Asiana crash

[Dumb Pilot]

Sad as to how such a tragic event goes virtually unnoticed by the media in the west, since the only loss of life was the two slaves in the front it isn't news worthy I guess. The bad thing is that the conversation about the dangers of transporting lithium batteries is long overdue.

http://www.avherald.com/h?article=44062b99&opt=512

 

[Flyer1015]

Sad as to how such a tragic event goes virtually unnoticed by the media in the west, since the only loss of life was the two slaves in the front it isn't news worthy I guess. The bad thing is that the conversation about the dangers of transporting lithium batteries is long overdue.

http://www.avherald.com/h?article=44062b99&opt=512

Scared me for a sec, I thought another one had gone down. This was the crash last year, right after the UPS one went down.

The timeline:

South Korea's ARAIB have released their preliminary report stating the first officer declared emergency about 50 minutes after takeoff from Seoul and 3 minutes after reporting on Shanghai frequency reporting a fire and requested to descend to 10,000 feet, 40 seconds later the first officer requested to divert to Jeju and reported they had an aft cargo fire. Subsequent communication between Incheon (Seoul) Radar and OZ-991 was done with the help of Korean Air flight KE-886, who relayed communication between radar and OZ-991. 12 minutes after declaring emergency the captain of OZ-991 reported they had lost rudder control, a minute later the captain stated they needed to open the hatch. 15 minutes after declaring emergency OZ-991 reported all flight controls were not working, the first officer added they had severe vibrations on the aircraft and needed to attempt an emergency ditching. 21 minutes after declaring emergency the first officer stated altitude control was not possible due to severe vibrations, "going to dtich ... ah" - and communication was lost.

The industry needs an overhaul. How many is this now? This Asiana, the UPS in Dubai, Swiss Air 111 Nova Scotia. All of them had a very similar timeline... from start of reporting smoke/fire problem to complete loss of control in 15-18 minutes, and crashed in the 21-28 minute interval.

There needs to be some sort of published guidelines that makes it clear that if you are on fire, especially if a lithium/battery type fire is suspected, you have 12 minutes to get on the ground, be it a runway, a road, or water ditching.

I recall a Compass flight where a FA set the toilet on fire, and the CA made it from the FL350 or so to the ground in 8 minutes and some change. Now obviously a toilet fire is different, because a FA can confirm it and fight it, maybe even extinguish it, but it's the mentality of getting down both quickly and safely that matters.

I don't mean to judge these guys, it sounds like they fought all the way through the last second, and did everything they thought was best to have a safe outcome. The industry needs to wakeup on inflight fires, especially considering that lithium battery threat. A lithium fire gives you 12-14 minutes tops to get the aircraft on terra firma, we've seen that now from the Asiana and UPS crashes.

 

[Dumb Pilot]

The industry doesn't want to learn from these crashes either, starting with the crash of the 747 combi operated by South African, these converted former passenger planes have no fire suppression at all, the theory is that by closing all the vents there is no sufficient air to feed the fire, time and time again this has proven to be wrong, the time needs to be increased by installing halon fire suppression on ALL cargo holds and make the cockpit a more isolated environment and not share the same air as the cargo holds, one thing that has doomed this flights has been the fact that as the cockpit fills with smoke, that limits the job that the pilots can do, in the UPS crash for example, they lost control of the A/C not because they couldn't breath, nor they were getting burned, they couldn't see their instruments because the cockpit was filled with smoke, but again, since there wasn't significant loss of life, there will be no change on the industry, on the mean time all we can do as pilots when we see dangerous goods on the manifest is say a prair.

 

[imacdog]

The conversation has happened before, but until a whale goes down in a city, nothing will change.

 

[brokeflyer]

you have any idea how expensive it would be to fix that problem? management would only get 80 million bonus instead 81.5 million....