How A Broken Clock Left A Passenger Jet With Almost No Fuel | Virgin Atlantic 207

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This is the story of virgin atlantic flight 207. On the 7th of february 2005 a virgin atlantic airbus a340 was making the flight from hong kong to london. On the ground at hong kong the pilots went over the weather at london. The weather at london wasnt the best so they needed to go over their alternate airports and the weather there. For this flight the alternate was prestwick scotland. With the weather stuff out of the way the three pilots settled in to set off. As the jet taxied to the runway a brief warning flashed on the electronic centralized aircraft monitor or the ECAM. on airbus jets the ECAM was the go to display to find out whats wrong with your plane? If you hear something blow up, chances are the ECAM will tell you exactly what blew up and how to combat the situation at hand. On this instance the error said “FCMC fault” but since the warning went away the crew decided to continue with the flight. After all, nothing was wrong with the plane right now. With that the plane lined up with the runway and took off at 4:21 pm. As the jet climbed away the fault came on again, the ECAM said FCMC2 fault. The captain did not want to trouble shoot the plane right now as they were in the midst of a climb through some very busy airspace, whatever was wrong with the plane could wait till they were at cruise altitude. Once at cruise the captain wanted to reset the computer to see if that would fix the error. Always remember if youre having trouble with your tech, turning it off and back on again is a viable troubleshooting technique, whether it's your $1000 iphone or a 250 million dollar quad engined passenger jet. Unfortunately for the captain this reset didn't really work as the error persisted. What was weird about this message is that there were no ecam actions to go with this error, as alluded to before, on airbus airplanes when you have an ecam error itll tell you the steps that you need to take to fix the problem. But that wasnt there in this case, and nothing else seemed to be wrong with the plane there were on warnings no cautions no messages. Nothing that would signal that there was anything wrong with this plane. So they decided to push onto london. As the plane made the long trek to london the pilots took turns to rest, staying on the flight deck for the entirety of the flight would violate flying hour limits and so these breaks are legally required. At about 3 am the captain returned to the flight deck from one of these rests as the plane was in dutch airspace and he took control of the plane from the first officer. The night was calm and as the plane cruised at 38000 feet it looked like this was another boring long haul flight. But then the captain noticed something strange, engine number one, the leftmost engine started to spool down. Shortly after that engine one lost all power and Engine one fail was lit up on the ECAM. The ECAM actions told the pilots to attempt a restart of engine number one but the captain knew that something was up and so he did not attempt a restart, not at this moment anyway. The crew immediately got to work trying to figure out what was wrong with the plane and they came to the shocking realization that inner tank 1 or the fuel tank that feeds engine number one was empty. This should not be happening, the one question on their mind was if they had a fuel leak onboard. If they had a fuel leak it would be a question of when all their engines would fail, not if. The pilots woke up the cruise first officer who was resting at the time and they got him to check the wings for any fuel that might be streaming out of the plane's wings but he could see nothing. To make sure that everyone was on the same page in case an emergency popped up the pilots got a senior cabin crew member into the cockpit to brief him on what was happening. As the pilots brought the cabin crew member upto speed the first officer pointed out something to the captain. Engine number 4 was starting to die, they watched on as the power generated by engine number 4 dropped before their very eyes, the captain immediately opened the cross feed valves, the cross feed valves basically allow you