One of the copilots looked up from his controls. “I think we should turn back,” he said. Turning the airplane around in order to head back to the airport was risky. But at their current heading, they were getting farther away from the runway with each second.
De Crespigny told the control tower they would return. He began turning the plane in a long, slow arc. “Request climb to ten thousand feet,” de Crespigny radioed to air traffic control.
“No!” his copilots shouted.
They quickly explained their concerns: Climbing higher might strain the engines. The change in altitude could cause fuel to leak faster. They wanted to stay low and keep the plane flat.
De Crespigny had flown more than fifteen thousand hours as a pilot and had practiced disaster scenarios like this in dozens of simulators. He had envisioned moments like this hundreds of times. He had a picture in his mind of how to react, and it involved getting higher so he would have more options. Every instinct told him to gain altitude. But each mental model has gaps. It was his crew’s job to find them.
“Qantas 32,” de Crespigny radioed. “Disregard the climb to 10,000 feet. We will maintain 7,400 feet.”
For the next twenty minutes, the men in the cockpit dealt with an increasing number of alarms and emergencies. The plane’s computer displayed step-by-step solutions to each problem, but as the issues cascaded, the instructions became so overwhelming that no one was certain how to prioritize or where to focus. De Crespigny felt himself getting drawn into a cognitive tunnel. One computer checklist told the pilots to transfer fuel between the wings in order to balance the plane’s weight. “Stop!” de Crespigny shouted as a copilot reached to comply with the screen’s command. “Should we be transferring fuel out of the good right wing into the leaking left wing?” A decade earlier, a flight in Toronto had nearly crashed after the crew had inadvertently dumped their fuel by transferring it into a leaky engine. The pilots agreed to ignore the order.
De Crespigny slumped in his chair. He was trying to visualize the damage, trying to keep track of his dwindling options, trying to construct a mental picture of the plane as he learned more and more about what was wrong. Throughout this crisis, de Crespigny and the other pilots had been building mental models of the Airbus inside their heads. Everywhere they looked, however, they saw a new alarm, another system failing, more blinking lights. De Crespigny took a breath, removed his hand from the controls, and placed them in his lap.
“Let’s keep this simple,” he said to his copilots. “We can’t transfer fuel, we can’t jettison it. The trim tank fuel is stuck in the tail and the transfer tanks are useless.
“So forget the pumps, forget the other eight tanks, forget the total fuel quantity gauge. We need to stop focusing on what’s wrong and start paying attention to what’s still working.”
On cue, one of the copilots began ticking off things that were still operational: Two of eight hydraulic pumps still functioned. The left wing had no electricity, but the right wing had some power. The wheels were intact and the copilots believed de Crespigny could pump the brakes at least once before they failed.
The first airplane de Crespigny had ever flown was a Cessna, one of the single-engine, nearly noncomputerized planes that hobbyists loved. A Cessna is a toy compared to an Airbus, of course, but every plane, at its core, has the same components: a fuel system, flight controls, brakes, landing gear. What if, de Crespigny thought to himself, I imagine this plane as a Cessna? What would I do then?
“That moment is really the turning point,” Barbara Burian, a research psychologist at NASA who has studied Qantas Flight 32, told me. “When de Crespigny decided to take control of the mental model he was applying to the situation, rather than react to the computer, it shifted his mindset. Now, he’s deciding where to direct his focus instead of relying on instructions.
“Most of the time, when information overload occurs, we’re not aware it’s happening—and that’s why it’s so dangerous,” Burian said. “So really good pilots push themselves to do a lot of ‘what if’ exercises before an event, running through scenarios in their heads. That way, when an emergency happens, they have models they can use.”
This shift in mindset—What if I imagine this plane as a Cessna?—is what never occurred, tragically, inside the cockpit of Air France Flight 447. The French pilots never reached for a new mental model to explain what was going on. But when the mental model of the Airbus inside de Crespigny’s head started coming apart under the weight of all the new emergencies, he decided to replace it with something new. He began imagining the plane as a Cessna, which allowed him to figure out where he should turn his attention and what he could ignore.
De Crespigny asked one of his copilots to calculate how much runway they would need. Inside his head, de Crespigny was envisioning the landing of an oversized Cessna. “Picturing it that way helped me simplify things,” he told me. “I had a picture in my head that contained the basics, and that’s all I needed to land the plane.”
If de Crespigny hit everything just right, the copilot said, the plane would require 3,900 meters of asphalt. The longest runway at Singapore Changi was 4,000 meters. If they overshot, the craft would buckle as its wheels hit the grassy fields and sand dunes.
“Let’s do this,” de Crespigny said.
The plane began descending toward Singapore Changi airport. At two thousand feet, de Crespigny looked up from his panel and saw the runway. At one thousand feet, an alarm inside the cockpit began screaming “SPEED! SPEED! SPEED!” The plane was at risk of stalling. De Crespigny’s eyes flicked between the runway and his speed indicators. He could see the Cessna’s wings in his mind. He delicately nudged the throttle, increasing the speed slightly, and the alarm stopped. He brought the nose up a touch because that’s what the picture in his mind told him to do.
“Confirm the fire services on standby,” a copilot radioed the control tower.
“Affirm, we have the emergency services on standby,” a voice replied.
The plane was descending at fourteen feet per second. The maximum certified speed the undercarriage could absorb was only twelve feet per second. But there were no other options now.
“FIFTY,” a computerized voice said. “FORTY.” De Crespigny pulled back slightly on his stick. “THIRTY…TWENTY.” A metallic voice erupted: “STALL! STALL! STALL!” The Cessna in de Crespigny’s mind was still sailing toward the runway, ready to land as he had hundreds of times before. It wasn’t stalling. He ignored the alarm. The rear wheels of the Airbus touched the ground and de Crespigny pushed his stick forward, forcing the front wheels onto the tarmac. The brakes would work only once, so de Crespigny pushed the pedal as far as it would go and held it down. The first thousand meters of the runway blurred past. At the two-thousand-meter mark, de Crespigny thought they might be slowing. The end of the runway was rushing toward them through the windshield, grass and sand dunes growing bigger the closer they got. As the plane neared the end of the runway, the metal began to groan. The wheels left long skid marks on the asphalt. Then the plane slowed, shuddered, and came to a stop with one hundred meters to spare.
Investigators would later deem Qantas Flight 32 the most damaged Airbus A380 ever to land safely. Multiple pilots would try to re-create de Crespigny’s recovery in simulators and would fail every time.
When Qantas Flight 32 finally came to a rest, the lead flight attendant activated the plane’s announcement system.