Note the tilt alarm shrieking on every gentle turn, and welcome to a reality of these real-life monster trucks: they roll. Physics is very unfriendly to high center-of-gravity vehicles full of sloshing water, particularly when combined with an adrenaline-fueled driver experiencing the tunnel vision that can set in when a call comes through. (A common theme in NTSB interviews: firefighters don't remember hearing the tilt alarm.) Did I mention that crash trucks often have a curb weight in excess of 100,000 pounds? Something to consider on those occasions where it seems as though fire rescue crews are taking forever to respond: They are useless if they don’t arrive. Continuing.... On October 28, 2016, at 2:32 p.m. CDT, a Boeing 767-300 (registration N345AN), scheduled as American Airlines flight 383 bound for Miami, Florida experienced an uncontained right engine failure and subsequent fire during its takeoff ground roll on runway 28R at Chicago O'Hare International Airport. The flight crew aborted the takeoff and stopped the aircraft on the runway and an emergency evacuation was conducted. Of the 161 passengers and 9 crew members onboard, one passenger received serious injuries during the evacuation and another 19 experienced minor injuries. The airplane was substantially damaged by the fire. Here is some more information you likely have not heard elsewhere: -It took firefighters ten hours to completely stop the fuel leak. To capture leaking fuel, firefighters first used eight containment pools, and eventually placed a fuel bowser beneath the wing. -Airport firefighters saw this fire from the station and started responding immediately, prior to notification from the tower -One of the first units on scene included a firefighter who had been with Chicago Fire Department for 36 years. He had never before responded to an aircraft fire and was scheduled to retire the following day. At 11:00 in this video you can hear him saying "I finally got my fire! Luckily no one was hurt." -Not all equipment was functional during the incident. Cameras which had recently been tested malfunctioned, and one of the high-reach extendible turrets on a crash truck was out of service. -One of the ejected turbine disc fragments pierced through the plane's wing and continued thousands of feet through the air, eventually falling through the roof of a UPS shipping facility, bouncing off the floor, breaking it (the floor, that is), and finally landing on a loading rack - over 3,000 feet away. Check out the photo album at http://tiny.cc/AA383Pics (case sensitive). -Firefighters used over 24,000 gallons of finished foam (720 gallons of 3% AFFF concentrate) on this fire. -The estimated cost to repair runway damage due to heat and gouges from flying turbine shrapnel was close to $1,000,000. It was necessary to cut a section of runway out of the ground. (Noise reduction was liberally applied to the audio track, including frequency-specific notch filters for the ear-piercing high-pitch tones. The way it sounded prior... could be used for riot control.) 1/3/18: Many additional documents from the NTSB investigation have been added to Google Drive - flight crew checklists, training manual excerpts, interview transcripts, metallurgy reports on the failed disc, and more. To join the 15,000+ people who have taken advantage of that (free) information resource, visit http://tiny.cc/AA383.

• published: 13 Dec 2017
• views: 6658578