was called a brute check and one of the captains, David Evans,
10:46was actually training the other captain, Harry Wubbin, to check me.
10:50The hierarchy of authority is quite different to what you would see in a business or a committee.
10:56We had three captains on board QF-32 that day, one first officer and one second officer.
11:02I was a pilot in command and even though there were two other captains on board,
11:06they would be supernumerary to me and they would support us.
11:10Many times during QF-32 I said stop to the crew because there was something wrong.
11:17If you demand the right and the privilege to say stop to your team,
11:20then you must also give your team the right to say stop to you.
11:24And there were many times during QF-32 the pilots in the cockpit said stop.
11:29This is not right or let's talk about it.
11:32This is not an abuse or a threat to the ego of the person in charge.
11:37This is everyone trying to add their ideas into the mix and get the best outcome.
11:42When I said ECAM actions, that gives the instruction to Matt to start actioning checklists.
11:47He now starts going head down, focusing on the screens, looking at the checklists,
11:53checking the systems, moving switches.
11:55I'm now flying the aeroplane and talking to air traffic control.
11:59We could have declared a mayday.
12:01You would issue a mayday if you think you're going to die.
12:04A mayday call received by air traffic control will say shut down departures,
12:10get ready for 440 passengers to come to the operating theatres because this could get nasty.
12:15Although we were working to our limits or sometimes beyond,
12:19I was absolutely confident that as a team we would prove resilient.
12:24So we declared a pan and it was never upgraded to a mayday.
12:29Every 5 minutes we checked the fuel on board to make sure we had sufficient.
12:33And every 10 minutes I queried the crew, should we just throw the aircraft on the ground
12:38or should we continue with the checklists?
12:40And everyone agreed we should continue with the checklists.
12:43I'm really proud to say that I think of the 100 decisions we made that day, they were all correct.
12:49And that's not because of me.
12:51It's because of the team of the five pilots pulling their knowledge, training and experience
12:56and decision making to come up with what I think were perfect decisions.
13:00If you thought it was stressful in the cockpit, now put yourself in the passengers' seats.
13:12They're looking out the window, they're seeing the wing open up, a bit of fire in the wing.
13:16They're seeing part of the wing fly past.
13:18They're seeing fuel and hydraulic oil streaming out the back of the wing.
13:22They're feeling the aircraft shaking like they're driving down a corrugated dirt road.
13:27And all the alarms are going off around them.
13:30The cabin service manager tried to contact us in the cockpit.
13:33He couldn't because the intercom had been destroyed by the explosion.
13:38So the only way we could have communication with the cabin was to send Mark, the second officer, back
13:44to give instructions face to face.
13:47Or I could press the public address button and send a message out to all the passengers
13:52and all the cabin crew and we ended up doing that quite a lot.
13:56Pilots find it very amusing to watch movies about air disasters because none of it is really based in facts.
14:05I think the movie Die Hard had a picture of an aircraft taking off, someone lit a match of fuel on the ground
14:12and it chased the aircraft and moved into the air.
14:15That just doesn't happen.
14:17Really, only two or three aircraft out of 40 million are crashing.
14:21The aviation safety record is just the most phenomenally remarkable safety record.
14:26There is nothing that closely matches it.
14:28I don't think people realise just how often pilots have to correct the system.
14:32There's being fuel, there's catering, there's engineering.
14:35Sewage systems are emptied on the aircraft.
14:37The cabin crew have to come together.
14:39All these systems have to be amalgamated to get all these people to come onto the aircraft and leave on schedule.
14:45And things go wrong all the time.
14:48And what passengers don't realise is that when everything's perfect, the technical crew or the pilots will operate the aircraft and you'll be safe.
14:59And when things go wrong, it might be an engineering problem or dirty fuel or a passenger hasn't boarded the aircraft.
15:07These are the things that pilots fix all the time.
15:11At the end of the QF32 incident, I debriefed the passengers saying what had happened, why, what was about to happen, what they needed to do.
15:19And I told them that the engines only fail one in every 350,000 engine hours.
15:25That means that only one pilot in four of a four engine aircraft will ever see an engine failure in their whole career.
15:33There are other types of failures too.
15:35There could be fuel problems or hydraulic problems or weather problems.
15:38But really, I would say you wouldn't have a major problem coming up any more than one in a hundred flights.
15:46Even though I've retired from aviation, I think our lives are in the best hands possible and I have the highest respect for everyone who commands a big jet in the sky.
15:58Pilots are always empathetic and compassionate and we always try and help people who say they have a fear of flying.
16:05So the best thing you can do if you have a fear of flying when getting onto an aircraft is to tell people, tell the cabin crew, and they will try and help you.
16:13And during my time flying on the A380, I would walk around the cabin during the cruise on my time off and if people had a fear of flying that they were happy to discuss, I would take them for a walk around the aircraft for two hours and I could fix their fear of flying in two hours.
16:28The Airbus A380 has 4 million parts.
16:35It's worth $400 million US.
16:38It was one part of the A380, a little stub pipe about this long.
16:43It had been manufactured incorrectly and one side of the pipe's wall was thinner than the other and with vibration that thin side of the wall cracked.
16:53So when that stub pipe fractured, oil bled into a part of the engine that should not be on fire.
16:59It got hot.
17:00It caught fire.
17:01It weakened the hub for the intermediate turbine.
17:06The turbine ripped itself off the shaft, over sped and exploded.
17:11Pieces came off that disc at two and a half times the speed of sound.
17:15It's called a rotor burst.
17:18When the engineers determined the cause of the failure on board QF32, engineers around the world inspected all the Airbus A380s that had the Rolls-Royce engines.
17:28And they found about another 20 engines that had faulty produced stub pipes.
17:34So those engines were pulled off and the stub pipes changed.
17:37As a consequence of the failure, there are now checks made where you can use cameras to look at these stub pipes and make sure that they're safe.
17:45But also the engine has been changed so that these failures are not expected to happen again.
17:50While we were in the air, I knew that the crisis centre in Qantas would have been convened.
17:55And it had.
17:56And there were people amassing in a room of all backgrounds, political, mechanical, financial, and they're all there to add value and to solve the problem.
18:06Now, they couldn't talk to us because the satellite phone on board our aircraft, or two of them, had been destroyed.
18:11People in the crisis centre trusted the pilots in the flight deck of QF32 to get that aircraft down on the ground.
18:18And in the flight deck, we trusted the people in the crisis centre to prepare for our arrival.
18:24When we landed, we stopped about 100 metres short of the end of the four-kilometre-long runway.
18:36Eight fire trucks surrounded us.
18:38Ambulances, police, triage.
18:41Like layers of an engine, fuel was gushing out of the wings when we were sitting on the runway, faster than it was gushing out of the wings when we were in flight.
18:50Passengers looked outside the window and noticed that there were no fire services approaching the aircraft.
18:56What they didn't realise is, in the cockpit, Matt was saying to the fire services,
19:01put foam over the fuel that's gushing on the ground, put water over the hot brakes to cool them down.
19:06The fire services said, well, turn off your engines first.
19:09We said, we have.
19:10They said, no, you haven't.
19:11I put my head out the window and I noticed that even after using three devices to try and shut down engine number one,
19:18that engine number one was still turning on the outside.
19:21We had an uncontrolled engine that we couldn't shut down.
19:35People criticise, perhaps, of the decisions to keep passengers on board.
19:39In fact, some of the pilots think it was more dangerous on the ground than it was in the air.
19:43We were on the ground for two hours before the last passenger got off the aircraft.
19:47There were so many threats outside that it was safer on board the aircraft than outside.
19:52There was fuel gushing around the aircraft, four tonnes on the ground.
19:56If passengers walked through the fuel, they might put a spark that would ignite the fuel.
20:02They might walk in front of engine number one to still running and get sucked into it.
20:06They might get covered in foam from the eight fire trucks.
20:09I had done studies of passenger evacuations and I knew that passengers will get injured in an evacuation.
20:17And bearing in mind that the doors of an A380 are higher than the doors on any other aircraft in the sky.
20:25If we put your grandfather down the slide and maybe he used a wheelchair to get on the aircraft,
20:30but now he's going down a 45 degree slide down through eight metres onto a hot concrete runway.
20:37If he doesn't break his legs when he touches the runway,
20:40maybe someone will concertina into him and break his hip.
20:44So there was massive risk in just evacuating down the slides.
20:48We use stairs for people to go down the stairs to get off the aircraft.
20:52The other part of the disembarkation of the aircraft that I'm particularly proud about
20:56is the management of the passengers and their onboard luggage.
21:01Michael Von Reith, the customer service manager,
21:05he made a public address that everyone was to leave the luggage in the overhead lockers
21:09and it was critical they did it.
21:11Everyone complied except one person who came to the front door with his stroller bag.
21:16And Michael said, I told you not to bring your stroller.
21:20And the man said, well, I'm here at the door.
21:22What are you going to do about it?
21:23Michael picked up the hand luggage and threw it across the aircraft and said, get off this aircraft.
21:30No one disobeyed any of the cabin crew's instructions.
21:34Everyone got off in an orderly way and there was no injury.
21:38In Russia, about 10 years ago, a super jet crashed on the runway and passengers died
21:44because other passengers congested the aisles with cabin luggage before they got off.
21:49We've seen the JAL flight in Japan recently where all the passengers left their luggage in the overhead lockers
21:55and the evacuation went perfectly.
21:58I told the passengers that because of the statistics, them having seen this engine failure
22:03probably reduces the likelihood of their neighbours or family ever seeing an engine failure.
22:08Now, after we landed, the CEO of Qantas asked the chief engineer, can you be sure that the failure that's happened aboard QF32,
22:19can you be sure that it won't happen again?
22:21The engineer said no.
22:23And so the CEO made a brave decision to say that I'm now grounding all the A380s in the airline wherever they are in the world.
22:31In Qantas, they found some more engines that did have the failure, but they never took off.
22:42When you find yourself in a crisis, the body reacts with cortisol that floods the blood.
22:48I had a cortical high during the QF32 event and for the following two days until I arrived home in Sydney.
22:56And now I found myself with a body that was totally depleted of energy and I then went into a state of post-traumatic stress.
23:05I wasn't listening to anyone.
23:07I was going through a stage of looking at the what-ifs.
23:11Could I have done something better?
23:13You know, maybe I did something wrong.
23:15So what if I tried all these different things?
23:18I slept.
23:19The incident kept circulating in my mind.
23:22I would dream about QF32 for the two hours in the air, two hours on the ground.
23:27And when that stopped, I would then cycle back and start it again.
23:31But I sought psychological help.
23:33I went to a psychologist three times.
23:35I grounded myself to the chief pilot saying,
23:38I'm not in a position to evaluate if I'm safe to fly, which means you must ground me.
23:44And he said, thank you.
23:46Now, not all the pilots did the same.
23:48Some pilots thought they could persist.
23:50Some pilots had a lot of trouble with post-traumatic stress.
23:53It took a long time to cure.
23:55In my case, I had mine solved within four months and I went back flying.
23:59Mental health is a very serious problem in aviation.
24:05But it's no more serious than anywhere else in the community.
24:08We have to give people the psychological safety to say, you know what?
24:12I'm not okay.
24:13And I need a week off.
24:14Now, the problem in aviation was, yes, you could always say you need a week off.
24:20And the airline would happily have you on the ground.
24:24But when you self-declare like that, the process to get back in the air is so enormous by the regulators that the consequence is the people simply don't declare that they're unfit to fly because of mental trauma.
24:39Now, in America, there was recently the Mental Health in Aviation Act of 2025.
24:44And this is going a long way towards trying to get the both companies and the regulators, which is the FAA in America, to change the system to try and get pilots back in the air quicker once the pilots say they're fit to fly.
25:00What you have to restore is trust, because at the moment there is no trust between the pilots and the medical inspectors in aviation.
25:11Trust takes years to build and it can be destroyed in a second.
25:15So this act in the American government is a very good step.
25:20Whether we like it or not, automation is here and it's going to control our lives more every day.
25:31In aircraft, the automation now consists of autopilots, autothrust, navigation systems, you name it, there's probably a thousand computers on an Airbus A380.
25:41The problem is, with the automation, we are more of a servant to the box.
25:45You can't fix it, so either you have to turn it off or you have to find a way to work around it.
25:51And that is a problem for pilots.
25:53So automation presents more problems for pilots, not less, because we have to be able to identify a faulty computer system and know how to turn it off.
26:02The world is suffering its greatest pilot shortage ever.
26:07Aviation has been growing, but the number of pilots coming into the profession is not increasing.
26:13To some degree, it's caused by the low-cost airlines where people are expecting to fly for almost no money across the country.
26:21And so the income's less, the pilot salaries are going down, and young people are deciding that maybe a career as a pilot won't support them for their life.
26:33So all the lead times are great, and airlines need to be proactive, not reactive, and they just simply have to give the incentives to have pilots commit to a career in aviation.
26:45People ask me if I think that aviation is getting safer or not.
26:49When only two or three out of 40 million aircraft crash in a year, it's hard to imagine how you can really get much safer.
26:57I mean, the chance of getting on one of those aircraft is less than the chance of winning the best lottery in America.
27:03So aviation is so safe already.
27:06Now, we can't take that for granted.
27:08Pilots have to keep their skills up, their manual of flying skills, in case the automation fails.
27:13AI, as it stands today, is not threatening pilots in the cockpit.
27:19AI is a tool.
27:20It's not a replacement.
27:22So until we see sentient computers, which are computers that have thought, awareness, consciousness, and prediction,
27:29until we see sentient computers in the workplace, there will be pilots in aircraft,
27:36and those pilots will save aircraft every day from minor and major disasters, and the passengers will continue to be safe.
27:46People make very extreme conclusions about safety when they're talking about companies like Boeing and Airbus.
27:53Pick the airline that you trust, and the airlines are different, and you can be comfortable that you will get to destination.
28:02Now, I have been hard on Boeing because I think the board of Boeing has lost the principles or the values of what Boeing was.
28:10Boeing has been around since the Second World War, and Bill Boeing started a company which was an engineering company.
28:17Boeing was an engineering company that built aircraft.
28:21The problem was they lost the focus on the technology.
28:25They lost the focus to have constructive destruction, to get rid of old things and bring in new.
28:30The 737's been flying since 1967, so when they do updates to that aircraft,
28:35it's like getting an old 1960s Mustang and saying, well, let's turn it into an F1 racing car.
28:41There should be constructive destruction.
28:42You should always get rid of the old to make way for the new.
28:47Because the technology is now totally different with fly-by-wire.
28:51And really, to fit an old aircraft with fly-by-wire is sort of incompatible.
28:56And the term fly-by-wire.
28:58It's really rather simple.
28:59Let's start with the non-fly-by-wire machines, which is what we've always had.
29:04Everything's mechanical.
29:05It's a bit like the tractor in your field.
29:07You turn the steering wheel.
29:08You can see all the bell cranks and the axles and the shafts turning to make the wheels turn.
29:13When you get to fly-by-wire, you take out that connection between the steering wheel, for example, and the wheels.
29:21And you put a sensor in the steering wheel to detect what position it's in.
29:25And then computers will move the wheels with actuators for the steering.
29:30So now you've got electronics and computers and actuators to do that link between what you're commanding and what happens at the back end.
29:39And now the modern aircraft all fly-by-wire.
29:42Because they're easier to design.
29:44They're easier to build.
29:45They're easier to maintain.
29:47And they actually perform better, lifting bigger weights or doing more action.
29:52Boeing, of course, is now making fly-by-wire aircraft.
29:55The 787 is a good aircraft.
29:57The 777 will be a great aircraft.
29:59And Boeing will recover.
30:01You see, the thing is, sometimes if you're the leader in a high-tech industry, the last thing you do is listen to your customer.
30:07Because your customer doesn't know what they want.
30:10The leading-edge companies don't listen to the customers.
30:12They produce what the technology lets them produce and let the customers see how they apply it.
30:17This is what Airbus did.
30:19And so they've built this fleet of fly-by-wire aircraft.
30:23And they're doing very well.
30:24And Airbus has kept a focus on being an engineering company and producing the best designs they can.
30:30I've seen many articles saying the turbulence is getting more frequent and more severe.
30:36I think the problem is that there's more congestion in the airspace and more aircraft in the sky.
30:41And maybe aircraft can't divert to miss bad weather because there's another aircraft in that part of the sky.
30:48Aircraft are being pushed as close together as they can possibly get.
30:53So I think it's just there's more aircraft in the sky and there's more people hitting turbulence events.
31:00I was planning to fly until I turned 65 years of age, at which point the regulations state that I can't fly internationally.
31:07So I was planning to retire at 65.
31:10But another black swan hit.
31:12COVID.
31:13Who was expecting that?
31:15So in 2020, aviation came to a standstill.
31:18Pilots were retrenched.
31:20And I found myself again put under stress.
31:24And I walked home to my wife, Coral, and said, I don't have a job anymore.
31:29And she said, we have just written a book about resilience.
31:32Now it's time to put it into practice again.
31:35So this is the reality.
31:37You know, you have to expect in this world of change and disruption.
31:42My life changed after QF32.
31:44I'm touring the world, presenting to companies and organizations around the world about resilience.
31:52So I've just started a podcast called Fly, The Elements of Resilience, about personal, corporate, national, and even existential resilience.
32:02And I'm interviewing the most remarkable people from around the world.
32:06You have to be comfortable being uncomfortable.
32:08This is all about building confidence and courage.
32:12You know, anxiety and resilience are on the opposite ends of the spectrum.
32:17So when we see our Gen Z people, the young kids today who are anxious, it's even called the anxious generation.
32:24We need to transition them through confidence, courage, to be intrepid people taking risks, making change, and surviving.
32:31Yes, my life will continue changing.
32:34I'll have to keep adapting or I will surely perish.
32:37And that's what all of us must have a responsibility to do.
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