An Air Astana Embraer E190 lost control after takeoff in Lisbon, Portugal. It managed to make a safe emergency landing in Beja after a pretty shocking flight with no passengers but the crew on board. The plane was grounded for 6 weeks before due to technical maintenance work.
Just take a look at the flightradar24 data. Absolutely shocking. They even considered ditching it into the ocean. It’s miraculous that they made it back to an airport.
I saw this on FR24 when I got a 7700 squawk alert. I knew something had happened and judging by its violent, non-consistent path I knew something was likely quiet wrong.
I saw this flight Squawk 7700 ( I was notified through Flightradar24) while doing homework. I stop what I am doing and have a quick look at the flight and I saw that at one point the flight was descending at 16,256fpm and I was shocked to see that. I thought that flight radar may have been glitching, but then seeing this has put it all into place now and I don’t really know what to think. I send my hope out to the pilots and hope they are ok and I am truly amazed that they managed to land the plane.
It is quite scary as we had the Lion Air crash last Monday and I was due to fly back from America 2 days later, which made me anxious, then the two planes overrunning the runways and then I thought, we can’t have another crash now, there have been too many incidents in the past couple of weeks and we do not need another one.
I hope everyone from the past couple weeks is recovering from all these incidents and I send my love and heart out to everyone involed.
Again, I congratulate the pilots on a sucessful landing and that they are all ok and well.
There is an interesting article on this Portuguese newspaper (for those who understand Portuguese):
The Embraer-ERJ was in Alverca airport (LPAR) for handling and was supposed to fly back to Kazakhstan after a short flight test around Lisbon. When trying to land at Lisbon Portela, the flight instruments stopped working and pilots lost control of the plane. At this time, they sent an emergency call and asked to land on water if possible. Also note that weather was not good at this time.
While flying over the Tagus river, the Air Astana Embraer has been escorted by two F-16 from the Portuguese Air Force to Beja airfiled (LPBJ) and managed to finally land on the third trial.
Looking at the video of the landing it seems like the approach was pretty unstable as well. Pilots did a great job here. The question is how the loss of the instruments results in such an uncontrolled flight path. I don’t like to speculate though.
The first part of the ATC conversation is now online:
When they were requesting to ditch the plane they knew that they were probably signing there death certificate. And still, they managed to stay calm and keep the plane airborne maintaining a safe distance to densely built-up area. Great job.
Here is part 2, you can even hear the Portuguese Air Force F16s communication. How stressful it is when you have to communicate with air force to land your plane.
There’s a video of the landing escorted by the fighters :
I recommend seeing the videos that the people onboard/outside shot. Watched it yesterday on the news, I was asking myself if the Emission was having a problem or if it was really the plane. It was impressive.