Originally Posted by
Ian W
Neither you nor I know what the captain was told.
He may not have been dealing with just a balance of probabilities but professional advice from the fire service.
So you are making the assumption that if you were captain and on the ground with a wing on fire and no other inputs you would evacuate. Probably the captain in this case would have done so too. But if he knew the wing tanks were empty and had been told by the fire service that the fire was not too severe, was not spreading and they estimated less than a minute to extinguish if he did not evacuate you would presumably tell the fire service to wind their necks in and withdraw you were going to evacuate anyway as it was 'a no brainer decision'. Therefore you would not use your brain take no notice of input information tell the fire service to stop trying to kill the fire pull back and let you evacuate the pax on the slides (that is of course if the NonRevs who post on here had not already fought their way past the flight attendants and started the evacuation for you).
No, I'd probably have asked the fire service to get on with their job and unleash their canonry on the fire, while pax were instructed to evac from the other side. See BA in Vegas - fire crew spraying while pax are evacuating, and even on the same side. It's not an either or question, if you use your brain a little bit
No I don't know what the captain was told. But fire crew were not at the scene when the plane stopped and there clearly was a
severe fire. I will offer my apologies if proven wrong, but I don't believe the fire chief told the captain there wasn't a severe fire. Even if he did, cabin crew should have been providing very different information about what was actually happening...