Originally Posted by
tdracer
You totally missed the point of that statement!
There were 18 minutes between impact (where the fire started), and the point where the aircraft was fully evacuated. The point is not that it took 18 minutes, it's that the fuselage provided protection from the fire for 18 minutes! Never did I question why it took that long - there is plenty of that going on in the existing thread in the accident forum.
18 minutes is pretty damn good - as others have speculated, I doubt aluminum would have held up that well for that long...
As I posted, there will be no shortage of study of how the carbon composite construction fared, compared to conventional aluminum (as well as ways both could potentially be improved). During the development stage of the (similarly constructed) 787, there was plenty of nay-sayer speculation that carbon composite wouldn't provide the same level of protection as aluminum in an accident - my initial impressions from this accident say those critics were rather dramatically wrong...
It wasn't necessarily a dig at you or anyone on the forum, but more the way the media is portraying the time taken for the evacuation - as if 18 minutes was a long time to get 379 people off an aircraft rather than the triumph and bravery that was getting all the passengers and crew off in 7 minutes and then spending another 11 minutes in a burning airframe checking to be 100% sure that everyone they were responsible for had been safely evacuated.