THE pilot at the controls of an Emirates jet that almost crashed at Melbourne Airport has revealed how he saved 275 lives.

Breaking a four-month silence, the pilot told how he managed to wrench the fully-loaded plane into the air just seconds before it almost crashed.

"I still don't know how we got it off the ground," the pilot said.

"I thought we were going to die, it was that close.

"It was the worst thing in 20 years (of flying). It was the worst thing I've felt, but thank God we got it safely around."

The pilot, a 42-year-old European man, spoke to the Sunday Herald Sun on the condition his identity not be revealed.

Realising the plane had not reached a high enough speed to get airborne, and with the end of the runway rapidly approaching, the pilot and co-pilot were desperately checking controls in the cockpit, trying to find out what had gone wrong.

At the last second, the pilot engaged a rapid acceleration known as TOGA (take-off go-around) and lifted the plane off the ground.

With 257 passengers and 18 crew aboard, the Airbus A340-500 struck its tail three times, wiped out lights and a navigation antennae at the end of the runway - some of the equipment struck was just 70cm high - and sustained $100 million damage as it barely cleared the airport boundary fence.

After limping into the air, the pilot took the jet out over Port Phillip Bay to dump its load of highly flammable aviation fuel, then returned to Melbourne Airport 30 minutes later.

Passengers had seen smoke and dust swirl into the cabin and felt the impact as the tail struck the ground, but the pilot did not tell them how bad the situation was, fearing it would cause them to panic.

The pilot said that when he left the plane after safely returning to Melbourne Airport he saw a number of the passengers disembarking, unaware of how close to death they had come.

"There were a lot of passengers left the airplane smiling," he said.

He said the landing afterwards was a "textbook landing".

"From take-off until we landed I am extremely proud of what we did from push-off to landing.

"The cabin crew were outstanding. We did extremely well under the circumstances. We kept it very, very simple."

He said he did not know to this day exactly how he manoeuvred the Airbus into the air.

"I . . . sort of reacted on instinct," he said.

"I had a feeling that (something) wasn't working, but I couldn't find out what was wrong.

"I knew I couldn't stop.

"At that point I knew we just had to go.

"And we got it off the ground, miraculously."

The accident was later described as the closest Australia had come to a major aviation catastrophe.

Tail strikes are extremely dangerous and can result in a plane breaking in two.

A report by air safety investigators found the co-pilot was at the controls when the pilot, a captain, called on him to "rotate", or lift the plane's nose.

When the plane failed to lift, the pilot again called for him to rotate the plane, which saw the plane's nose lift and its tail strike the ground.

The pilot then took over, commanding and selecting TOGA, which provides the maximum thrust the plane's engines will deliver.

Once the plane was in the air, the crew realised the take-off weight programmed into the plane's computer was 100 tonnes lighter than the actual weight of the plane.

The typing error meant the wrong take-off speed and thrust settings had been calculated.

Emirates has said there were four layers of checks that should have picked up the error, and the failure to do so was "perplexing".

The pilot did not type in the numbers, but was responsible for checking them.

The pilot said he almost collapsed after bringing the plane safely back to land.

"One of my friends almost admitted me to hospital I was so stressed," he said.

"If you have a near-death experience your body reacts in a particular way."

In multiple interviews conducted with the Sunday Herald Sun over a period of weeks, the pilot who has left Dubai with his family and returned to his home country in Europe also revealed:

HE had slept for only 3 1/2 hours in the 24 hours before the flight taking off on March 20.

THE brush with death upset him so badly he had not slept for four days after the accident.

HE and his co-pilot were ordered to resign. They were handed pre-prepared letters of resignation when they returned to Emirates headquarters.

HE was still so horrified by the accident that he could not bear to think about it.

HE needed to find a job, but did not know if he would fly again.

HE was reluctant to reveal exactly what happened in the cockpit in case his recollection was different from what Australian Transport Safety Bureau investigators would find.

The veteran pilot, who has 22 years' experience with the military and commercial airlines, said he knew Melbourne Airport quite well.

In his 4 1/2 years of flying for Emirates he had flown in and out of Melbourne many times.

"Maybe four, five times in the past six months," he said.

"Melbourne was one of the places I knew well.

"Maybe (I flew there) once every other month.

"It was quite emotional to have to say goodbye."

Since the accident, several Emirates pilots have spoken to the Sunday Herald Sun, saying fatigue was a major problem with the airline, which is one of the world's largest long-haul carriers.

The ATSB has also been told of fatigue problems, though its preliminary report into the tail strike revealed fatigue was probably not a factor.

The pilot said it was hard for him to know if he was fatigued or not, but that he had very little sleep when the near-fatal error was made.

"I had the flown the maximum in the last 30 days. One hundred hours in 28 days, it's an Emirates rule," he said.

"I'd flown 99 hours. You can fly 100 hours in a month. There a big difference in long-haul, nights, it's a mix of everything."

He said he had told ATSB investigators he had little sleep in the day before to the 10.30pm flight on Friday, March 20.

"This long-haul flying is really, really fatiguing. Really demanding on your body," he said.

"When I did that take-off in Melbourne I had slept 3 1/2 hours in 24 hours.

"You feel sort of normal, abnormal."

He said he had been in Melbourne for 24 hours before his flight.

"That (the Melbourne-Dubai flight) is the most tiring trip I have done in my career.

"You're always out of whack."

The pilot said he and other pilots tried hard not to make any mistakes, but occasionally errors happened.

"It's never on purpose," he said.

"No fingers point in our direction. It happens because of a range of things coming together at the time.

"Until now, I had a perfect record.

"I was just a pilot."

He said he had told the ATSB everything about the period leading up to the accident, and he praised the Australian investigators for their thoroughness and sensitivity.

"I told them everything about what happens. Eating, exercise, I was dead honest. It's always like that when you fly," he said.

"I was really scared of going to jail when I got back to Dubai."

He said there had been four pilots in the cockpit - he and the co-pilot, who had been at the controls as the plane taxied along the runway, and two augmenting pilots who were on board because of the length of the 14 1/2 hour flight to Dubai.