With no final opinion, and listening to arguments on both sides, I am going to play the devil's advocate......
If we have an engine fire after a heavy takeoff from a short, slippery runway and the fire warning remains after blowing the bottles, the procedure is to land ASAP.
What do you do if the engine fire light goes out after blowing the bottles. Frequently, take the time to dump fuel then land. But you might say...hey, I can inspect the engine to ensure that the fire has extinguished. Not necessarily on a freighter or with tail mounted engines. Do you still dump fuel and then land? Seems to happen that way.
Why then, is it any different for a wheelwell fire compared to an engine fire. In fact, if the wheelwell fire light has been out for 20 minutes, doesn't Boeing say that the gear can be retracted for performance reasons. Why.....because it was hot brakes, not a wheelwell fire and the brakes have now cooled.
But some say...dual fire sensors are in engine/APU versus a single sensor in the wheelwell, therefore the extinguishing of the fire warning for the engine/APU is more reliable than for the gear. But the dual sensors are intertwined with each other aren't they. If they are, a fire is going not going to burn one and leave the other one OK. So is it any more reliable or really just more redundancy for dispatch purposes.
Mexicana and Swissair were tire explosions, not wheelwell fires. Nationair was a landing gear fire in which the gear remained retracted. If you have an actual fire in your wheelwell, you will know soon. On the Nationair flight, within a very short time period, they had multiple secondary failures. Plus, they had other indications of a blown tire on almost the entire takeoff roll indicating that it was not just a brake overheat.
So if you had a wheelwell fire indication(which will likely be a certain time period after being airborne as the brakes take time before reaching max temp), drop the gear and typically turn around to go back to the departure airport and if there have been no further anomalies since the fire light extinguished 5 minutes ago, how likely is it that you still have or ever had a fire? Not very likely.
With those still fairly warm brakes now landing on a short runway when overweight, you might have trouble getting stopped if you automatically just return and land right away. Which would make you look rather silly to write off an aircraft due to a hot brake(which by the way will not help your stopping capability much).
Last edited by JammedStab; 7th Jun 2015 at 02:37.