Originally Posted by
Orange future
I first became aware of this line of thinking when reading the report into the QF 380 incident in SIN. Apparently the skipper did no want to evac the pax because of the possibility of fire breaking out. But isnt that the exact reason you would WANT to evacuate?
From the captain of that flight's book:
"Behind me, one of the pilots asked why we weren't doing an emergency evacuation. It was a good question. We looked at all the threats and considered all our options, and we ultimately came to a conclusion and I made the decision. My decision was simple: where are the passengers safest right now; inside or outside? Given the current situation with no fire I thought the passengers and crew were safer inside the fuselage than evacuating down the slides onto the dangerous runway.
We had wheelchair passengers and babies onboard, and I knew the elderly passengers would be injured descending the slides and some would break their legs and hips as the slid to the bottom of the steep evacuation slides. Other passengers in a panic would jump from the aircraft, down the same slides, the concertina into the injured. I figured that 5% of the passengers would have fractures escaping from the lower deck slides, 10 percent from the upper deck slides; that would equate to 30 fracture cases with our 440 passenger load. But it gets worse. The passengers who survived the slides would run the risk of slipping over on fuel or foam, or could become confused and walk in front of engine 1 that was still running and be sucked into it. Passengers who had survived to this stage might walk through jet fuel, creating a spark or taking flash photography and igniting the fuel. Even if all passengers did get off safely, then we would have the dangerous situation of all the passengers being outside and all the supervising staff being inside the aircraft. Who would be monitoring the passengers at this time? A friend of mine commanded an evacuation of his aircraft in Osaka. After the passengers cleared the slides they ran away from the aircraft and some ran on to an active runway where a Boeing 747 was making another emergency landing.
We had a discussion rather than an argument about it. Harry pointed at the last images to display: the wheels on the left body landing gear had reached 900 deg C - they were getting hotter, but there was no fire."