On the 11th of November 2018, three pilots prepared to ferry a regional jet belonging to Kazakh flag carrier Air Astana back home from a round of heavy maintenance in Portugal 3,700 miles to their base in Almaty in Kazakhstan via Minsk, Belarus. But almost as soon as the Embraer ERJ-190 took off from Lisbon, the pilots found themselves thrown into a nightmarish emergency unlike anything that they had ever imagined. Their plane had become uncontrollable, rolling wildly in seemingly random directions, turning inverted, diving toward the ground at tremendous speed, only to pull out and start the same rollercoaster ride all over again. And all of this, "in the soup". The flight went into solid overcast - instrument meteorological conditions - just off the runway.
Faced with a near-certain catastrophe, the pilots made a chilling request: that they be given vectors over the ocean, hoping to avoid endangering people on the ground in their seemingly inevitable crash.
And yet, even as they struggled to steer their plane back away from populated areas, the crew put their minds together and slowly but surely began to make sense of the madness. By learning the vagaries of their profoundly broken airplane, they managed to regain control, and after two hours and two failed approaches, Air Astana flight 1388 landed in one piece on the runway in Beja, Portugal, saving the lives of all six people on board. It was a legendary piece of flying, one which will likely be remembered for decades.
The wild ride was the result of incorrectly done maintenance which included accomplishing several service bulletins, one of which replacing the stainless steel flight surface control cables with carbon steel cables (uh-oh! – what could possibly go wrong?). The cables were installed backwards such that, in flight, the ailerons and the spoilers acted to oppose each other, leaving the aircraft to do what it wanted regardless of the pilots' attempts to regain control.
P4-KCJ, the incident aircraft, was an Embraer ERJ-190LR operated by Air Astana of Kazakhstan. Prior to the incident it had accumulated a total of 13,152 flight hours. It did not survive the ordeal, as the excessive aerodynamic and G loads it experienced crinkled the fuselage and went way over the design limits of the airframe. It was declared a hull loss and scrapped.
This is my small tribute to this aerodynamic trio – two pilots plus a spare – who pulled off an incredible feat by returning this airplane safely to the ground after two hours of fighting. In IMC, no less.
Kit is Revell #03883, Embraer E-190 in 1/144 scale; decals by Draw Decals. Paints are rattlecan grey primer and gloss white, with Testors ModelMaster Acryl FS36622 Camouflage Grey (wings) and Blue Angels Blue for the tail.
