Heathrow near-miss

[PretendFriend]

It happened in January but I'm a bit disconcerted at the reported complacency of the Dept for Transport:

"there was never any risk of a crash because the pilot took action which air traffic control was aware of"

The plane was flying at 1200 feet over West London because the autopilot was trying to land it - it should normally have been at 2300+. Luckily the pilot could see there was something wrong when the autopilot was trying to land the plane on London. What if cloud cover had been lower? What if it had been foggy? Why isn't more fuss being made about this nationally?

I can't find any more about this incident on other media websites but there are proposals to build a new international airport in the Thames estuary which sounds like a much safer and more sensible place for it. I know it would ruin local wildlife but something will crash on London one day and then they'll have to move it anyway.

I'm not sure the pilot had to look out of the window to check his heigt - i think the instrumenst would have given the altitude, and it was the instrumenst that told him the plane was descending fast in the wrong place.

It is worrying that they can't find out what caused the auto-pilot to misfunction, but was it really a 'near-miss' given that the pilot was well-equipped to know what was happening and put it right?

Ah - thanks, Blu, that's why I was trying to find another report - but still the autopilot was able to halve the plane's height before they noticed?

I did find this report about a close call at Hong Kong when the autopilot was off

"The aircraft flew uncontrolled for three minutes, veering almost 180 degrees off course toward mountains and coming within seconds of a catastrophic stall.

"No one in the four-person crew took any intervening action because they believed the Boeing 747-400 was being directed by the autopilot. They assumed the aircraft's unusual movements resulted from a local windshear effect, which their weather radar had warned them about."

They assumed???? Surely pilots should never assume anything?