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Corrosion Image: Cafe Nervosa Derek Mawhinney, Corrosion Engineer Own work


This is the story of inter canadien flight flight 1678. On the 13th of march 1994 an ATR 42 was to fly from Val D’or airport in quebec to Dorval airport also in quebec. At about 10 am the ATR 42 took off from runway 18. As the plane climbed the first officer was the one at the controls, theyd been asked to climb to 21000 feet by ATC. The plane climbed as the canadian countryside stretched out in front of them. This went on for some time, suddenly as the plane climbed through 17,000 feet an explosion rocked the ATR 42. The plane rocked from side to side in the the air in the cabin was sucked out as it depressurized in a matter of seconds. The pilots immediately stopped climbing and started a descent. It looked like the right hand engine had failed so as the plane descended down to a safer altitude the pilots started work on the the single engine failure checklist.

The first officer contacted Montreal area control and told them about their situation. they cleared flight 1678 down to 11,000 feet. In the cockpit the pilots were worried about a potential inflight fire on the right hand engine as they observed fuel leaking from the engine. The first officer pulled the fire handle and declared an emergency with ATC. 7 minutes had passed since an explosion rocked flight 1678, they were still airborne and things were under control. The first officer decided to go into the cabin and survey to see what had happened. The first officer could see a gash on the right hand side of the plane below a window seat. To their shock they noticed that the frame of the seat itself had been sliced through by something. Once back in the cockpit the pilots had some tough decisions to make. Obviously something had gone catastrophically wrong and the fuselage itself sustained a lot of damage, but they couldnt judge the full extent of the damage from inside the cabin, the damage on the outside could be a lot bigger than the tiny gash that they could see. As they didnt know how badly their plane was damaged they tried to turn as little as possible to avoid stressing the aircraft too much. If the crack grew any further well that could end very badly. Minimising further damage was of paramount importance as they were still about half an hour away from all of their diversion airports. For example mirabel was 39 minutes away, val d'or was 36 minutes away and dor val was 44 minutes away. They opted to continue on to dorval. Its not explicitly stated in the report but i think they opted to continue onto dorval because thats the flight path that required the fewest amount of turns, think about it to get back to val d’or theyd need to do a 180 and they really didn't wanna do that.

At 10:28 am the plane cautiously started a descent to 9000 feet, it stayed there till it entered the Montreal terminal zone and then after that it continued its descent, on their way down the pilots requested the airport to have emergency vehicles on standby just in case something went wrong. Fight 1678 lined up with runway 06L, I imagine that that was stressful, with them just hoping that their plane held it together for a few more minutes till they reached the runway. Thankfully it did at 11:16 am flight 1678 touched down safely and all onboard were okay.

Once on the ground the pilots got a first hand look at what had happened. The right hand propellor was missing One of the blades on the right hand propeller had broken off and the blade went right through the fuselage, it was so close that it went through the cabin and cut through a seat that was unoccupied, thank god for that. The seat isnt the only think that was spared; they found two slightly bend hydraulic lines where the blade had gone through, had the