ambient air in. a flight attendant empties a fire extinguisher trying to control the smoke, but they can t find the source of the fire. there was no open flame. that was behind the walls in an inaccessible areas. a fire behind the wall is the worst-case scenario. it s almost impossible to put out or contain. a disaster is in progress. the smoke was clearing and then i suddenly lost all of my electrical power. that s when the crew realized they had a life threatening event on their hands. they needed a crew on the ground as soon as they could get there. mayday. we re going down. moments later dense smoke begins to come through the cabin walls. you have time to give me the nature of the emergency? we have a fire in the wash filling up with smoke right now. filled the cabin very quickly.
smoke in the cabin. the smoke moves into the flight deck. and the airplane finally levels off and begins to turn and the pilot is now a little bit more intense in his dialogue. with no electrical systems, the pilots struggle to maintain control of the situation. as they try to make their way back towards miami, fire begins to come out through the cabin floor. he is more intent. now my heart rate is up. i said proceed directly to the airport. he said, i need vectors. in my mind, that s no good. he s got so much smoke he can t see his instrumentation. so i start bringing him back around. the turn was real slow coming back to the airport, but still a lot of air speed. about 9,500 feet is where he says, i need the nearest air strip. he s maybe two or three miles closer to dade collier, but at
the pilot advised that they needed to dump fuel. at that point they were approximately 16,000 feet. the fuel dump complicated the situation. greatly. it s a good decision to get the airplane as light as you can. it s easier on the airplane. but delaying the landing could put the flight in more danger. the passengers have been told they are being diverted, but there is no smoke in the cabin, and they have no idea that inside the cockpit, something is going horribly wrong. following the smoke checklist, the pilot shut off power to the cabin. if there is an electrical fire this could cut power to the source. but the smoke only gets thicker. then the autopilot fails. flying the plane by hand in the dark, the pilots put on their oxygen masks. at this point they knew they had a very serious situation and they needed to get on the ground as rapidly as possible. as soon as they were over the
i would say 10 to 15 minutes. it was horrible. it was so thick you couldn t see your hand in front of you. you could feel your lungs and your throat burning from the sensation of breathing in. i suggested that we put our heads lower. in firefighting school, we learned that the lower you got, that you could be below the smoke. with low visibility and few remaining control or navigation system, the capital is flying almost blind. we have no instruments. all we have is in the light right now. i would have been right up close like this with my eyeball maybe three, four inches from the window on the left side. at this point you know you got something serious when you got, a thing like a christmas tree. i didn t think about what was burning or happening, jut that something serious had happened. we re going to need fire trucks. the trucks are standing by.
near noef nova scotia just minutes after the crew reports mo smoke in the cockpit. in a search to find out has went wrong, investigators discover that a common aircraft insulation material is a fire hazard. thousands are planes are fitted with new insulation. and florida amount re-evaluated. but they still don t know how the fire started, and if other aircraft are at risk. when we started to look for potential ignition sources the very first thing that comes to mind is aircraft wiring. the investigators scour more than 150 miles of wiring for signs of an electrical malfunction called arcing. arcing events are when electricity jumps from a wire to another piece of metal. it can be another wire or a part of the airplane or something else. when it does that it can create tremendous amount of heat. finding an arcing event is difficult and determining if one preceded another is nearly