The cause of last week's crash at London Heathrow's airport of a British Airways Boeing 777 is still unclear. Crash investigators promise a preliminary report within a month.
Speculation about the cause currently run from a problem with the airplane's electrics, avionics system and/or engine control automation (reported in the Sunday Times and yesterday's London Guardian) to something wrong with either the aircraft's fuel system or the fuel itself that led to fuel starvation (Sunday Express). Just about every British paper has a theory, it seems.
What is known that about 2 miles from the airport and 600 feet up, the "the autothrottle demanded more thrust. It was a normal procedure, a small adjustment intended to keep the plane at the correct speed and height. Nothing happened. The computer system again ordered more thrust. Again, no response." The pilots apparently then tried to increase the throttle manually, and again, no response. Skilled airmanship brought the 777 into what one could called a semi-controlled crash, which fortunately, didn't result in any loss of life.
The plane's wreckage is being moved to British Airway's Hatton Cross engineering facility about 500 meters from the crash site for further investigation. If a rare software anomaly is found to be the problem - as it was in the Malaysian 777-200 incident of 2005 (see the Australian Transport Safety Bureau incident report, and a brief description of it in today's Sunday Times) - then expect there to be some additional fall out towards the Boeing 787 development.
UPDATE: Peter Ladkin point out that a preliminary crash report is required within 30 days (I wrote promised, which implies something else). As Peter noted, the UK is an International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) signatory, and ICAO signatories are required to produce accident reports according to a general standard format; they are also required to issue a preliminary report within 30 days of the accident.
UPDATE 1: Today's London Times is claiming that, "British Airways technical staff believe that the Boeing aircraft’s computerised control system caused both engines to fail during its final descent towards Heathrow on Thursday." We shall see.
