November 4, 2010 started like any other day for Qantas pilot Richard de Crespigny.

Flight QF32 took off from Singapore's Changi airport heading for Sydney but only a couple minutes after takeoff the engine exploded and with 469 people on board Richard managed to safely land the plane.

He has written about his experience in his new book Fly!: Life Lessons from the Cockpit of QF32

He told Mike Hosking pilots are always expecting the worst so he didn't panic.

"We have a thing called chronic unease [which means] we are always expecting the worst and always expecting the unexpected."

Richard said it took hours for him to figure out what had happened.

"We have 1200 checks on the aircraft, we did about 120 of them. It really took hours, we didn't land for two hours [because] it took that long to figure out what had gone wrong and see if we could fix it and if we couldn't, if we could mitigate it."

LISTEN ABOVE AS RICHARD DE CRESPIGNY SPEAKS WITH MIKE HOSKING