Last week, a JetBlue Airbus A320 declared an emergency shortly after taking off from Barbados. While emergencies happen all the time, there are a few things that make this incident noteworthy.
JetBlue A320 has “all the lights flashing” after takeoff
This incident happened on Tuesday, June 4, 2024, and involves JetBlue flight B61844, scheduled to operate the 2,132-mile flight from Bridgetown, Barbados (BGI), to Boston (BOS). The flight was operated by a 20-year-old Airbus A320 with the registration code N586JB.
The first thing that stood out to me about this incident is that there were only 47 people onboard, including the crew (meaning there were 41 passengers). Gosh, I thought JetBlue was trying to cut its unprofitable flying? 😉
VASAviation has an excellent video with the air traffic control audio plus a visualization of what happened during the incident, so I’d recommend watching it.
To summarize, as soon as the jet takes off from runway 9, the JetBlue pilots contact air traffic control, stating that they have an emergency, and intend to return to the airport. Here are a few of the ways the pilots describe the situation:
- “We don’t know what we got going on. There’s so many faults going on with the airplane, we’re unable to tell.”
- “We’ve got so many lights going off, we’ve got an engine showing shutdown or failed, but it seems to be working, and then too many other lights to count, so unable to give you any information.”
- “We need a minute just to set up everything, sir, cause we’re trying to work through all the lights flashing, cause the checklists and everything is cutting out, so not sure what all we got going on.”
The plane ended up landing back on runway 9 around 17 minutes after its initial departure. The flight ended up being canceled. The aircraft was ferried back to Boston on June 7 (three days later), and then returned to service on June 8.
Someone commenting at The Aviation Herald claims that an internal JetBlue report explained that there were spurious ECAM reports, which triggered this incident (ECAM stands for Electronic Centralized Aircraft Monitor). So basically the computer was sending wrong warnings, even though the plane was flying fine.
Huge kudos to the pilots for how professionally they handled this situation. I can only imagine how stressful it is to fly a plane and stay focused when you have all kinds of alarms and flashing lights going off.
What’s going on with the air traffic controllers?
Okay, here’s the part of the incident that I find the most bizarre. What the heck is going on with the air traffic controllers here? Not only were the JetBlue pilots having to deal with their own emergency, but they were basically having to “coach” the air traffic controllers on how to do their job.
I’m not sure if they’re just not used to emergencies, or what, but it seems like the air traffic controllers are more frantic and confused than the pilots:
- The tower controller just seems very confused, and first tells the pilots to stand by, then tells them to make a right turn (without giving vectors), and then tells them to contact approach (without giving the frequency), and then tells them to stand by again
- The pilots then ask for an altitude and direction, and the controller simply clears them for a right downwind
- The pilots have to ask if they’re supposed to stay with tower or contact another frequency, which the controller ignores, until they request the approach they need, and then she sends them over to another frequency
- The approach controller seemingly forgets to hand the JetBlue plane back to the tower frequency, so the pilots follow up, at which point they’re switched over
It’s possible that I’m reading too much into this, but usually air traffic controllers are calm in these situations, and are very quick to give pilots what they need, given what pilots deal with in an emergency. But in this situation, I get the sense that wasn’t happening.
Bottom line
A JetBlue Airbus A320 had an emergency last week after taking off from Barbados. It seems like the plane actually flew just fine, while the computer went a bit crazy, and indicated that basically everything was broken. Fortunately the pilots handled the situation professionally, and the plane landed safely back in Barbados minutes after its departure. While the pilots did a great job, I’m a bit confused by the performance of air traffic controllers here…
What do you make of this JetBlue emergency?
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