BA038 crash pictures

David Cenciotti
1 Min Read

Three high resolution pictures of the British Airways B.777 crash landing at London Heathrow airport on Jan. 17th were published in the last days around the Internet. Those images were taken from a perimeter road by David Spalton who was taking pictures outside the airport when flight BA38 from Beijing crash landed short of runway 27L.
The pictures can be found here.
What is really interesting is that those pictures (which David immediately handled to the police in order to provide as much information as possible to the investigators) show the aircraft overflying the rooftops, touching the grass just inside the airport’s perimeter fence and the passengers escaping thorugh the emergency chutes.
The first picture of the series is very interesting: the aircraft is depicted in a very unusual pitch up attitude with both engines still running. Consequently, it confirms that the aircraft didn’t suffer a birdstrike induced engine flame-out or compressor stall; both engines failed to respond to an autothrottle request for more thrust needed to keep the desired rate of descent and speed. Previous pictures of the engine were not clear enough to determine if engines were running when the aircraft struck the ground.

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