JW411,
excellent post, thanks a lot.
Sometimes things turn weird. We have you doing smoke drills while a crew struggles to survive and fails. And we have the UPS crew doing the same struggle again and fail exactly 12 years to the day of Swissair 111.
Fire is the single most dangerous thing on the flight decks, starting with a Piper Cub up to the lagrest jets and, even worse, spaceflight. If I recall right, they had one of these in MIR and it was a very close shave indeed.
I was working for Swissair at the time that 111 happened, knew two of the crew on and off. It was then and still is one of the accidents that had a profound impact on my own perception of what the real issues on such flights are. All of these flights did happen in the vicinity of airports, none of them ever did at 30W, as you mention. Even to people who are restricted to armchairflying today it is clear that a situation like that will render all sort of EROPS/STOPS whatever planning methods totally absurd. We can't plan for this contingency or there won't be any long haul flights and not a lot of shorthaul ones either. At 30 West, all you can really do is consider ditching in this situation and does anyone want to contemplate that?
Before SR111, the company lost another aircraft to fire. Swissair 330 was a Convair Coronado going to TLV out of ZRH with a bomb on board. The bomb went off and started to set the airplane ablaze. They did try an in flight return but never managed to land. They hit the ground a few hundred yards from a nuclear research facility. It was not a few weeks ago, when they gave a documentary of this on TV, playing back some of the radio tapes. Words that are in my memory from the report and which I heard spoken for the first time. The Captain, realizing he will crash, saying good bye on the radio. Lost some sleep after that recording, I admit freely.
Then the Munich near accident with the Swissair MD80 discussed in this thread earlier. Then SR111.
I remember that after SR111 happened and the circumstances emerged, a lot of planes landed as precautions for too well done "Chicken a la King" or after flying through residue of a forest fire. Heck, they are all alive and I understand them!
Sorry, this got longer than I thought it would, and more open too. But I reckon, seeing that it happened again, and won't be the last time I fear, we are all in one boat so to speak on this.
Last edited by AN2 Driver; 7th Sep 2010 at 19:38.