An airliner is steered by its hydraulics. They move the ailerons, the elevators, the rudder — every control surface the pilots touch. Take away all of it and, in theory, the aircraft becomes an unsteerable projectile. On 22 November 2003, a DHL cargo crew climbing out of Baghdad lost every hydraulic system at once when an insurgent’s missile tore into their wing. Then they flew home on nothing but the throttles.

It remains one of the most extraordinary feats of raw airmanship in the history of civil aviation.

A missile in the wing

The Airbus lifted off from Baghdad at 06:30 UTC, bound for Bahrain, and flew a steep, evasive climb-out to stay above the reach of ground fire. It wasn’t enough. Passing about 8,000 feet, a 9K34 Strela-3 missile — a Soviet-designed, shoulder-launched weapon in the hands of Iraqi insurgents — struck the rear of the left wing between the engine and the wingtip. The warhead set the wing ablaze and, within seconds, drained all three of the aircraft’s hydraulic circuits.

With the hydraulics gone, the ailerons, elevator and rudder went dead. The A300 began to porpoise through the sky in a slow rollercoaster oscillation — nose up, nose down — with the crew unable to stop it by any normal means.

The moment the DHL A300 was hit over Baghdad.

Flying on thrust alone

There was exactly one thing still working: the engines. Fourteen years earlier, the crew of United Airlines Flight 232 had faced the same nightmare over Iowa and managed a partial recovery using engine thrust alone — but that DC-10 still broke up on landing. The Baghdad crew now had to repeat the trick, over a war zone, with a wing on fire.

Captain Éric Gennotte and First Officer Steeve Michielsen discovered that adding power pitched the nose up, reducing it let the nose drop, and running the two throttles unevenly could yaw and turn the aircraft. Flight engineer Mario Rofail dropped the landing gear by gravity — a manual backup — because the extra drag helped tame the oscillations. In roughly ten minutes of desperate experimentation, they taught themselves to fly a jet with its controls dead.

United Flight 232, the 1989 precedent for a thrust-only landing.

The landing

Guiding the crippled freighter back toward Baghdad, the crew lined up on runway 33L. They knew they could not pull the throttles back before touchdown — doing so would drop the nose or a wing into the ground — so they came in fast, around 180 knots. Turbulence dipped the right wing at the last moment; the A300 thumped down off the centreline, the flight engineer slammed on full reverse thrust, and the aircraft charged off the paved runway into soft sand, dragging a razor-wire barrier before grinding to a halt about a kilometre later.

Some twenty-five minutes after the missile hit, all three men climbed out unhurt. It was the first time in history an airliner had lost all hydraulic power and been landed with no loss of life.

A reconstruction of the DHL crew’s throttle-only landing.

Conséquences

Gennotte, Michielsen and Rofail were showered with honours — the Hugh Gordon-Burge Memorial Award, the Flight Safety Foundation’s Professionalism Award, and the IFALPA Polaris Award for exceptional airmanship. Their techniques were studied by Airbus and the wider industry as a template for the unthinkable.

The aircraft itself was patched up and put up for sale, but never flew commercially again. More than two decades later, the old freighter that survived a missile still sits at Baghdad airport — a quiet monument to the morning three men flew a broken aeroplane home on the throttles.

Sources: 2003 Baghdad DHL attempted shootdown incident (Wikipedia); Flight Global (“Great Escape”); Sam Chui; Aviation Week; Flight Safety Foundation; Mayday / Air Crash Investigation, “Attack over Baghdad” (2005).