Re: Engine fire, EDI
We don't know what happened for sure yet.
Puddle-Jumper2, I'm afraid posts such as yours are the sort of thing that turn professional pilots away from this website in their droves. How can you say the crew acted correctly when we don't actually know how they acted yet?
You quote Magplug with more than a small amount of ridicule in your tone, yet his quote of the sequence of events following an engine fire is completely accurate.
Following the Manchester 737 incident 20 years ago (still BA's last fatal incident), BA take the issue of how to handle an engine fire on the ground very seriously and pay close attention in sim checks not only to the immediate handling of the fire itself, but especially to the "post recall items" management of the situation. Obviously, CFAE is operated under BACX SOPs at present, but I cannot imagine they are much changed from when I flew her under mainline SOPs. There are still some pilots seconded to BACX who have flown the RJ right through the 'integration' using CFE, Mainline and now BACX SOPs... They will know for sure whether anything is materially different, but I bet it isn't - every commercial transport type I have flown (from three different manufacturers) uses more or less the same procedure for dealing with an engine fire.
As an aside, some years ago I witnessed some colleagues starting an RJ at night in NCE that I'd positioned down to them (CFAA it was). The aircraft in question had a FADEC inoperative which required a different sequence of putting the fuel into the engine on startup. If you got it wrong and did the 'normal' start sequence by mistake, things got a bit hot out the back of the engine, which was exactly what happened that night! Quite an impressive display it was too, but nothing to overreact to and indeed, having caught the hot start very quickly (I guess they knew instantly what they'd done wrong - I certainly did as a spectator knowing that the FADEC was u/s on that engine), they simply started the other three then went back to the first one and started it correctly whereupon it behaved normally and off they went back to West Sussex.
All I'm saying here is that the flames out the back were very impressive, albeit for only about one or two seconds. Maybe they were just lucky that nobody unqualified spotted and overreacted to them. I was certainly half expecting a passenger to demand to get off or something like that, but all the flight crew would have seen was a hot start on their EGT gauge which they reacted to immediately before exceeding the limit. Where I'm going with this is that just because there are what appeared to me to be quite large flames out the back of an engine, it doesn't necessarily mean that all hell is going to break loose. I guess they didn't look so bad to the headset man standing at the front as they did to me standing beside it. I'd be amazed if a passenger didn't spot it though and draw it to someone's attention, but then I don't know what went on inside the aircraft - It was late and they'd had a long tech delay with the previous aircraft so maybe all the pax on the RH side were asleep! Maybe the crew made an explanatory PA in a reassuring, soothing voice explaining what had happened, who knows?
To recap then... Flames out of the back of an RJ engine is not necessarily a reason to evacuate.