Gulf Air Flight 072

Gulf Air Flight 072
An identical aircraft from Gulf Air
Accident summary
Accident type	Controlled flight into water
place	Persian Gulf , 3 miles from Bahrain Airport , Bahrain
date	August 23, 2000
Fatalities	143
Survivors	0
Aircraft
Aircraft type	Airbus A320-212
operator	Gulf Air
Mark	A4O-EK
Departure airport	Cairo International Airport , Egypt
Destination airport	Bahrain Airport , Bahrain
Passengers	135
crew	8th
Lists of aviation accidents

The Gulf Air flight 072 (flight number IATA : GF072 , ICAO : GFA072 ) was a scheduled evening flight of Bahrain airline Gulf Air from Cairo to Bahrain . On August 23, 2000, an Airbus A320-212 (A4O-EK) accident occurred on this flight, killing all 143 people on board.

As of April 2020, it is the most serious aircraft accident in Bahrain. For the small emirate, it was the first fatal air accident in more than 50 years. Until the accident on TAM Linhas Aéreas flight 3054 in 2007, it was also the most serious incident involving an Airbus A320.

plane

The aircraft involved in the accident was an Airbus A320-212, which was six years and three months old at the time of the accident. It was the 481st Airbus A320 from ongoing production. The aircraft was finally assembled at the Airbus plant in Toulouse , France and completed its first flight with the test registration F-WWIE on March 16, 1994, before it was delivered to Gulf Air on September 29, 1994 . The machine was certified with the Omani aircraft registration A4O-EK , with which it remained in operation until the end. The twin -engined , narrow -body aircraft was equipped with two CFMI-CFM56-5A3 engines. At the time of the accident, the machine had completed an accumulated operating performance of 17,370 operating hours with 13,990 take-offs and landings.

crew

There was an eight-person crew on board the machine, consisting of a flight captain, a first officer and six flight attendants.

The 37-year-old flight captain Ihsan Shakeeb was a Bahraini citizen. He was hired as a student pilot with Gulf Air in 1979. In 1994 he was promoted to the rank of First Officer on the Lockheed L-1011 Tristar and then the Boeing 767 . In 1998 he became first officer on board the Airbus A320 and since 2000 he has been the captain of this type of aircraft. Shakeeb had 4,416 hours of flight experience, 1,083 hours of which he had on board the Airbus A320, of which 86 hours were in the role of captain.

The 25-year-old first officer Khalaf Al Alawi was an Omani citizen. He started as a pilot's student with Gulf Air in 1999 and has been first officer on board the Airbus A320 since 2000. Al Alawi had 608 hours of flight experience, of which he had completed 408 hours in the cockpit of the Airbus A320.

The six flight attendants came from Bahrain , Egypt , India , Poland , Morocco and the Philippines .

Passengers

The flight from Cairo to Bahrain had taken 135 passengers from 14 countries. Together with the crew members, 18 nations were represented among the occupants. The remains of an unborn child were also found, which was not included in the number of victims.

nationality	Passengers	crew	total
Egypt	63	1	64
Bahrain	34	2	36
Saudi Arabia	12	-	12
Palestine	9	-	9
United Arab Emirates	6th	-	6th
People's Republic of China	3	-	3
United Kingdom	2	-	2
Australia	1	-	1
Canada	1	-	1
Kuwait	1	-	1
Oman	1	1	2
South Korea	1	-	1
Sudan	1	-	1
United States	1	-	1
India	-	1	1
Morocco	-	1	1
Philippines	-	1	1
Poland	-	1	1
total	135	8th	143

the accident

The machine took off at 4:52 p.m. local time with 135 passengers and eight crew members on board in Cairo. On the approach to Bahrain airport, the crew received clearance to land on runway 12. When the pilots saw the runway, they switched off the autopilot. About a nautical mile from the runway, at an altitude of 600 feet and at a speed of 185 miles per hour (about 298 km / h), the pilots asked for clearance to fly a 360-degree turn as the machine was in critical moment was too high for a safe approach and was also too fast. Permission was granted and the pilots initiated a left turn. The pilots performed the turns very closely, with the machine assuming a roll angle of 36 degrees. At the same time the buoyancy aids were fully extended and the landing checklist worked through. The air traffic controller permitted a climb to 2500 feet on a course of 300 degrees, with the aim of aligning the aircraft for a further approach. The airspeed increased to 185 knots (about 342 km / h) and the machine began to climb with a pitch angle of five degrees to an altitude of 1,000 feet. During the reverse flight, the machine suddenly began to descend rapidly from an altitude of 1,000 feet with a negative pitch angle of −15 degrees. Shortly afterwards the Ground Proximity Warning System (GPWS) sounded . The flight captain gave the instruction to retract the buoyancy aids and moved the sidestick backwards. Shortly thereafter, the machine hit the shallow waters of the Persian Gulf two kilometers north of the airport at a flight speed of 280 knots (approx. 519 km / h) and a negative pitch angle of −6.5 degrees . All occupants of the machine were killed in the impact.

Accident investigation

A combination of a number of factors was found to be the cause of the accident. It was essential that the aircraft's crew had succumbed to an optical illusion during the reverse flight. The captain believed that the aircraft would adopt an excessively steep pitch angle during the reverse flight and directed the aircraft nose downwards, which first steered the aircraft into the sea so that a controlled flight into water occurred. It was also criticized that the pilots did not adhere to standard procedures by making the first approach too high and at too high a speed, that they did not try to stabilize the approach, that they tried near the runway and at low altitude to make a 360-degree turn instead of the normal reverse flight procedure. The flight of a 360-degree turn in a passenger aircraft was a non-standard maneuver and had also resulted in an aircraft accident with many deaths just a month earlier in India on Alliance Air flight 7412 . Although there had been a number of deviations from the standard flight parameters and the standard approach profile, the first officer had not called them out or tried to draw the master's attention to the deviations. The same would have been prescribed according to the standard procedures. Despite the repeated GPWS warnings, neither the master nor the first officer seemed to correctly assess the risk of a collision with the ground, or the cockpit members failed to react appropriately to the warnings. In relation to the airline, a lack of consideration of effective crew resource management in pilot training was criticized. The training programs for the operation of the Airbus A320 were inefficient when it came to following standard procedures and responding to an upcoming controlled flight into terrain or to warning messages from the GPWS. In the three years before the accident, the airline reacted very slowly to complaints from the air safety authority and did not implement corrective measures in critical areas, or only implemented them slowly.

swell

• Accident report A320-212, A4O-EK in the Aviation Safety Network
• Gulf Air - Airbus A320-212 (A4O-EK) flight GF072 on aviation-accidents.net
• ACCIDENT INVESTIGATION REPORT Gulf Air Flight GF-072 Airbus A320-212, REG. A4O-EK on 23 August 2000 at Bahrain , MoT Bahrain
• 23 Aug 2000 - Gulf Air 072 , tailstrike.com
• Operating history A320-212, A4O-EK on planespotters.net

Coordinates: 26 ° 17 ′ 51 ″  N , 50 ° 38 ′ 49 ″  E