Originally Posted by
parabellum
etudiant - You are not a profesional aviator I'm assuming? It is SOP in a situation such as the one here for the flight crew to contact the emergency services ASAP after landing on the emergency services frequency, which is normally, in ICAO countries, only one click away from 121.5. If the fire chief is on the spot he is in a position to pass invaluable info to the flight crew, particularly where burning fuel may be flowing.
Lots of guesses made here from poor quality photos that fuel did not flow under this aircraft, nothing verified, the fire chief would have been able to to pass an assessment to the Captain. Evacuating passengers into an area where the slides could land in burning fuel, or spilled fuel that may subsequently ignite, is the action that will kill passengers.
Not so, the split is about fifty/fifty of experienced voices. Each professional is the master of his own game, pilots don't fight fires and fire chiefs don't fly. A pilot who would evacuate and be damned , choosing to contradict qualified professional advice from outside when it is available, is, I believe, the real safety hazard here.
The issue is that the fire was not manifest until the airplane had completed a successful landing on a non emergency basis. They had a mechanical problem that was non threatening enough for the crew to fly home rather than divert. On landing, there was no fire chief available to assess the situation. So the decision to sit tight cannot be attributed to a fire chief, he was not there.
While the fire crew arrived with commendable speed, the video at least suggests that this was a very near run thing.