4 replies to this topic

[Aharon]

Shalom and greetings all my pals,

Just came across this amazing photo showing Eastern DC-8 taking off from TJSJ with fire on its engine on Feb 14, 1964.  The plane made successful emergency landing without any injuries and strange enough without any damage!!!  Made me wonder how the plane could dump fuel without increasing the flame???

Is it proper procedure to skip fuel dumping and try to land the plane full loaded with fuel to avoid increasing flame or what???  What procedures did the pilots execute when the engine was in flames apart from shutting down engine?

Check this out



Regards,

Aharon

[Gunfighter]

Aharon,

Typical emergency procedures in the event of a fire on an aircraft (Each one is different)-The ###### s Broke
T-throttle, in this case, the selected engine
F-fuel, shut off valve/fuel lever
Broke-battery, or in this case, the generators/relays, I don t know the DC8 all that well, but it would certainly make sense to be one of those. At that weight, its just best to maintain full forward speed and a level altitude-keep in mind, airspeed is your number one goal in case of engine fire/failure.

Also, most fuel dumps/drains are in the back end of the aircraft to minimize flame exposure.

[divemaster08]

As stated in the above post, cut the fuel to the engine, deploy any extinguisher (if the DC8 had them, don't know) to help kill the fire and then fly on 3 engines. Plenty of power from the 3 remaining!

The fire is coming from the engine in the photo. So once it was been put out, then its easy to dump fuel, if it has the ability to (not fully sure if the DC-8 had it, and even if Eastern had them on theirs) or you go around and fly the aircraft in a "dirty" configuration to help burn some fuel off.
Modern Fuel Dumping systems are found on the wings, just outside of the flaps, and you can select either left, right or both sides to dump. If they had this feature and were worried, they would select the opposite side from the fire and fuel transfer across.

As I don't know the exact destination for the aircraft, it may not be as heavy with fuel and may be already below its Max Landing Weight, so its nothing to worry about when it returned to land. As for damage to the aircraft, I can see the engine needing replaced but the rest of the air frame should be good to go

[Aharon]

Divemaster,

thanks for explanations  I got explanations from Eastern airline experts who told me the article was wrong.  It was supposed to be from KJFK, not TJSJ.  Also it was supposed to be on 1967, not 1964.

The experts also told me that the cause of the accident was mechanics' fault.  The mechanics installed into one of the engines the engine compressor in wrong opposite direction which caused engine explosion and fire.  The experts told me that they were totally surprised that the plane flew different trips for 16 hours  without incident after improper engine compressor installation.

Aharon

[_NW_]

NTSB report : http://www.ntsb.gov/..._id=18729&key=0