‘Additional crew member saw fire on left engine’

Mumbai: In the Friday's fire emergency incident on a Jet Airways flight that was scheduled to fly to Chennai from here, an Additional Crew Member (ACM), travelling as a passenger, “apparently observed fire on the left engine” and informed another ACM, who was also travelling as a passenger.
The latter too “claimed to have seen the fire.” The captain and the cabin crew were then alerted.
On conformation, the pilot “pulled the fire handles of the left and right engines and the APU [auxiliary power unit]. However, he did not discharge any of the fire bottles.”
After the pilot ordered evacuation, escape slides were deployed and the airport's fire and rescue personnel pressed into service.
Fourteen passengers on flight 9W2302 sustained injuries during the evacuation. There were 131 passengers on board, including an infant.
Doctors from the Mumbai International Airport Limited (MIAL) attended to 25 passengers. “None of the patients was critical, but a few sustained injuries and suspected fractures when they fell during evacuation.
At 11.57 p.m. Jet Airways operated another aircraft to Chennai with 117 passengers,” an MIAL spokesperson said. “In some cases, the chutes did not deploy early. So some passengers jumped,” the spokesperson said. The injured were sent to two hospitals.
Shivram Krishnan, a Nagpur-based passenger, who suffered an ankle injury, underwent surgery on Friday night. Another patient with a fracture is recuperating.
29/08/10 The Hindu

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Categories: airports aug 2010, Jet Airways Aug 2010, Safety Aug 2010