PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - British Airways Incident at Johannesburg
View Single Post
Old 17th Oct 2014, 16:56
  #671 (permalink)  
Locked door
 
Join Date: Aug 2007
Location: The sky
Posts: 337
Received 4 Likes on 1 Post
Saskatoon,

It's self styled experts like you that put people in danger. Believe it or not a crew has your (and their) best interests at heart and is making assessments with way more information than you have. By unilaterally taking action all you do is add risk and confuse the situation. You'd look (even more of) an idiot if you self evacuated into a pool of kerosine that the crew knew was there.

FWIW the Phoenix evac was initiated by a pax opening a door while the a/c was moving, confusing an already complex situation and necessitating some extremely prompt action from the flight crew. Helpful to the situation? No. That a/c only had a minor fault, the pax initiated evac exposed all involved to far greater risk than if they had stayed on board and allowed the crew time to troubleshoot.

Your tech knowledge is a bit lacking too, you can only put approx 53.5 tons of fuel in a 747 wing, 36 tons in the inner tank, 13.5 in the outer and 4 in the reserve. The outer was the only one breached so the max possible fuel spill was 13.5 tons but it was actually far less than that. Also kerosine (paraffin) is not as volatile as petrol, so if there is no ignition on impact there is unlikely to be one post event, especially when the fuel is leaking into grass off the taxiway. You can be damn sure the crew were getting regular updates from the fire services about the size and location of the spill.

In a nutshell, stop trying to second guess crews from a position of ignorance and let them get on with managing a situation to the best outcome without interfering.
Locked door is offline