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747 Image: Eduard Marmet - http://www.airliners.net/photo/Olympi...
Interview With Captain:    • Video   ( Turn On Subs)

This is the incredible story of Olympic airways flight 411. On the 9th of august 1978 an olympic airways boeing 747 was preparing to depart Hellinikon airport in greece bound for JFK international airport in new york. The plane had 398 passengers on board and about 20 crew members adding up to about 418 people on this plane. The 747 was absolutely huge and olympic airlines was keen to tap the travel demand between the US and greece with their 747s and so this plane was mostly filled with americans returning to the US from Greece the. The jumbo jet was piloted by captain Sifis Migadis and first officer Kostas Fikardos. The 747 was fueled up with about 150 tons of fuel for the flight to New york. Just before 2 pm the 747 started its roll down the runway, the plane picked up speed and soon they were at V1 the speed at which they could no longer safely reject the takeoff. As the captain started to lift the nose of the plane into the air, a loud bang rocked the 747. Captain Migadis had no idea what had happened, did a tyre blow did an engine explode? Whatever the cause he didn't have a choice, they were going too fast to stop in the runway that was remaining. But in the cabin Cabin crew member Lucia Siachou got an intercom message from a colleague at the back, engine number three or the inboard engine on the right hand side had blown up. The colleague said “we are screwed” she just replied with “I Know”. Controllers in the tower watched on in horror as they watched the plane struggle to gain altitude. The shattered engine peppered the runway with parts.

In the cockpit the captain was trying to coax every ounce of performance from the stricken plane. But they had problems, engine number 2 had undergone some maintenance and so was only producing about 94% of power as opposed to the 110% that is supposed to generate. Making matters worse for the crew, the captain asked the flight engineer to turn on the alcohol enrichment valve. In the 1970s planes had an alcohol fuel enrichment system to improve performance but unfortunately the flight engineer turned it off instead of turning it on.

But the plane took off, that was a miracle in its own right, captain Migadis, an ex combat pilot immediately commanded a retraction of the landing gear. This was against boeings policy for this situation. You see right now the plane in in a precarious situation its low and slow and it needs all the speed that it can get retracting the gear now would mean that the landing gear doors would open and then close, meaning that there would be a temporary increase in drag and at that point any increase in drag would be enough to send them crashing back down. His first officer complied. His reasoning was that he needed speed in the long term, he had a hill in his flight path and there was no way that hed be able to clear the hill with the gear down slowing the plane down. He was relying on his decades of experience and so he made the call. The controllers watched as the plane barely gained any altitude once the gear was up the plane gained a bit of altitude. But the 200 foot tall Panos hill was now barely a mile away. The captain didnt have a choice; he pulled the nose up as the airspeed he had built up so far bled away. The jumbo jet cleared the hill by 9 feet. Talk about cutting it close.

But this was far from over, climbing to avoid the hill had cost him precious airspeed. He now had to drop the nose to speed up otherwise the jumbo jet would drop out of the sky. The captain decided to trade about 50 feet of altitude for about 6 knots in airspeed. It wasn't much but it would keep them from stalling. At this point the jet was so low that it barely cleared the