Tow truck on fire
 

Nobody injured, however tow-truck driver in hospital.

And one A340 probably written off due to fire/heat damage to the avionics compartment and flight deck...

Looks expensive!

https://aviation-safety.net/wikibase/wiki.php?id=212015

That will be two units w/o.

Indeed. First news about the plane were only about "minor damage". :hmm:

LH might be quite pleased about that - good insurance payout on an old A340.

That depends. That truck was LH's as well.
BTW: Six people were injured after smoke inhalation.

RIP D-AIFA

Looks like the door strap is of excellent quality.

Airframe aged 17 apparently - no doubt lots of useful/valuable bits that LH maintenance will be happy to add to their spares pool.

I was going to suggest TurtleWax , until I saw picture at post #8.
Does anyone know how long it took for the fire brigade, that looks a tad more then 90 sec burn time.
I am guessing 5 min from start to extinguished ?
Sad to see such a nice AC go, but the MoneyMen loves it. no doubt.

Just a practical thought. Would this count as a hull-loss? Pretty rotten to get a hull-loss in the statistics because of this.
And in that direction, if it's not a hull-loss in that sense, does anyone know the criteria? I'd say it's not the same thing (in the statistics for safe airline) to have an aircraft destroyed in an accident during operation or destroyed by something like this incident, or even damaged beyond repair at night by vandals.

Depends on whose statistic?

It's usually important to insurance carriers.

and safety studies usually set things like this aside that don't threaten the users

Had an O2 fire on an Omani Air Force BAC 1-11 in around 1980,burnt out around the same area as this.A working party was despatched from Hurn & the wings & tail removed.The whole lot was shipped back to Bournemouth & re-inserted on the production line for a new front end to be built on.
Can't see the same happening here.

I believe that under ICAO Annex 13 it will count as an "aviation accident" IF any crew (at least, or crew and pax) were on board for the flight (sounds like this may not be the case), if so, and it's written off, then it's a hull loss. Otherwise it would just be a total loss for insurance purposes.

Hull losses are also a financial decision rather than an extent-of-damage indicator - airlines can (and do...) game the stats, if they want to, by paying to repair aircraft that are actually uneconomical to repair. Equally, the odds of a write off depend on how old the airframe is, be pretty rotten to get a hull loss purely because your new a/c went tech and you had to take the much older spare, wouldn't it?

There are many other problems with "hull loss" as a classification. How do you classify crashes on test flights for instance? How about crashes when showing off (badly) at airshows? How do you handle Malaysian, for instance? Two 777 hull losses, but MH17 is being excluded from some safety stats (I believe) because it was shot down, a terrorist act, not an accident (how, by what, or by whom is disputed, by one country at least), however MH370 is included, despite the fact that it also has a disputed cause and might have been a terrorist act, or a fire, or <insert favourite conspiracy theory here>.

Hull losses are just not that much use for "safe airline" stats, there are generally so few of them that you can decide what you want to conclude, collect your stats, analyse each incident and pretty much pick an exclusion criteria that is "fair" and will deliver the conclusion you wanted.

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Safety stats routinely exclude "acts of war" - which MH17 clearly was (granted there is still some debate on the who, there is no question about the 'what'). Similarly, hijacking are routinely excluded. MH 370 is included simply because a cause hasn't been established - if and when a cause is established then it might be excluded (depending of course on what the cause turn out to be).

Flight test accidents are a bit different - in-flight shutdown rate definitions specifically exclude shutdowns done for testing or flight training purposes, but actual crashes during flight test are never intentional. I would think that if something crashed while operating on an experimental ticket would be excluded (by definition, operating on an experimental ticket means a non-certified configuration) but I don't really know.

MH17 does not have a disputed cause. MH17 was willful murder in the 1st degree, supported and covered up by the Russian Government, followed by blatant disrespect for the remains of the flight crew and passengers. Similar to KAL007.

In the case of MH370, it is fair to have all kinds of theories because that's what they are: theories. Very little actual evidence exists.

Thats a valiant effort, any idea what sort of exploded? I guess it was something in the tug and not from the aircraft. They were lucky there wasn't a bigger explosion. Thinking oxygen tanks, that could have been interesting.