Engine Catches Fire On Flight 28 | On Board Fire | FULL EPISODE | Mayday: Air Disaster

it's just before six in the morning on august the 22nd 1985. manchester's airport is coming to life the first flights of the day are being prepped for departure british air tours flight 28 is scheduled to take 131 passengers from manchester to the greek island of corfu british air tours is a division of british airways specializing in low-cost flights to vacation destinations [Music] it's a chilly morning a slight breeze is blowing ideal flying weather [Music] most of the passengers on this early morning flight are traveling on vacation lindsay davis is heading to greece with her boyfriend charlie thickson all right let's go we've been going out with each other for a year and um that's one of the reasons we were so excited about it you know it was our first holiday together captain peter terrington is in command [Music] i was a senior training captain on the fleet first officer brian love is being trained by tarrington he was going to perform the takeoff and landing as part of his training all right captain yep uh briefing that brian airfield emergencies you handling the aircraft what are the four things you're going to stop for fire failure configuration warning or you shutting stop okay so you bring the thing to a stop and i'll take over the aircraft need you to do all the emergency our layers of atc okay if you've talked about the possibility of an emergency and talked over what you will do then if it actually happens it's easier to recall those items okay start to starting to oil pressure rising okay go on 45 26 27 28 29 129 plus two on board captain all strapped in doors are closed down automatically thank you arthur the crew is flying a boeing 737 it takes just four minutes for the plane to reach the foot of the runway vtors28 you are clear for takeoff the 737 has 3 000 meters to get to takeoff speed [Music] the engines are pushed to high power i was sitting by the window looking out the window everything was normal the plane was going quite fast 80 knots check we heard a dull foot which sounded as if it came from outside i was really keen to see what was going on outside but couldn't see anything captain terrington needs to act fast [Music] and the immediate reaction was to stop we were quite a few knots below our decision speed so i very quickly closed the throttles and applied reverse thrust we knew we could feel the aircraft slowing down and after i think we've blown a tyre and i [Music] thought the tire might have gone and would cause damage to the undercarriage if we break too strongly probably nothing who wouldn't worry and just assumed that maybe a tire had burst so it wasn't really alarmed at that point my thought at that time was oh okay we're going to get off this plane and probably have to move all the luggage onto another plane and take off soon passengers on the left side of the plane see the real problem i could see orange flames inside the back of the engine and at that point i thought and it's obviously not a burst tire that wouldn't cause that and this is perhaps something a bit more serious let me buy i'm not staying there but at that point i knew that i wanted to get off the plane and and i wasn't happy at all i knew that there was a fire and i just wanted to get away from the fire smoke is seeping into the cabin please sit down my nearest exit was at the back i didn't want to go to the back because the smoke was coming in there so i decided in my mind that i was going to go through the front i said to charlie come on we're going and that's when i started going towards the front of the plane stopping 28 mike we are abandoning takeoff [Music] looks like we've got the fire on number one looks like there's a lot of fire thank you plane on fire runway 24. from where he's sitting captain terrington can't see how bad the fire is he needs advice from the tower do we have to get the passengers off i would do by the starboard side tarrington decides to pull off the runway evacuate to the starboard side please before the flight crew leaves the cockpit they must complete a 15-step checklist parking brake set speed brake lever but time is running out we had an evacuation checklist but it was four pages long and the last item was to get the passengers off engine and apu fire warning switches this didn't cover my problem at all on the 737 there are four cabin doors the two in the back are covered in flames and smoke leaving only two for 137 people then a mechanical problem eliminates one of those was opening one right and it was really bang it was really trying to open it was really hard to open [Music] the back of the cabin is filling with smoke it's making breathing difficult passengers rush forward it just seemed to go on forever before they started evacuating and that's when i thought i'm not gonna get off it's gonna blow up with all of us on it engine and apu fire warning switches right now all 137 people on board are alive but with every second their odds of surviving are decreasing flight 28 is becoming a death trap the jam door on the right side of british air tours flight 28 leaves the crew no choice they must get the passengers out from the side of the plane that's burning then we opened the door the fire service were already around shooting foam up the slide and came into the galley floor we wanted to start to activate the passengers but there's a bit of a bottleneck and nobody was coming forward the aisle is quite narrow at where the galley is and there were sort of an end of pushing forward and i could see this boy that was really sort of pushed against the wall [Music] he couldn't get out so i pulled him by his t-shirt had the yellow t-shirt on and he he sort of tumbled forward and after that everybody sort of just tumbled in behind me and we just directed them down the slide in training they tell you to you know bring people to the door and you tell them to jump desperate to get people off the plane quickly the purser returns to the jam door after several attempts he manages to force it open the only time i turned around was to make sure that charlie was following me are you out there one thing i did see when i looked back was people going to the front towards the front of the plane where the seats are and pushing the seats forward folding them down as they went along so people were trying to rush forward from the back the shoot was open and people were just jumping up straight onto the chute as i got to the bottom i didn't look back at all this was just wanting to get off dozens of passengers have made it off the plane but there are still many more inside it was smoldering and it was black thick black smoke and charlie had said that after you'd gone this black smoke came down he said and everybody was screaming and panicking he said people are going to die in there standby power switch captain peter terrington and his first officer brian love are still aboard the burning airplane and they still haven't completed the steps required to evacuate there was four tons of fuel coming out of that aircraft wing tank okay go back go brian i can see quite a lot of flames completing the checklist would put their lives at risk we did as many items as we could and then we both went out of the flight deck window there are no more passengers of the exits so joanna tough decides to see if anyone else is left in the cabin you could touch it it was so thick and you could take it it was awful [Music] there's a young girl just a bit further down in the cabin but she was really disorientated i mean i suppose we all were already we just didn't have any idea what was going on i just brought her down to the slide she was taken off then the fireman was telling me to come when i was thinking well i'm not finished you know we've not finished yet when tough re-enters the cabin the thick smoke makes it as hard to see as it is to breathe it was really dark and quiet i've never seen anything like it i could see the light from the door anyway by then so i knew where the door was the smoke forces tarp to abandon her search just minutes after pulling off the runway british air tours flight 28 has been consumed by fire we got out of a flight deck which was relatively intact and when we turned around on the ground we saw a complete wreck of an aircraft and it happened in a matter of seconds it was dreadful 54 people are dead another would die in hospital there was nothing wrong really with us we thought nothing physical wrong with us but our lives changed you know just in those in those few hours i couldn't breathe i was virtually out of jail and i couldn't breathe the smoke was coming in and everybody just stood up and ran out it was just a mad planet getting out because when the smoke came you just couldn't see anything at all i couldn't see anybody it takes 125 firefighters more than two hours to put out the fire news of the disaster soon spreads around the world british prime minister margaret thatcher flies to manchester to visit the scene when we get a terrible air crash of this kind everyone is appalled and shocked every single aspect of this accident will be thoroughly investigated it has to be this is the fourth major commercial air disaster of the year in june of 1985 an air india jet exploded over the atlantic ocean 329 people were killed weeks later 137 people died when a delta airlines flight crashed at dallas-fort worth airport and just 10 days before the manchester crash the deadliest single aircraft accident in history japan airlines flight 123 a fully loaded 747 slammed into a mountain killing 520 people british air tours flight 28 adds 55 new victims to the list of casualties 1985 is now the deadliest year in the history of commercial aviation the flying public is getting nervous britain's air accidents investigation branch sends a team to manchester to unravel the events that led to the catastrophe among them stephen moss he'll be inspecting the plane's engines this should not really have happened the aircraft didn't even get airborne it didn't run off the runway and yet still 55 people were killed chris prothero is also on the team his focus is on the fire we were aware from initial reports that the fire had entered the the aircraft very rapidly as the aircraft came to a halt and that that was a focus for me it doesn't take too long for steven moss to figure out where the trouble started he sees damage to the plane that was not caused by fire well the first thing we noticed clearly was the the hole in the underside the wing and right next to it was a gaping hole the side of the engine it seems that one has led to the other to get a plane loaded with passengers off the ground you need to generate massive thrust that power is created when air travels through the front of the engine to a series of compressor fans it's then ignited and the exhaust pushes the plane forward something had clearly gone very wrong with flight 28's left engine [Music] investigators look for clues on the runway and in the cabin hoping to discover why so many people died [Music] entering the cabin for the first time there was a as with all aircraft fires there's an overwhelming and pungent smell burning plastic burnt fuel burning material had dropped down onto seats and so that the aisles were filled up with with the remains of overhead lockers a scene of of devastation the damage in the cabin is revealing it's almost completely charred up high but is relatively intact down low it was clear that they had not been flashover in this particular case a flashover occurs when the gases in an enclosed space become so hot that they ignite incinerating everything around them the way flight 28's cabin is charred tells prothero about the nature of the fire many of the seat squab cushions even things like the emergency evacuation cars which are just plastic laminated cards were pretty much undamaged you could have wiped them off and put them on another aircraft that nobody would have known they'd been in this accident whereas at the upper levels in the fuselage there was a great deal of heat damage and this is not a characteristic of a flashover the fire in the cabin had been severe but should not have been catastrophic this leaves investigators with two questions why did so many people die and what caused the fire the answer to the second question may be outside the plane lying on the runway investigators find a large piece of dome-shaped metal along the plane's path steven moss can see it's from a piece of the engine called a combustor can look like they've been a separation of the can from the front end from the back end the combustion chamber of the 737s jet engines contains nine combustor cans it's where fuel and air are mixed and ignited so each can needs to withstand intense heat mass suspects the fractured can somehow blew apart and destroyed the plane's left engine it had struck an underwing fuel tank access panel and put a sizeable hole in that which directly led to the release of a vast quantity of fuel proving the piece of the combustion can penetrated the wing is easy it fits neatly into the hole in the wing this was clearly if you like the root cause of the accident the engine on the plane is a pratt and whitney jt8d for moss that's of grave concern at the time was probably the most widely used jet engine on commercial air transport in the world and it was obviously pretty urgent that we try and find the the cause of this one in order to prevent other aircraft having the same problem there are tens of thousands of combustor cans in service around the world one of them erupted in manchester stephen moss needs to find out why it failed and fast [Applause] investigators looking into the deadly fire on board british air tours flight 28 study the plane's maintenance log they discover the combustor can that ruptured had previously been repaired we needed to look at that repair and and how effective it was during a routine inspection a year and a half earlier mechanics had found small cracks in some of the combustor cans it was certainly not uncommon to find uh fatigue cracks um in the in in the cans they're operating in a high temperature environment the manuals give various schemes for repairing these cracks investigators find mechanics repaired the cracks according to a procedure laid out in the engine repair manual they welded them closed but the crack on can number nine was unusually long the overhaul manual did not give any limit on the length of crack that could be repaired and it was a longer crack than had been experienced before it was still repaired after the repaired cans were put back in the engine mechanics had no way of knowing the world didn't effectively seal the crack that's because the cans can't be inspected while the engine is on the plane since the repair there were 11 reports of slow acceleration from the engine that exploded in manchester a damaged combustor can could have been a reason for the problem but troubleshooting guides available to mechanics in manchester didn't list that as a potential cause instead pratt and whitney offered other ways to fix the acceleration problem it didn't seem to ring any great alarm bells with them if you like it's they'd seen it before and it had never turned out to be anything serious so mechanics in manchester made minor adjustments to fix the plane's idle speed and kept the plane in operation cockpit voice recordings reveal that the crew of flight 28 was aware there was a problem with slow acceleration slow acceleration on number one engine the day before yesterday i was on the flight yes sir engineer signed off on it but the log entry led captain terrington to believe that the problem had been fixed a comment in the tech log uh from for the flight before the last one that the engine was slowing accelerating it wasn't apparent as a serious problem because the engineers had done some work and the aircraft had been flying the previous day with no no problems the idle speed adjustments didn't fix the real problem the cracked combustor can and it reached the breaking point on flight 28. [Music] stopping 28 mike we're abandoning takeoff evacuate evacuate please stay calm and don't panic if the airline had inspected the cans i think there is no doubt that they would have seen the problem investigators now know the origins of the manchester disaster the welded crack in combustor can number nine gave way as flight 28 sped down the runway the front of the can was ejected from the engine and put a hole in the underside of the left wing that led to a huge fuel leak onto the damaged engine which caused the fire engine fires are not uncommon the body of a 737 is insulated with fire retardant material to protect the cabin investigators still don't understand how a fire outside the plane spread into the cabin as quickly as it did runway which produced this energetic turbulent sort of blow torching type of fire visually anyway trailing behind the aircraft a press photo from the day of the crash leads prothero to a new theory the photographs of the aircraft that appeared in the press showed the left thrust reverser deployed the general impression that one got visually from that photograph was that the thrust reversers had effectively blow torched fire against the side of the fuselage and that if you like was the explanation as to why the fire had penetrated so quickly that photograph and the implications of it actually um therefore loomed quite large stop there are several ways to bring a speeding jetliner to a halt one is with the brakes don't hammer the brakes another is with the engine's thrust reversers thrust reversers redirect the exhaust from the jet engine forwards this helps slow the plane down it looked as though the thrust reversers had simply blown this big fire on the left of the aircraft against us directly onto the side of the aircraft directly onto the rear fuselage that would explain why the fire destroyed the cabin so quickly it now seems possible that captain terrington made the fire worse by trying to slow his plane down but prothero has two good reasons to doubt his theory one is the location where charring from the burning exhaust gas or eflux was found the e-flux impinges on the fuselage further up closer to the roof the crown skins of the of the aircraft so actually the penetration that we had low down did not fit with that and the other reason is by the time the thrust reversers were deployed the left engine had already exploded but to act as a blow torch the engine would have needed considerable exhaust we did calculations to confirm that the residual thrust from that engine would not have had the energy to have this effect that confirmed that the thrust reversers couldn't actually have played any role or significant role anyway in the in the fires severity clearly something other than the thrusters had caused the fire to spread so quickly prothero looks more closely at the data after examining weather reports from the day of the accident he finds the answer the wind was the main factor that determined the severity of the fire in terms of its attack on the outside of the aircraft how rapidly it penetrated the aircraft and it also affected the conditions inside the cabin believing he had blown a tire captain tarrington made a fateful decision stop it 28 mike we're abandoning takeoff well when when we when we heard the third and we we closed the throttles it was my assumption that we were going to turn off the runway clear the runway ask air traffic for an engineer to come out and check the tyres like a highway an airport runway has a series of exits captain tarrington chose one called link but we've delta the fire on number one when we got the additional information of a fire warning the brain was already programmed to carry out the uh the stop the crew had been aware that they had a fire but didn't really appreciate at the time that the nature of the fire the severity of the fire so they had turned off the runway captain terrington turned his plane to the right and brought it to a stop he couldn't have realized that doing so would make the problem far worse there was a cross witness light crosswind from the left side of the aircraft that was carrying the fire that was burning from the fuel that was pulled underneath the left wing it carried that fire aft rearwards and took over and under the rear fuselage in between the wing and the turquoise the wind wrapped the fire around the back of the plane and into the cabin if there'd been no wind at all i think the situation would have been very much more benign [Music] investigators have discovered how the fire started and the conditions that caused it to penetrate the cabin now investigator ed trimble must solve the biggest mystery surrounding the manchester accident here we had an aircraft which had aborted the takeoff for good reason i had taxed it off and stopped in a taxiway in an expeditious manner and yet 55 people had lost their lives so there was a big question as to precisely why that had occurred investigators learned that most of the dead were not found in the worst burned parts of the plane autopsies will point to the real killer on flight 28. [Music] of the 54 people who died in the cabin only six had suffered serious burns all the rest died from smoke inhalation it seems the smoke in the cabin was particularly lethal survivors tell investigators that the smoke was unbearable the smoke was really black and and it was it was it was almost touching you it was it was really weird and they said the effect of that was shocking immediately you took one breath of the smoke you began to feel debilitated and you knew that if you took another breath or two you weren't going to make it at the time of the manchester accident the effects of fire on an airplane had been well studied and understood but the effects of smoke were not to figure out what made the smoke so toxic trimble decides to recreate the fire that burned on flight 28 we were trying to model not only the gases which were produced but also the kind of threat levels which were produced the smoke that filled the plane was from materials burning inside the cabin the foam in the seats the wool in the carpets and the plastic overhead bins all release poisonous fumes those conditions are recreated by burning those same materials trimble discovers the passengers on flight 28 inhaled smoke that contained a deadly blend of poisonous gases including high levels of carbon monoxide and hydrogen cyanide now he desperately needs to find out if there's any way to protect airline passengers from that kind of smoke so it seems to be pretty clear that unless we could protect people's respiratory systems from the assault from such combustion gases there was little that we could do to improve survival chances from aircraft fires over the course of five weeks investigators run dozens of tests experimenting with different filters [Music] they burn nearly a quarter ton of material to create the necessary smoke their dramatic conclusion it may have been possible to save passengers lives there is not the slightest out of my mind that in these situations in an aircraft cabin if it is being assaulted by combustion gases your chances of survival are vastly improved if you have smoker protection british air tours flight 28 had only enough smoke hoods for the crew they were never used trimble's research indicates that smokehoods for passengers could have saved lives there were hoods available both of the filter type and the breathable gas type which can provide a very high level of protection to people in these circumstances many of the passengers on flight 28 would have survived with a few more minutes of breathing time [Music] it was it was in a blink of an eye you know from from the time you know we stopped on the runway you know just within a few minutes it was all over really [Music] a full boeing 737 is designed to be evacuated in less than two minutes so even without additional time more of the passengers on flight 28 should have been able to get off to discover why so many people never made it off the plane investigators turned to an unlikely source for the answer by law airplane manufacturers must prove their planes can be evacuated quickly and safely when the 737 was introduced in the uk boeing demonstrated that 130 people could get off the plane in just 75 seconds all public transport aircraft are certificated to the same criteria and that is that the total complement of passengers must be capable of evacuating from the aircraft using half the exits in the aircraft it's generally one side or the other within a maximum of 90 seconds but 90 seconds after flight 28 came to a stop most of the passengers were still on board [Music] the reason why the evacuation in manchester wasn't achieved in 90 seconds is because the conditions in a real fire evacuation are completely different from the certification conditions the certification evacuation is conducted in clear conditions with no smoke that reduces vision and overwhelms passengers within minutes of coming to a stop flight 28 filled with thick black smoke as soon as the smoke began to spill into the rear cabin and then flow forwards essentially that induced immediate panic in those who were so affected by this moment because the respiration i mean the typical comment was i took one breath of smoke i felt it was not my lungs was solidifying you can imagine under these conditions people have got to get away from the smoke and people did this by basically clambering over the seats and other people in front of them in less than five minutes what should have been a survivable accident turned deadly to prevent future tragedies britain's civil aviation authority decides to learn more about people helen muir is a psychologist and a leading expert on how airplane design can influence survival she's asked to study the behavior of passengers on flight 28 to figure out why so many died what we had to learn to do was to design the aircraft interior so even if we had what we might say was dysfunctional behavior in totality we could accommodate the needs of individuals and their desperate rush to get out muir configures a cabin to duplicate flight 28 and fills it with volunteers then to have them act as though the plane's on fire she offers money to the first ones off and that produced behavior that was quite unbelievable people went over seats they went round past each other all sorts of things and indeed when survivors from the actual manchester accent came and saw the videos they said yeah this is that's how it was the evacuation of flight 28 was slowed by the fact that passengers became jammed in the bulkhead opening separating the main cabin from the galley investigators discover the log jam was created by the design of the boeing 737 the bulkhead opening was 22.5 inches wide just enough for one person to fit through but what they wanted to know was how much wider would they have to make it for people not to get stopped and blocked we were trying to do as much as we could to recreate the situation which had happened at manchester and then to systematically vary the aircraft interior to see what changes would improve the situation for passengers muir's tests showed the narrow bulkhead opening created bottlenecks that flight attendants had to constantly clear increasing the width to 30 inches greatly improved the movement of passengers but we showed through repeat testing that if you changed the minimum gap from 20 to 30 inches you would dramatically improve the speed at which people could get out and you'd reduce the likelihood of people falling and slipping and so on as a result of helen muir's work a recommendation was made to increase the space between the bulkhead walls to 30 inches and introduce strip lighting to help guide passengers to exits even when they are blinded by smoke muir also found a way to improve cabin safety without redesigning the cabin please sit down she conducted research on the behavior of the cabin crew in emergencies and found that passengers get off a plane much faster with a highly assertive crew [Music] it's because we don't want people really making their own decisions we want people to do exactly what the cabin crew or the procedures state and we don't want people hesitating particularly at the door helen muir's research prompted manufacturers to redesign cabins to make them safer but one safety feature remains controversial smokehoods ed trimble believes they should be mandatory on all commercial flights without a doubt without a doubt helen muir is less convinced she studied how smokehoods affect passenger behavior and is worried they would slow down the orderly evacuation of an airplane we know you've only got literally one and a half to two minutes for everybody to get out what we don't want to have is something which is difficult to put on so it slows people getting down the most important lesson of british air tours flight 28 is that seconds matter it's now universally accepted that it takes 90 seconds from the first sign of fire before it becomes unsurvivable the passengers on flight 28 lost valuable time when the starboard side door jammed the investigators determined that the slide mechanism deployed too early preventing the door from opening there was a floor that led the slide container's lid to jam if the door is open too quickly after the manchester accident boeing quickly redesigned the system so that couldn't happen but the recommendations made by the aaib weren't adopted quickly enough to save lives six years later in 1991 a boeing 737 slammed into another plane on the runway in los angeles and caught fire many of the 22 people who died were overcome by smoke before they could get out but in 2005 the crash of an air france jet in toronto showed how much has changed since the manchester accident all 309 people got off that plane in just 90 seconds no one died [Music] some major changes to commercial airliners that's the only way i can resolve it with the death of 55 of my passengers the fact that flying is now safer i can't imagine anybody you know doesn't wish that it hadn't happened you know despite what's been learned and despite maybe the subsequent lies that have been changed you know you'd give anything to a hand you

Channel: Mayday: Air Disaster

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Id: 0556xKxEbWw

Length: 45min 49sec (2749 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 25 2021