Official: Jet lost flight instruments after blast

(MANILA, Philippines) A packed Qantas jetliner lost the use of crucial flight instruments after an explosion aboard the aircraft last week blasted a large hole in its fuselage, an air safety investigator said Wednesday.

The explosion last Friday during a flight from London to Melbourne forced the pilots of the Boeing 747 to rapidly descend thousands of feet and make an emergency landing in the Philippines. No one was injured in the blast or during the descent.

Investigators have found that the jet's three landing instrument systems and its antiskid system were not working when they arrived in Manila, said Julian Walsh, the Australian Transport Safety Bureau's director of aviation safety.

But he told reporters the jumbo jet's main systems, including engines and hydraulics, were functioning normally.

Walsh said the pilots did not use the flight instruments to land the plane. If the pilots were not able to land under so-called visual flight rules, he said, they had other navigation systems that they could have used.

But another bureau investigator, Ian Brokenshire, told The Associated Press later that the failed instruments would have made landing "extremely difficult" if conditions over Manila had been cloudy or foggy.