I appreciate the Intentional slowdown of ATC when sharing channels & noticed that as the situation became more severe, everyone up'ed their communication game under pressure.
Someday, everyone will standardize the "amount of fuel on board".........tons, pounds, gallons, minutes, etc..... Of course, would need different reporting amounts for different category of aircraft, but that should be doable. Very professional crew.
Minutes would make the most sense, but then every different plane would have a different fuel amount based on effiency so it can't really accurately measure how much fuel there is. Whereas gallons/pounds etc. would give the ATC an idea of what size of an area would be effected by a fuel dump.
@@gregoryborton6598 well for ARRF’s purposes they need quantity in case of a fire, versus ATC needs time/range so they can maneuver the emergency aircraft around (obviously since they were an immediate return they had sufficient fuel for their trip to Luxembourg so pretty much any diversion is fine (hell they could in theory divert to Heathrow and still have plenty of fuel - obviously a bad idea when possibly on fire)
B747 Fire wheel well sys warning :Checklist Introdution. "There are some situations where the crew must always land at the nearest Available Airport. These situations include, but are not limted to, conditions where: - The non-normal checklist has the words "Plan to land at the nearest Available Airport" The Wheel Well fire checklist includes this line. Also in the Checklist Introduction "It must be stressed that for persistent smoke or a fire that cannot be positively confirmed to be completely extinguished, the earliest possible descent, landing and evacuation must be done" I am fully aware that, as PIC or PF u can vary checklists if required, however Boeing have gone to pains to stress an immediate landing, and I think I'd have serious questions for any crew that chose to ignore this one. Keep calm & Fly safe 😉
Didn't you pile up your sofa a few years ago? That on top of a hard landing in your Lazy Boy. You have lost all cred Flyboy.....stick to your kites. You do well with kites.
The key phrase is if the fire has been confirmed out. Since there is no way of checking if the fire is out then you do what the NNC says and land at nearest suitable. To jettison those 70T of fuel will take >45 minutes. That’s fine you don’t want to be orbiting and jettisoning fuel when the overweight landing is clearly a more sensible option.
A point of clarification. They reported fuel on board as weight in Tonnes, not Tons. The "Tonne" is a metric measure and is standardized, whereas the "Ton" is not. In aviation, when FOB is given in terms of weight, 1 tonne means 1,000 kgs, not 2,000 lbs (the US ton; the UK ton is 2,240 lbs). So, 124 tonnes is equivalent to approx. 273 thousand pounds. For a 747-800, that's around 11 hours flight time.
No self-respecting American would ever spell "ton" as "tonne" (nor "color" as "colour" nor "meter" as "metre" etc). Now admittedly "ton" is ambiguous in the USA. In most contexts it's safe to assume short ton (2k lbs), however sometimes it does mean metric ton (1 Mg), and only rarely does it mean the British long ton (I don't even know what a long ton is offhand). In any case, for the purposes here, a short ton and metric ton differ by only about 10%, which is well within the margin that ATC/ARFF care about.
Holding and jettisoning with the gear down following a possible gear fire isn’t the wiser of things and Boeing don’t seem to advocate this. Getting a second fire warning seemed odd as well, so maybe just a false warning / detection loop fault. Obviously better to be safe than sorry and the overweight landing is justified in these circumstances.
Flame me if you want (pun not intended), but if you asked me (hi, I am nobody) a fire warning would be always considere a real fire even if chances are that it was a false alarm, and should always be followed by the landing the plane as quickly as it can be done safely. Delay vectors to run checklists, going somewhere to dump fuel, etc is an unnecessary delay and distraction which can very well mean the difference a fatal accident and a successful landing, and history has proven over and over. Do as many checklists as you can and dump as much fuel as you can as you are quickly heading to the closest airport, but don't increase the time to land in 1 minute by doing that.
@@pauldunn5978 ... Well, they did request to climb and be vectored out for fuel dumping. That is not compatible with landing ASAP. It was only when the fire warring re-appeared that thy decided to screw the fuel damp and land overweight. Imagine if the fire was real or if the reason why the fire alarm stopped the first time was a failure of the alarm (maybe induced by the fire itself).
If they thought the fire was out, but might have damaged the gear, it is reasonable to not want to land heavy. All choices are bad, but the fuel dump is reasonable, if you think the fire is out.
One mayday declaration on 30.10.2022, one serious landing incident on 15.04.2023, and another major one on 15.05.2023, and a recent landing gear issue on 20 May 2023. (Not mentioning their circus act some years ago with the wing wave).
I always wonder why they don't shorten the callsign in an emergency. 3 Xray would identify the aircraft fine. It's a 748; everyone knows it's heavy and what difference does it make who the airline is? What are the chances there'd be two emergency aircraft in LAX airspace with 3X as the last two digits of tail number?
An airplane engine requires oxygen to burn fuel. There really no altitude that will snuff out a fire. You have 2 options. Get yourself to an airport, or bend over and kiss your a$$ goodbye.
That's what I thought as well. But going to higher altitudes does also come with a higher risk and longer time required to make an emergency landing. An even if you extinguish it, it does not mean that I may just start over once you go lower altitudes as well.
Not really. Even unadapted humans can breathe just fine at 10,000 feet, and adapted humans can breathe just fine up to like 15+ 000 feet. It really doesn't take a lot of oxygen to sustain even an ember of a flame, which is much smaller than a human brain, and just one ember would be enough to rekindle the fire when they descend again. Overall, climbing only makes the situation worse (further from landing), not better.
Not compared to damaging an >$100m aircraft. 70T of Jet-A costs around $80,000 total, which in airplane terms is small. Hell, I imagine the brake repairs alone, exceed that if they melt the brakes.
So what could have caused the warnings - especially twice - if there was no fire? Electric circuit malfunction? A particular system confusing the fire warning circuit? A power surge or spark? Something overheating? Those would be all my guesses!
Any of those things are relatively common sources of false indications yes. I would be inclined to believe some short circuit or other physical damage to some electronic part somewhere, something easily fixed most likely
The crew normally do a fire detection test as part of preflight duties, don't go crazy thinking about the large tires, Brakes are not used during takeoff and that error would be evident if it happened. There are hot fluids in reservoirs in the wheel well and metal / rubber lines that reside in the wheel well cavity. There is also hot bleed air ducting in the wings adjacent to the well wells and very high current from electric components like pumps. Wheel well fire does not automatically mean wheel fire. Rubber and tire fires can be corrected by leaving the gear extended but if the nature of the fire is electrical, Engine bleed air, or fluids, among other things, you may have to deactivate pumps, valves, and circuits to stop a wheel well fire.
24R/6L is 8,926 feet; 24L/6R is 10,285 feet; 25R/7L is 12,091 feet; and 25L/7R is 11,095 feet. All are 150 feet wide except 25L/7R, which is 200 feet wide.
That runway choice (the second time) had them approach and land over water, staying clear of densely populated areas to the East of the airport, also. This crew had seemingly made this flight many times before and made the very best of landing runway choices.
Usually giving a fire more airflow works the other way, though keeping something potentially hot/burning away from aircraft structure and systems (a lot of stuff runs through or near the wheel wells) would have advantages.
@Pissedoff Cow58 - for the 777 the wheel well fire NNC says to put the gear down then LANSA. You’ve got no idea if it’s an actual fire or it, most like is because of system design. Brake Temp NNC is totally different.
It is possible that the tower was ok with 120 as well and didn't want to unnecessarily add more workload to the pilots that were dealing with a daring emergency.
They were also given a 250 heading, to which they read back 250 but flew 205. Again the tower didnt bother them. The crew are task saturated, as long as ATC see's its safe, they won't bother correcting them.
“Say intentions”, “well given we are European, we intend to have a cigarette and drink some espresso in a pretentious manner prior to our return?”, all kidding aside very professional flying, the cost of dumping 70 tons of jet-a, glad it’s not my credit card!
I don’t really know much about emergency procedures but it sounds weird to me that fuel dumping is a thing with an indication of fire onboard. I mean spraying fuel around a plane that might be on fire doesn’t seem ideal.
Fuel is normally dumped through valves in the wings near the tips, so is as far from the fuselage as possible. There is a minimal risk of the fuel catching fire, and better to land within the weight limits than land heavy with 100+ tons of fuel onboard
I just don't get asking for fuel onboard when the controller knows that the pilot wants to dump fuel. The CFR services want to know how much fuel will be onboard when it lands. Too many controllers seem to ask fuel & souls as rote questions. Some are appropriate and at an appropriate time, others are not.
It’s up to the pilot up basically tell the ATCO to STANDBY. A very powerful instruction in aviation , and especially in FAA land where ATCOs appear to love the sound of their own voices. 😳
So, then you're all for just dumping 100 tons of fuel anywhere and don't figure the controllers need to know the amount of fuel so they can safely allow dumping that much fuel...got it...
It is an appropriate question, this way when rolling the trucks they are prepared for a possible fire and how much fluid/foam is required incase of fire, and easier to do a head count when you know how many people were on board.
In most emergency landings the people and fuel onboard are completely irrelevant, asking every time seems like a waste of everybody's time, especially when you ask for their fuel level moments before they're planning to dump most of it.
Actualy no both are 100% relevant. ATC wants to know the fuel for two reasons. The first is so they know how long the plane has in the air, the second is for the firefighters. who may have to deal with all that fuel on fire. The souls on board is also extremely relevant. If you don't know how many people are on board than someone might get left unknowingly behind in a burning plane or rescue crew could be searching an empty plane and get killed.
Basically means that the aircraft is big and literally heavy. Thus, the term "heavy" is included by heavy-class aircraft in radio transmissions around airports during take-off and landing, incorporated into the call sign, to warn other aircraft that they should leave additional separation to avoid this wake turbulence :)
i don't know what's with these professional pilots. you've got a fire in your wheel well. that means, you land your plane fast. you don't go flying in circles, and attempt to maintain altitude, for the sake of procedure. it's a serious wtf as far as common-sense goes. the fuel is stored in the body and wings of the plane. you can't have a fire on board!
@@philwhipple4557 They returned immediately only because the fire indication came back on. They made an overweight landing, risking damaging the airplane. Dumping fuel out of the wing tips sure the hell isn't going to contribute to a fire in the wheel well. You're not the brightest bulb in the pack. I'm definitely not a millennial. Only a moron would make dumb assumptions.
@@philwhipple4557 he didn't dump it because the fire warning became active again... making it more of an emergency to land fast, than to land with a lighter load
Radio comms skill level unlocked: Professional. This is how you talk on the radio, especially in an emergency. Speaking slowly, clearly, using standard procedures, and asking for clarification when required. Panicking and yelling into the mic, speaking too quickly, etc. only makes things worse. Also, the read back (repeating a ATC direction back to ATC to verify that you heard it correctly), it seems time consuming, but especially in emergencies…these things are important. Examples include radio frequency changes. Note how the pilot would spell out numbers slowly. He also uses his entire callsign. When he changes to the tower, he indicates that he is an emergency (declares MAYDAY on the new frequency), let’s the tower know right out the gate that he has the localizer, and reads the runway assignment back to the tower (another cross-check). Yes, the standard procedure is to give amount of fuel remaining *in minutes* (ATC has no idea what your fuel rate is, but knowing how much “burn time” you have does help them). Otherwise, this is perfect radiotelephone procedure.
Yes, I've noticed some ATC want the fuel in POUNDS, some in MINUTES and this one was happy with TONS I don't like that because there is a 10% difference between short and long tons. 124 tons @2240 lbs per long ton is 277,760 lbs. Even if using short tons that is 248,000 lbs. Cargolux is a Luxembourg (ie European) airline so I suspect they use long tons or metric tonnes (2205 lbs per tonne)
Might just be a sensor fault in the wheel well. Thing is: the pilots didn't know that. For all they knew, they could have been in for an overweight landing with a fire damaged landing gear. Verry professionally handled.
If you don't do a too-hard touchdown, nothing, except for an overweight landing inspection which can be as easy as taking the landing parameters from some recorder and confirm that it didn't exceed overweight landing limits. Certification standards requires that an airplane must be able to safely land and stop at maximum take-off weight, except that the vertical speed limit is reduced compared with the requirement for a landing at maximum landing weight. It is still adequate for a normal and even somewhat hard landing, though. Regarding the brakes temperature, yes, you can suffer brakes overtempt and, in extreme cases, the fuse plugs may melt and the tires may deflate after you stop. But the braking performance is designed for the high-speed rejected take-off case, which is more limiting because you already consumed most of the runway by when you reject the take off and have to brake very strongly in a short distance. LAX 07L is more than 12000 ft long, so it would be possible to stop the plane with less than full braking (using aerodynamic drag and engine reversers to assist), although I would not blame if they wanted to stop the plane as quickly as possible. In that case the overtemp situation can occur. Runway damage is unlikely. Unless you touch down quite hard, the ground loads during touch down (when the lift of the wings are already cancelling the weight of the plane) are typically less than the ground loads with the airplane stopped or moving at slow speed, where the landing gear has to bear the full weight of the plane.
Structural damage, skin wrinkling, hydraulic line damage and so on. An overweight inspection needs to be performed, base on what’s found on the surface phase 1 inspection a further detailed inspection may be performed
There is structural risk (and brake temp risk), and a special inspection is required, but the large majority of such landings and inspections reveal no damage, generally.
Glad this all worked out but reminds me a lot of Swiss air 111 and Nationair. If the fire was bad and it was just the detection equipment faulty or it got worse while out dumping, we'd be looking at an episode of Air crash investigations. Obviously the crew had all the information but i feel like an overweight landing would have been prudent rather than a fuel dump. Hope Kelsey or Juan can shed some light when a report comes out?
1) possible fire. dont fuck with fires, traffic can wait as long as needed to fight fires. 2) it's 2 am, there isn't even traffic anyways. but even if there was, fires take precedence a million times out of a million over traffic.
I don't think that it was a good idea to attempt to dump fuel when their was any risk of fire. Fire sensors are not perfect i would not want to risk that their was a spark smoldering somewhere.
In a retractable landing gear you generally do tap the brakes (I don’t know if on this model the brakes auto deploy) since the wheels are spinning at takeoff speed and you don’t want that going up into the wells spinning sufficiently fast for a takeoff). But as Chris R points out there are other causes, one of the most serious and common is a blown tire, which are under sufficient pressure to catch fire when they burst; and as anyone who has watched the opening sequence to the Simpsons knows, tires can burn for a long time. :)
The winds were shifted and they were already in the process of reversing the airport, as indicated by the reverse landing on the opposite side of the field. By the time the Cargolux needed to return, the winds dictated the safer landing was into the 070 at 4 winds, which is pretty much nose on, versus the tail wind 25L/R would have had. As an extra note, people/buildings/infrastructure is not underneath the airplane during approach, which is good in case of items dropping off the aircraft or the aircraft not making it. Fire in the wheels means things could fall off or compromise the airframe, it's why Boeing says "Get down, now" for that event.
