Replay
Saturday Morning - the programme has just been reshown. It was 13 minutes (not 15 as I wrote above) which a top crew with a fully functioning machine would have required to land at Halifax -and two minutes before this, due to the change in airflow in the ceiling allowing fire gases to flow forward, a piece of cockpit ceiling either collapsed or melted and the gases entered the cockpit.
At this point, both pilots simultaneously made a Mayday call, showing how dramatically the situation had degenerated. Forty seconds after that the ship was in an uncontrolled right banked descent. The pilots were for whatever reason no longer controlling the aircraft at this point ( purely speculation if incapacitated or attempting shelter from the heat) and as one team member said, "they had no chance."
Of the many recommendations made, most have now been incorporated into the MD-11 fleet - which in the meantime belongs to Swiss - but many other lines are flying ships with metallised Mylar insulation, Velcro and other hazards still in place.
One useful item is a smoke detector behind the panelling, which would have alerted the crew much earlier in the sequence to the hidden fire just behind their heads.
All this safety costs money - is that why only so few unaffected fleet operators have made these changes? "Once bitten, twice shy", springs to mind.