Originally Posted by
Unimatrix One
I thought airliners are designed to be evacuated in 90 seconds with half the exits inoperative?
You're comparing two different things here. It's 90 seconds from evacuation order to evacuation completion.
With half the slides. In perfect weather conditions, in daylight, on a plane that has not just hit another plane and caught on fire and filled the cabin with smoke.
The 90 second standard is meant to insure you have enough correctly placed exits to allow rapid egress from the aircraft. It isn't meant to indicate how long an evacuation in real world conditions might take.
Is it possible that the main reason all the JAL pax survived is that the fire was slow to spread?
Given the pictures showing the plane mostly intact and the cabin not yet on fire post-evacuation, it may be that there was enough time that even a tremendously sloppy evacuation would have been successful, and the passengers owe more to Airbus engineers / strength of carbon fiber hulls than anything.
Originally Posted by
Kbboy
So, according to his details, they hit the other plane while in the air and touched down afterward. While many reporters that were commentating on the CCTV video seem to suggest that the plane landed first and hit the other plane after 3-4 seconds. The initial pictures of the wreck suggest the nose of the A350 was damaged and the nose landing gear collapsed but the main gear seems OK. So, it could be that the pilots of the incoming A350 saw the Dash 8 at the last moment and tried to avoid it but the nose (and front underneath of the fuselage) of the Airbus hit the tail of the Dash 8 along with the nose landing gear and the rest of the plane would have bumped and escaped crushing the Dash 8. It then landed with the nose gear collapsed and scraped along the runway which caused the fire and also the delay in evacuation as pilots may have put the plane to take-off power while trying to avoid the crash.
There's Patreon video linked up thread from a pilot who goes through some pretty good information. (edit: post link:
https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/35871363-post202.html) Key takeaways, it's extremely difficult to see a smaller plane on a lit runway at night, and the impact points on the A350 (nose cone and dents on the front sides of both engines) are consistent with the A350 landing "on top" of the Dash8 with the Dash8 oriented down the runway for takeoff, such that the A350 nose hit the tail of the Dash8 and the engines hit the wings (which would have been full of fuel and created the fireball at impact.)
Originally Posted by
lamphs
Again judging from the video and pics, the aircraft burned quite quickly (I should not make any assumption re: rate of burn). The ARFFs likely could not have known, immediately, that all were evacuated, and would have responded as assuming there were saves to be made. At what point did the ARFFs know all were evacuated and decide to standdown and let it burn?
There are post-evacuation photos that show the cabin intact and not itself on fire. It seems there would have been enough time to clear the cabin (whether the FAs due that before exiting or a fire crew goes in, I have no idea.)
Once you know the cabin is clear, and the aircraft is obviously a loss, no reason to risk crew fighting the fire, just let it burn out.