Southwest 737 blows tyre, catches fire

[Seth Jaworski]

HOUSTON (KTRK) -- A Southwest Airlines plane landed with flames spouting underneath the aircraft after one of its rear tires caught on fire.

Those flames started under the aircraft, and got larger in the moments after the plane came to a stop Tuesday evening at Hobby Airport.

Minutes later, fire crews arrived to put out the fire, and the passengers jumped down an emergency slide evacuating the plane one at a time. The passengers stood in a grassy median until they were taken back to the terminal.

Video here:
http://edition.cnn.com/video/#/video/us/2009/05/12/vo.tx.plane.fire.ktrk

[Gerard M]

Aren't you meant to leave your belongings on the plane when evacuating to prevent such things as the guy losing his papers on the slide and then chasing after them?

[NickN]

Just saw the footage on the news, very spectacular landing and by the looks of things well handled by the crew.

[Tim Bowrey]

guy losing his papers on the slide and then chasing after them?

Hahaha its funny watching him trying to pick up all his pappers flying away after 0:53:D

[Peter JB]

Try this link - shows everything (click on Watch Video).

http://abclocal.go.com/ktrk/index

[Gareth Forwood]

I noticed that in the 2nd vid, the fire crews didn't get there until about 3 minutes after landing. Is this a normal and acceptable response time?

I think Ten News also said the airport was forewarned that something was wrong with the landing gear and had notified emergency crews, which makes me question the long response time somewhat - having said that, Ten could be completely wrong...

[Nigel C]

I understand that the stations at Sydney were placed at locations where it would take them no more than 3 minutes to reach any part of the airport in an emergency.

So, in answer to your question, then yes I believe this is an acceptable response time.

[Philip Argy]

Doing a rough back of the envelope calculation, YSSY is about 4km x 3 km which Mr Pythagoras tells me gives a diagonal of about 5 km. If you accept that the firestation is not too far from the centre of the diagonal the fire tender would have to travel perhaps up to 3 km to get to an incident. To be able to do that inside 180 seconds it would need to achieve an average speed of better than 60 kmh. Allowing for reaction time and acceleration that would seem to be well within the capability of the tenders at YSSY.

Obviously based on a whole lot of mostly unstated assumptions, but it gives a seat of the pants comfort level.

I could also take comfort from the facts given at:
http://www.airsidetarmactours.com/facts.html



The Rescue Fire Fighting Service (RFFS) is on call 24 hours per day and is required by international regulations to be capable of reaching an emergency anywhere on the airfield within 3 minutes. The fire tenders at Sydney Airport are constant 6WD and weigh 34 tonnes when full. Each vehicle carries 10,200 litres of water and 1,300 litres of foam mixture. When mixed, this produces around 102,000 litres of fire retardant foam, which can be applied in around 2.5 minutes. Each vehicle was purchased at a cost of around $1.2 million ...



Compare that to what we had only 60 years ago:
http://www.airwaysmuseum.com/ARFF%20SY%2047-48.htm

And we had a 738 with a blown tyre at YSSY only a couple of years ago:
https://www.pprune.org/archive/index.php/t-283563.html