Crash
During takeoff roll at 11:42 p.m, captain Ahmet Erdem, one of Birgenairs' most senior pilots, found that his air speed indicator (ASI) was not working properly, but chose not to abort takeoff. The co-pilot's ASI was functional.
While the plane was climbing through 4,700 feet (1,400 m), the captain's airspeed indicator read 350 knots (650 km/h). The autopilot, which was taking its air speed information from the same equipment that was providing faulty readings to the captain's ASI, increased the pitch-up attitude and reduced power to lower the plane's airspeed. Co-pilot Aykut Gergin's ASI read 200 knots (370 km/h) and decreasing, yet the airplane started to give multiple contradictory warnings that it was flying too fast, including rudder ratio, Mach airspeed and overspeed lights and sounds.
The autopilot reached the limits of its programming and disengaged. After checking their circuit breakers for the source of the warnings, the crew then reduced thrust to lower the speed. This immediately triggered the 757's stick-shaker stall alert, warning the confused pilots that the aircraft was flying dangerously slow, seconds after it was warning them that the speed was too high. The co-pilot and relief pilot Muhlis Evrenesoğlu both seemed to recognize the approaching stall and tried to tell the captain, but did not intervene directly, possibly out of deference to the captain's age and experience. The captain then tried to recover from the stall by increasing the plane's thrust to full, but the plane was still in a nose up attitude, preventing the engines from receiving adequate airflow to match the increase in thrust. The left engine stalled and flamed out, which caused the right engine, still at full power, to throw the airplane into a spin. Moments later, the plane inverted. At 11:47 p.m., the Ground Proximity Warning System sounded an audio warning, and eight seconds later the plane crashed into the Atlantic Ocean. All 13 crew members and 176 passengers were killed.
Read more about this topic: Birgenair Flight 301
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