Originally Posted by
oicur12.again
SQ 743 had an engine fire out of MEL long ago and the
PR spin from SIN was that the setting sun reflecting on the exhaust can may have LOOKED like a fire. But they returned anyway.
Back in the late 1980's I was FO on an early ETOPS flight and we were about to go feet wet out of JFK for Europe. A passenger reported seeing flames coming out of an engine, it was just after sunset in the summertime. The third pilot said 'it's just the strobe reflecting off the engine nacelle, I'll go back and talk with them'. He took a look and came back saying there were indeed intermittent flashes of flame in the exhaust. We throttled the engine back to idle to avoid a negative ETOPS shutdown statistic and returned uneventfully back to JFK for a tail swap.
And, a colleague told me about seeing a sunrise at noon on a 737-200 when he was brand new in the plane doing IOE (now OE). He was starting an engine and somehow the igniters were not on due to breakers out or wrong switch position. The check airman spotted the mistake and announced 'watch and learn!' as he turned on the sparklers. The flight attendants said flame came out of both ends of the fuel soaked JT8D as it lit off and the pax were duly impressed.
The B-727 APU with the exhaust on the right wing caused a lot of pax evacuations, some pax initiated, back in the day. I watched one at DTW years ago as we were taxiing out in another plane.
The NTSB issued this bulletin to address the dangers of a pax initiated evac on the 727 due to APU torching:
http://www.ntsb.gov/safety/safety-re...rs/A93_125.pdf
Obviously, the recent SQ fire was far more serious than momentary APU torching.