On November 16th, 2007 the AP reported that ten people were injured when a new Airbus 340-600 crashed through a barrier and rammed into a wall during tests of that plane at the Toulouse-Blagnac airport, in France.   French government officials reported that the nine people on board and one person on the ground were injured in the mishap.  None of the injuries were life threatening.

This news story is real, but it became the subject of a fake news story that is currently circulating around the Internet mostly by e-mail.  The fake story seems to have an agenda behind it, the desire to disparage Arab people.  Here is a copy of  most of the fake story as "reported":     
        

    
THE TALE OF THE ARAB FLIGHT CREW    
Written by: AUTHOR DELETED       
Friday, 16 May 2008

The brand spanking new Airbus 340-600, the largest passenger airplane ever built, sat in its hangar in Toulouse, France without a single hour of airtime.  Enter the Arab flight crew of Abu Dhabi Aircraft Technologies (ADAT) to conduct pre-delivery tests on the ground, such as engine runups, prior to delivery to Etihad Airways in Abu Dhabi.  The date was November 15, 2007.

The ADAT crew taxied the A340-600 to the run-up area. Then they took all four engines to takeoff power with a virtually empty aircraft.  Not having read the run-up manuals, they had no clue just how light an empty A340-600 really is.

The takeoff warning horn was blaring away in the cockpit because they had all 4 engines at full power. The aircraft computers thought they were trying to takeoff but it had not been configured properly (flaps/slats, etc.) Then one of the ADAT crew decided to pull the circuit breaker on the Ground Proximity Sensor to silence the alarm.

This fools the aircraft into thinking it is in the air.

The computers automatically released all the brakes and set the aircraft rocketing forward. The ADAT crew had no idea that this is a safety feature so that pilots can't land with the brakes on.

Not one member of the seven-man Arab crew was smart enough to throttle back the engines from their max power setting, so the $80 million brand-new aircraft crashed into a blast barrier, totaling it.

The extent of injuries to the crew is unknown, for there has been a news blackout in the major media in France and elsewhere.  Coverage of the story was deemed insulting to Moslem Arabs.  Finally, the photos are starting to leak out.

END OF FAKE STORY


According to Snopes.com the trusty urban legend debunking website, the story is fake, but the incident and the photos are real.  There really was a crash at the Toulouse-Blagnac airport.  The Airbus A340-600 destined for delivery to Etihad Airlines failed to pass one of its last tests on Nov. 15 and crashed.  After the French investigated the incident, it was determined that the cause of the crash was the failure of the crew to properly chock the wheels.  There was however, no media coverup.

According to AP:

France's environment and transportation minister, Jean-Louis Borloo, "immediately requested" a technical investigation into the causes of the accident, which took place near Airbus headquarters.  In the run-up to the accident, the full-power engine test with wheels unchocked was conducted to test the limits of the parking brake.  As the aircraft began to move, an ADAT engineer reported the aircraft was moving. According to the flight recorder, at that point the pedal brake was applied and the parking brake deactivated.  Finally, the steering wheel was turned to avoid crashing into the test-pen wall, but that had the opposite effect as it instead reduced the braking pressure, and thus led to the plane crashing into the wall.

According to Snopes.com:


The four-engine Airbus A340-600 is not actually "the largest passenger airplane ever built" as reported in the fake story.  But in the process of being delivered to Abu Dhabi-based Etihad Airways it was undergoing ground engine testing at the Airbus Technical Center in Toulouse, France.  During those tests, the aircraft somehow broke loose and crashed into the test-pen wall.  According to press reports, nine people & two Airbus employees and seven employees of Abu Dhabi Aircraft Technologies (ADAT), a service provider contracted by Etihad — were aboard the airliner at the time, and four of them were injured. (It is not true, as claimed, that there was "a news blackout in the major media in France and elsewhere" because "coverage of the story was deemed insulting to Moslem Arabs.")

Although the accident did occur while ground engine tests were being conducted with the plane's parking brake applied, a report released by French investigators in December 2008 did not confirm that claim made above that the crash was caused by ADAT technicians who were unfamiliar with the aircraft and overrode a vital safety feature:  French investigators have found that an Airbus to be delivered to Etihad Airways crashed during ground engine tests because the wheels were unchocked and attempts to steer away from a wall had decreased brake pressure.

"It was all over in 13 seconds," said David Kaminski-Morrow, an editor at Air Transport Intelligence. "The aeroplane shouldn't haven been running with engines at higher power and the aeroplane should have had chocks on the wheels to stop [it] moving, and these things didn't happen. It was basically a schoolboy error."

The real incident behind this fake story was indeed dramatic, but nowhere near as was reported in the fake story.  It is important to understand that when you receive information in an e-mail that has been circulated around to either try to confirm it, or just take it with a proverbial grain of salt.

UPDATE:   See our follow-up to this story here

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This article was written by Mark Soveign who writes for Wertheim Communications LLC as well as Mooker.Com Did you like this story? If so, vote for it on your favorite bookmarks site: