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Swiss Air 111 - Ten years ago today

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brokedash

Member of the DX A-Team
Joined
Nov 7, 2007
Posts
872
Sad, just as any aviation accident. Can't believe its been 10 years though...

I still do not know why they didn't go to BOS.

P1.
 
Sad, just as any aviation accident. Can't believe its been 10 years though...

I still do not know why they didn't go to BOS.

P1.

Why don't you educate yourself before you pontificate on what they should have done.

They hit the water 21 minutes after detecting an "unusual odor".
 
They hit the water 21 minutes after detecting an "unusual odor".[/quote]
I had electrical smoke smell in the cockpit and cabin in a B757 after this incident. I realized our checklist wouldn't prevent the same thing happening to us so went over how the B727 checklist with the flight engineer and the two pilot simplified B757 checklist were different. I shut off the utility busses as an immediate action, declared an emergency and returned for landing. The electrical smoke was coming from a galley oven which is on the utility bus. After my report two weeks later we changed the checklist. This was about a year after the Swissair 111 crash off Halifax.
 
Why didn't they make an emergency descent. They actually circled back from the airport to dump fuel and lose altitude.
 
Folks, this accident (like any) was very unfortunate. We can all quarterback and play the hindsight game. At their first hint of cockpit smoke, they actually thought diverting to BOS (almost 250nm away at the time) was a good idea. Only when the Moncton controller said Halifax is much closer did they accept it. Next, fuel dumping. True, one would think to just screw it and just LAND. In fact, look at the CVT. The FO did ask the CA if he just wants to forget the fuel dumping procedure and just land. CA said no, lets dump fuel. So they did.

BUT all that having been said, this is the closer:

The TSB concluded that even if the crew had been aware of the nature of the problem, the rate at which the fire spread would have precluded a safe landing at Halifax even if an approach had begun as soon as the "pan-pan" was declared.

So, it really seems they were SOL even if they made a mad dash to Halifax the second they first saw the cockpit smoke.

But lessons to be learned. Any cockpit smoke, inflight smoke, especially from an unknown source, get your as$ on the ground as quickly as possible. You could potentially be talking about minutes that you have before the airplane is un-flyable.
 

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