The fire aboard British Airways flight 2276 was “every pilot’s worst nightmare”, an aviation expert has said, praising the plane’s crew for their “by the book” handling of the emergency.
Seconds before the Boeing 777 took off from Las Vegas on Tuesday its pilot would have received “a master warning, a big red light and bells”, alerting him to a problem, said Marcus Diamond, a safety and technical consultant at the Australian Federation of Air Pilots.
Diamond reviewed an audio recording of chatter between the aircraft and a control tower, which captured the pilot’s mayday call and request for firefighters at the scene.
He said the distress call was made after the plane entered its “sterile cockpit” phase, in which pilots discuss only operational matters.
It was unclear what the first sign of danger would have been. “If could have been that the catastrophic engine failure happened first, and then because it had failed, fuel and hydraulics were leaking everywhere, and it caught fire,” Diamond said.
“If a fire had already been indicated, [the pilot] would have had a big red light that would have said, ‘master warning’,” he said.
“That stimulates the crew to go into an emergency procedure, dictated by Boeing’s quick reference handbook. And very clearly from those radio calls that’s what he was doing.”
“He called mayday, he called for the fire service. The pause between the stop, the mayday, and the evacuation, which was about 30 seconds ... That was the period of time that they were carrying out the checklist,” he said.
The emergency checklist includes identifying the problem and then identifying the course of action in response. “It would take you down the track of shutting down the engine, securing it, and securing your passengers,” he said.
The audio recordings revealed another potential danger: another aircraft preparing to land on the same strip, “lining up on final for approach”.
“A pilot should always have in their minds a go-around situation, which there was in this case - he was instructed by the tower to go around the runway,” he said.
Safety training around fires often draws on the tragedy of Saudia Flight 163, an aircraft that landed in Jeddah after a fire broke out but was not immediately evacuated. As a result, more than 300 people aboard died of smoke inhalation.
“In the old days they used to have a think about whether or not to evacuate, but if you pause too long, that’s what happens,” Diamond said, in reference to the Saudia flight.
“Once you’ve got a fire indication or think there may be a fire, you’ve got to evacuate. It’s a well practiced scenario in the simulators.”
He praised the flight crew for their cool handling of the emergency. “I think they did it by the book, they did a good job. It’s a pretty scary thing to have a fire in an airplane ... It’s every pilot’s worst nightmare.”
