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enough to be felt by the crew. This happened shortly after 20:05 h. At the same
time as the increase in vibration was felt, smoke and fumes were drawn into the
aircraft through the air conditioning system. In their analysis of the problem, the
flight crew mistakenly identified the right hand (#2) engine as being at fault and
therefore reduced its power accordingly.
An analysis of the data from the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) showed that
there had been a slight hesitancy in determining which of the engines was at fault.
When the Captain (the senior officer on the flight deck) asked the First Officer
which engine was faulty, he replied 'It's the le… it's the right one.' As a
consequence, the power to the right hand (#2) engine was throttled back and the
engine was eventually shut down.
The actions taken on the right hand engine coincided (as it later turned out) with
a reduction in vibration, and the smoke and fumes emerging from the left (faulty)
engine also stopped. The flight crew therefore decided, erroneously (again, as it
later turned out), that the correct engine had been shut down. They decided to put
in motion the plan to make an emergency landing at East Midlands Airport, which
involved talking to Air Traffic Control (ATC) to make sure they could get the
appropriate clearances to land. Although the left engine continued to show a higher
than normal level of vibration for several minutes, the crew did not notice this at
the time.
When the crew began their descent towards the airport they reduced the power
to the left engine. This led to a further reduction in the vibration in that engine to
the point where it was not much higher than what would normally be expected.
About 10 min later the crew decided to increase the power to the left engine once
more, in order to maintain the aircraft's altitude in the final stages of descent. The
vibration levels increased once more to very high levels, power was lost in engine
#1, and a fire warning sounded. At this point the crew tried to restart the #2 engine
but did not manage to achieve this before the aircraft crashed into the ground 0.5
nautical miles short of the runway shortly after 20:12 h.
An Analysis of Possible Contributory Factors
It is often very difficult to single out the exact causes of an accident after the fact.
Where lives and machinery are lost, the best attempts involve a reconstruction of
events based on the available evidence. In the case of aircraft accidents, this
includes the information captured by the Flight Data Recorder, and the CVR.
These are what you often hear referred to as ''the Black Box'' although they are
usually a highly visible shade of orange!
In the Kegworth accident, the crash was ultimately attributed to the way that the
flight crew managed a mechanical incident in the left (#1) engine. The events
unfolded very quickly: from the vibration being detected to the crash took less than
7 min 30 s. As is often the case, there were several contributory events that
happened which contributed to the accident. These occurred at different levels
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