I have refrained from commenting so far but it is now time to add to a lot of the nonsense that has been posted so far.
I have probably spent most of my 46 year commercial flying career flying around with "dangerous cargo" ranging from plastic explosives, AVPIN, crew members who haven't changed their shreddies for two weeks to "nuclear waste" with an NEC of 24,000 lbs equivalent.
However, what I want to talk about here is smoke/fire in the cockpit.
This is the ULTIMATE KILLER.
I simply cannot believe those of you out there who have ultimate solutions such as, if the UPS crew had followed your wisdom, they would be alive and well if they had only followed your fantastic advice.
Have you any idea what you would do when you are sat upon a fire such that you cannot even see six inches in front of you and your legs and the rest of your body is starting to melt?
Smoke and fire in the cockpit was always one of my big topics when I was training.
I will relate a very true story.
I was training two SFOs to move to the left seat. Although smoke in the cockpit was not actually part of the syllabus, I made the pair of them do one each (in the simulator) because I always figured that this was about the most difficult scenario that a new captain (or an old one for that matter) could ever face.
We got out of the simulator at around 0300 and arranged to meet for lunch after a sleep.
"Isn't it spooky" said one. "What's spooky" said I? It transpired that when we were doing our smoke drills, SR111 was going into the Grand Banks.
So now I would like to move on to Manufacturers and their Advice.
I can always remember my only experience (outside of the military) of smoke in the cockpit. I was captain of one of Fred Laker's fine DC-10s on my way from LAX to LGW. At about 30 West, the F/E asked the pair of us up front if we could smell burning. (I have to explain to the youngsters that we used to smoke cigarettes in those days so sense of smell was not as good as it is now).
Neither of us could so we carried on (for the MS pilots, there is not a lot else you can do at 30 West).
Then the F/O said that he could smell smoke. That made two out of three so we got the QRH out and started doing an electrical isolation drill. I knew from my time in the simulator that this would take up to 30 minutes to complete.
So, we have the F/O flying and I am watching and monitoring the QRH with the F/E. Then the sun started to come up and I suddenly spotted a wisp of electrical smoke coming out of the F/Es seat!
One of the electric motors in his seat was burning out. We laughed about it afterwards for he was actually sitting on the "fire" whilst conducting the orchestra so to speak but I had already experienced in a previous life a quite nasty incident when a rheostat burned out on an overhead panel.
I will be very interested to see what Boeing and (more importantly) their lawyers will do about the 744 QRH/FCOM.
A lot of you out there are probably unaware that all manufacturers manuals have passed through the legal department many times over before the final document can be printed.
A classic example is the old electrical smoke isolation drill that British Aerospace had printed on Pages 4A and 4B of the BAe146 QRH. I think (and I'm guessing now) as a result of a "happening" somewhere, the pages suddenly disappeared in an amendment. Pages 4A and 4B were suddenly empty and marked "Deliberately Blank".
When I queried this with BAe, I was told that this brought the BAe146 in line with the Avro RJ. The advice given to the Avro RJ pilots was "Land at the nearest suitable airfield". The CAA not only allowed this but (I assume) had allowed the lawyers to back date this reprehensible advice to those of us left on the BAe 146 freighter.
There is NO DOUBT that you have probably less than 15 minutes to get a burning aeroplane down on the sea or the land before you die.
Perhaps the lawyers and the accountants might like to consider this?
PS I, and a lot of others who wanted to stay alive, kept our old QRH handy.