Air Detective 14, Fire

This weeks Air Detective is about fire.  A fire in flight is can be catastrophic.  Sometimes what is just as bad as an actual fire in flight is a false fire indication.  This was the case for a
Russian Airline called Aeroflot.  On July 6, 1982, Aeroflot flight 411 took off from Moscow.  The aircraft was a four engine Ilyushin-62.  The Ilyushin-62 has the engines sit directly next to each other, directly next to the fuselage.  With this design, if the pilots have an engine fire in any one engine they had to shut down both engines in the pair in order to avoid further damage to the other engine and the fuselage.  Shortly after take off the pilots got an engine fire indication.  Because of this they shut down both engines on that nacelle.  The aircraft tried to return to the airport, but because half the engines were off, the aircraft was very difficult to control.  Due to lose of control they crashed six miles from the airport.  Afterwards, investigators found that the fire indication was false and caused by a faulty fire warning system in the powerplant.   Soviet officials would not disclose any information about the passangers, but western sources believed about 90 passangers were on board and none survived.

Fire was also a very serious problem on an aircraft crash that was very close to home for me.  I'm talking about United Airlines flight 232.  I moved to Sioux City, Iowa in early 1989.  I was pretty young, but I still remember it.  United Airlines flight 232 was a DC-10 that had the center engine that sits in the vertical stab fail and break apart so violently that it sent shrapnel through three hydraulics systems.  This made it so that the aircrew lost all control of their flight controls.  The crew had to use the remaining engines to guide the aircraft to Sioux City Gateway Airport.  

Above is a picture of the failed fan assembly.

When the aircraft crash landed, it rolled and caught fire.  There were thirty five people that were sitting in the middle of the fuselage directly above the fuel tanks.  They died from smoke inhalation.  In most fires the victims die from smoke inhalation and not from the actual fire.  Many innocent people lost their lives, but many also survived because of the efforts of the crew, emergency personnel, and 285 Air National Guardsmen that were stationed and on duty at the airport.

Belsie, L. (1989) Piecing Together the Reasons for United Flight 232 Crash. Christian Science Monitor Boston, MA, Retrieved from www.lexisnexis.com/hottopics/lnacademic

NTSB. (1990). Aircraft accident report NTSB-AAR-90/06. Retrieved from http://www.airdisaster.com/reports/ntsb/AAR90-06.pdf

Press, A. (1982, Jul 06). Soviet Jetliner en Route to West Africa Crashes In Moscow; 90 Believed; Killed. Boston Globe (Pre-1997 Fulltext) Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.libproxy.db.erau.edu/docview/294171178?accountid=27203