A TAP flight to Bissau lost an engine and had to turn back to Lisbon
The Airbus A320neo was climbing out of Lisbon when one engine lost oil pressure and was shut down. The crew declared PAN PAN and landed safely. Nobody was hurt.
It took off from Lisbon bound for Bissau and, minutes later, it was already turning around. A TAP Airbus A320neo lost oil pressure in one engine on Thursday, the crew shut that engine down during the climb, and the aircraft came back to where it started, landing safely at 2.30pm. Nobody was hurt.
What does a PAN PAN call actually mean?
It is aviation’s second-highest alert, one rung below Mayday. When pilots say PAN PAN to air traffic control they are flagging a serious problem on board without an immediate threat to the people inside. In practice it buys them priority for the approach and puts emergency services on standby, without triggering the full-blown emergency.
An A320 flies perfectly well on one engine, and can do so for hours. What changes is everything around it: each engine feeds electrical, hydraulic and pressurisation systems, so the crew is suddenly running half the resources with the same workload. That is precisely the scenario drilled in the simulator every six months, and it is why the landing was uneventful.
Why did the airport stop for a few minutes?
Because of the suspicion of spilled oil on the runway. Losing oil pressure is rarely a tidy failure, so the tower held movements until an inspection confirmed the surface was fine. It was only a few minutes, but at Lisbon, at peak hour on a summer day, a few minutes is enough to shuffle a handful of arrivals.
For the passengers the problem stopped being technical and became a diary problem: the airline’s next flight to Bissau does not leave until Saturday morning. It is one more bump at a moment when the carrier is under a spotlight for having received the final takeover bids from Air France-KLM and Lufthansa.
One dull but honest note to close on: events like this are neither rare nor accidents. In Portugal the technical investigation of these occurrences sits with the GPIAAF, which decides case by case whether to open an inquiry. An engine shut down in flight makes headlines because it sounds frightening; the fair reading is that the procedure worked exactly as designed.
Image: S5A-0043 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)
