AN2 Driver;
The documentary can be found at:
http://www.cbc.ca/natureofthings/swi...air_flash.html
The 3D graphics showing the progress of the fire are quite good. The caution of course is, animations and graphics are very powerful to an image-driven population. Is it the truth?
Here, I strongly suspect it is, given the outcome of the investigation (where the fire first began, how it spread...soot path and wiring insulation burn) and knowing that the checklist was being actioned and what the results would be.
It has been suggested that shutting off the generators/busses would have put the fire out which, while perhaps (and perhaps not) true in the very initial stages, is academic once the fire is self-sustaining. "Smoke decreases" checklist items are a sucker's game and have largely disappeared from emergency SOPs.
No checklist can handle a situation where the fire is self-sustaining (
a point in the emergency which the crew will likely never know has been reached), and getting on the ground as quickly as possible is the only chance for survival. Further, given the complete inability to know what's going on behind the panels and the added inability to predict outcomes when departing from the manufacturer's/airline's standard emergency checklist, I think making up "alternative" checklists on one's own is wandering in engineering and test-pilot territory.
I hastily add, we know that successful outcomes have come from such ad-hoc individual solutions and that both manufacturers and airlines can be slow to change even in the face of an accident such as SR111. Ultimately, when faced with what this crew was faced with, that's what command authority, experience and training is all about. Our own smoke removal and smoke of unknown origin checklists were revised some time ago, are in very big, black font (although not at the front of the QRH..they're the first item behind the "EMERGENCY" tab).
Anyone besides airline managements around here supporting MCPL yet?....
