Royal Air Maroc B763 evacuation at Montreal
 

A Royal Air Maroc B763 was evacuated at Montreal yesterday due to a fire in a baggage conveyor vehicle under the aircraft.

Accident: Royal Air Maroc B763 at Montreal on Nov 4th 2013, cargo belt loader caught fire

It LOOKS quite spectacular, but were the pax in GREATER DANGER by staying aboard or "rapid disembarkation"?

Fire burning under stationary airliner.
 

Not to evacuate? Stupid question from non-pilot.

Let's see - in the aircraft with a fire underneath, or out of the aircraft and getting away from the fire?

I know where I'd rather be. IMHO, the decision to evacuate was correct. :ok:

Naturally the decision to evacuate was sensible.

Alas in my experience the call "hazard on xxx side" seems to have been written out of the manuals for some obscure reason (lawyers?).

So whilst it's reasonable to throw them down the slides, is it reasonable to allow or encourage some to arrive straight into the source of the problem, be it burning baggage conveyors or smoking/burning brakes?

All I'm hoping for is some considered thought in a rapidly changing situation and not the mentality of "Someone said FIRE, so I was justified in calling evacuation!"

In the last (pax) airlines that I worked for, the Commander called the Evacuation and the cabin crew executed it. Part of the cabin crew Evacuation drill was to check outside for a hazard prior to opening the door and blowing the slide - and to redirect pax where necessary. Seems sensible to me.

Wow, quite a statement. So it would seem ALL fires equals evacuate, according to unequivocal expert RoyHudd.

As a pilot (and, for Roy's sake, a captain on this very aircraft type) I WOULD question the need to evacuate, versus 'rapidly disembark'. The fire is offset to the side of the aircraft, not directly underneath and even if it was the aircraft is not going to suddenly explode as in some Hollywood movie. The conveyor belt is at the bulk cargo door and away from anything that's easily ignited. The passengers have a pretty decent cocoon of metal etc to protect them and they're not going to be baked alive, even if their forward progress was not as rapid as would be desired. The jetty was attached and the passengers were already disembarking, so it's quite a reasonable question to ask if a rapid disembarkation would have been a viable option i.e. there's no need to guess how long it's going to be before a jetty is attached to the aircraft etc.

Note, please, that I am NOT questioning this captain's decision to evacuate; he made that based on the information he had and it's absolutely A correct one as far as I'm concerned. I would pat him on the back, say 'well done' and buy him a glass of his favourite liquid refreshment. I am merely replying with a differing viewpoint because my gob was fairly smacked by Roy's quite unreasonable and disparaging reply to a quite reasonable question, which DOES have more options than fire = evacuate.

All questions have options for an answer. This is inherent in the word "question".

Some answers are blindingly obvious. This was such a case. You confirmed that.

But thanks ever so much Pompous Pontius. I always "enjoy" the company of insecure captains who feel the need to inform one of their status. I have a few such colleagues myself. They are to be pitied.

Back to the Nat Tracks tomorrow. Maybe you there, doubtless a bit lower than my steed :)). I'll look down to the left.

Good grief. Stop it ! Fire. Eveacuate. Pilots are behind the electronic locked door, bullet proof, blah blah blah. Even before that, we cannot see where the fire is. My company stated that the cabin crew were the real observers & were understood to use "all available exits".The cabin crew made that evaluation in co-ordination with the senior cabin crew member.

Good thing this wasn't a 787 - or we'd be hearing about how the plastic airplane caused the baggage loader to burst into flames :ugh: :ugh: :mad:

Why the fire started; that's worth looking into.

Everyone off the aircraft? Yes. All alive? Yes.
And the ambulance chasers have been leaving business cards ... :cool:

I feel sorry for the one to your right.

My reason for stating my qualification is because of your pompous statement: "Stupid question from non-pilot". Evidently, in your mind, nobody can express an opinion unless they fly the machines, hence my explanation at the beginning of my reply.

It would seem your flights in the upper levels (please feel free to fly as high above me as you wish, it affects me not one iota) have diminished your ability to understand the written word. Some questions may have blindingly obvious answers but I do not agree this is one of those and did NOT "confirm" it (in fact I went so far as to suggest a rapid disembarkation WAS a worthy option). If you feel there is only one answer to this question and you'll always evacuate at the word 'fire' then expect no criticism from me; you've got it straight in your mind what you're going to do and that's great. However, just because someone else, pilot or not, asks a perfectly reasonable question doesn't mean they have to be condemned as 'stupid' because it doesn't agree with your model.

Enjoy your NAT tracks; I'll raise a beer to you from the BBQ.

Rapidly disembark is not a concept that I have seen on a wide bodied passenger jet arrived at it's destination, particularly with mixed nationalities and the tendency to have multiple items of hand luggage. I would suggest that it is improbable that the passengers leave behind their belongings to speed up the process, as we have seen from many emergency evacuations people still take their luggage with them. I can guess that watching more and more smoke and possibly flames rising whilst there is little forward movement of the queue would cause great anxiety for passengers and rear cabin crew.

Sometimes you may like to also consider life at the back of the cabin, it's a different world than the front. I am just a humble techie who get's sent out on the cheapest seats so my view is very different from the pointy end.

What we don't know is at what stage this happened. Ingress or egress?

Likely that the evacuation was ordered and no crew would have been near all the doors. Pax opened doors, manually deployed (un armed )slides and got out. Job well done by all.

Last time I checked, Pax are not trained to evaluate the hazard before opening doors. Survival instincts kick in.

As SLF I've just got off a Ryanair 738. I was sat in the over wing emergency seat and was asked to study the laminated emergency procedure : it clearly showed that you should not open/ use the exit if you can see fire on that side.

The link in the first post indicates that this happened during the unloading process.

'Rapid disembarkation'

As in via whatever doorway is in use and along the jetway or down the stairs?

I'm a volunteer fireman in my off hours. I'm also a Brit; I remember Hillsborough and I'm almost old enough to remember Ibrox. I know about fire, I know how people behave, and I know about panic.

I don't know for sure what studies have been carried out, but IF the pax panic I would imagine the potential for an absolutely lethal crush to develop at that single door would be very high indeed. I could easily see that… just one pax tripping could lead to a pileup, multiple fatalities through crushing, and a door blocked with bodies of the dead and dying - just from crush injuries, even if the fire itself is a bit of a non-event.

With due allowance for panic in a situation where there is a real known fire, even if it doesn't initially involve the cabin directly, I suspect a full evac via slides may always be the safer option.

I'd sooner find myself having to explain a couple of twisted ankles than a bunch of dead pax…

Video here.

The video clearly demonstrates why a full evacuation is problematic once already on stand. Only two slides appears to be in use and not too many of the 250 odd pax seem to have come down them. What would be the reasons? well here are a few.

The doors are already disarmed and the CC have probably already moved away from some of them.
The pax are already standing in the aisles and getting their hand baggage down. Those that were sitting adjacent to emergency exits probably aren't there anymore.
The CC might have trouble seeing past and getting past standing passengers to perform their drill properly.
Many exits would already be blocked by ground equipment and or other hazards.

This is a very complex scenario and one that would be very difficult to fully comprehend in the time available. A full evacuation is probably only the best option if the event occurs very soon after pulling on to stand and before the a/c is surrounded by ground equipment. The rapid disembarkation drill was developed for exactly this type of eventuality.

Having said that the arguments put forward by Ranger One are very valid.

Any situation like this needs evaluating rapidly but carefully. The blanket idea of evacuate regardless of the circumstances is foolish and a derogation of responsibility. We are paid to use our brains and our judgement not just do the easy thing.

Complex problem for sure. Opened main/service doors would need to be closed and then re-armed before the slides could be deployed. The exits just aft of the trailing edge are permanently armed emergency exits only. It may be that a combination of usable exits and the air bridge offers the best solution. In my airline, crew are trained to open an exit and evacuate if they consider the situation is life threatening.

It all goes to prove that any real emergency is unlikely to be text-book.

Errrr lift the flap and pull the "manual inflation" thingi?

Where do you think the "flap" and the "manual inflation thingy" are, when the main/service doors are disarmed and open?

Dooh......:ugh: good point well made

That sounds like a significant amount of smoke had already entered the cabin (through the open cargo door). And with no easy way to verify that the fire hadn't spread to the airplane yet... Evacuation makes sense.

Strange to have only used the slides at 3L/R, can't tell if a Jetway is at 1L or 2L but 1R and 2R could have been used and would have been a much better choice than 3L in this case, probably only about 10 m from the bottom of the slide to the burning vehicle.

This particular scenario is not well covered in our training. Some airports will try to remove airbridges if they believe the aircraft may cause fire to spread into the terminal. Others will shut the boarding gate. Therefore, the only sensible option is to put everyone onto the apron, by whatever means.

Why did it take so long to get an extinguisher/s to the fire?
Or did they and they were too small?

I suppose it was beyond possibility to grab a tug and shove/pull the burning loader away from the aircraft….

Huck that would have required someone to think for him/herself, which seems to be a thing of the past.

I had a GPU catch fire once, sitting on the ramp in KATL. We were in an ATR-72.

A beefy rampie (who looked like Christopher Reeve) skidded up in a tug, connected the GPU and yanked out the power cable, and drove it off in a cloud of smoke and sparks. Quite the brave act - there were flames licking the fuselage…..

On the first link the top picture shows somebody coming from the wind side at the back of the plane with a big powder extinguisher .
It looks to be before the evacuation .

Nice to see a healthy discussion at long last on the topic of whether to evacuate or not.

I enjoyed playing devil's advocate to try to kick off the discussion and I am now hoping it will produce some intelligent comments and reasoning over an action which strikes me as SOMETIMES carried with the idea that the initiator is covered and can't be criticised after the event.

Any action which results in passenger injury should be carefully considered with a risk assessment as to whether they are better off aboard, as in the case of the exploding hot tyres and brakes discussed elsewhere, or you do the equivalent of beating up every 4th passenger and putting them in hospital just because someone said the magic words smoke/fire, by calling an evacuation.

When an aircraft comes to a halt at the end of the runway, off a pre-notified emergency landing, surrounded by that airport's finest in their firefighting equipment, is it really a justified action to jettison the pax "because I'm legally entitled to"?

One day perhaps, when the facts are known, said pax are going to sue the crew/airline/xAA and anyone else in the lawyers' sights for causing unnecessary stress, injury, trauma and the rest of the charge sheet and then we may see a change in emphasis by those in command.

I also await the first evacuation by the RTO aircraft which has discharged engine fire extinguisher(s), thereby producing a puff/cloud of white vapour as the extinguishant hits the hot engine, interpreted by ATC and others as smoke, thus causing the crew to misunderstand and call evacuate with the resultant injuries! How many of todays crews have thought of or heard this phenomenon discussed and self-briefed to consider such possibility?

I hope the thread continues and we get more info as to what Professional Pilots are thinking.

As the "non-pilot" referred to earlier, please don't let my passengers know that I am such an animal, as they may not wish to board my flights next week?! :rolleyes:

I would want to get everyone off that thing ASAP. There is a vehicle on fire adjacent to the aircraft. That vehicle contains a fuel tank that could ignite in spectacular fashion.

My first priority is the safety of the passengers and crew. How to get them off is more complicated than usual, due to disarmed doors/ground equipment etc. The lawyers can argue the toss afterwards.

People will sue no matter what.

train for this...
 

we did train for a fire on or around an a/c whilst a jetty/jetway was connected to an aircraft many years ago at BMA LHR if pax were boarding or sitting on-board whilst re-fuelling.

safest and quickest ways was to get everyone off (primary) ONLY via the jetty attached to the a/c...especially if fire around the rear or under the wings...
that's what we were trained for...the jetway gives plenty of protection in evac.
In this RAM fire i noticed no one around using extinguishers nor any fire services on the scene yet in the video...although in a still photo on AVH i think i can see a bod in a hi-viz pushing a red thing which could be a couple of extinguishers on wheel trolley thingy...

for pax to exit the R3 exit slide things may well have become a bit desperate in the cabin hence using that R3 slide, and that comms may have been difficult from the rear to front cabin...
strange that 2L/R slides were not used which are dual lane and door is much wider and their paths were clear...

i have had a GPU madly catch fire in a blaze of sparks and flames (GPU parked between the nose and the wing) during boarding 150 pax on a remote stand at LGW (by steps,not jetty)
about a coach load were already on-board a/c...

sequence of my events: i was on the ground.
i saw it catch fire, called the fire service on my radio, waved to the skipper in cockpit who acknowledged, ran over to Shell guy refuelling and warned him, he grabbed an engineer to switch off GPU/try and move it, and they grabbed extinguishers, I ran back to the pax coaches and stopped pax getting off the coaches, got the number 1 c/c at the pax door and told her to get everyone off the a/c NOW back off by the back steps...that was all done in the time it takes to say these words...fire crews arrived within a couple of minutes or less..

i am glad we had some good training. everyone came together at once. no one questioned me, we all acted immediately and all were safe.

another observation on the RAM i do not see any ground engineer on a headset to the cockpit which of course would have helped...strange that no one was around the front end.