the later photos, the inside of that plane is not on fire. there s no flame, you know, shooting out of the you know, in some of the later photos, you see an orange glow i think right around the wing area. but that s probably later. if we re able to evacuate this plane like they say they can evacuate this plane within two or three minutes, i think they were able to get most of the people off that plane, if not all of them. and if the reports of two fatalities, i can t confirm that, i know they are going to have a press conference at 3:00. and i don t want to step on the toes of what they re doing down there. but if that was the case, then everybody got off of this plane. and pretty much the fire itself, we can suppress it to a certain point. we can cool it down until it goes out and smother it. but it s still going to burn that plane down burn the plane a little bit. like it is now. so that s going to be something common that will happen.
and then they lost their life or seriously injured in the post crash fire. the aftermath. so when a plane goes in, oftentimes a fire ball does not come instantly. the plane hits the runway or the apron before the runway. it settles in. and it is the friction that started a fire somewhere with the fuel as the fuel begins to mist or maybe a fuel tank is broken open. then the fire builds. and when it gets hot enough, they call it flashing over. and then it just becomes an inferno. eventually as you see from the pictures on the screen, and the pictures of the fuselage, eventually this was a ferocious, ferocious fire. but there was time, evidently, since we ve seen there were survivors who were able to, we saw twitter pictures of people
walk away from the aircraft. so people were able to get out so this is been all this research. noticing a big time gap, not a big time gap but moments, where it was possible that people could escape. so there was a huge effort to, a, make the fire, make the materials more fire retardant. the cloth on the walls of the aircraft. that he would slow down delay, the time the fire flashes over. and the other thing was to lessen the impact. the seats were made much stronger. particularly the anchors under the seats that hole they will to the floor of the aircraft. this was not easy for airlines to stomach. it meant adding to the weight of the aircraft. and weight means everything. it makes you use more fuel. makes flying more expensive. but the airlines did it. and the seats, the anchors of
the wings are intact. the tail and the engines came off and that s to be expected. you will have a post crash fire. that s quite common. this is a survivable accident and that could very well be because the pilot was working very hard to get it done. it sounds like you re looking at the same images that we re looking at here. as we look at this fuselage that is, you know, obviously pretty bad shape here. burned out. up until about 15 minutes ago, firefighters were dousing with it the white flame retardant. the extent of the fire. what does that tell but the plane? well, quite frankly, this is a common fire pattern for a low impact type of accident. you will get a fuel leak. the fire will go up the side of the airplane and burn down the top where the aluminum tends to be the thinnest. not necessarily a catastrophic fire. we re also getting our first accounts of witnesses who were in the area. a reporter there says an unnamed
i want to bring in jeff near the san francisco international airport. i understand you and your wife, you heard the crash and then you saw the aftermath. is that right? yes, we did. what did you hear and then what did you see? initially i heard a boom. i heard a boom and i looked out and it was just dust for two to three minutes. and then on the right side of the airplane, maybe about a minute or so later. we started seeing the passengers depart. maybe 30 to 40 seconds later. the air on the right side, the emergency chutes deployed and then we started seeing passengers come out on that side. maybe within three to five minutes, the air maybe had caught fire on the front. after that, everybody was just