cstorey wrote:Chris Trott
I do not know how much flying experience you have - I know you have some - but I speak as one whose only emergency was an engine fire when I say that it is highly undesirable that the system was designed in such a way that the fuel cut off CANNOT be operated AFTER pulling the fire handle. It is , frankly, a dangerous piece of design and would have cost me my life
Christopher Storey
Chris, consider the memory items on a light plane engine fire -
On start:
- Throttle to full
- Mixture to Cut-off
- Fuel Selector to Off
- Keep Cranking until the engine starts, the fire is out, or someone gets a fire extinguisher
In Flight:
- Mixture to Cut-off
- Fuel Selector to Off
- Establish 100KTS dive (for C172)
In all cases, before you fire off the extinguishers or the aux fuel cut-off, you shut off the fuel with the mixture, which is your primary method of cutting off fuel to the engines. The Boeing system is the same. You cut off the fuel in the primary fashion and then cut off the fuel with the secondary system. The fire handles are the secondary system for shutting off the fuel.
Rich - you are right that as a whole BA's been in the business long enough, but history has proven too many times that just because the company has been around doesn't prevent people from taking actions that end up being detrimental to the company and the error not get caught before it causes problems. In this case, the people writing BA's manual changed the procedure and it bit them. Boeing stressed the need for the procedure to be sequential and the issue with the isolation of the fuel cut-off levers before the accident, and no immediate action was taken to ensure it didn't continue to be a problem. Now, that's not to say they should have forseen this accident, but it was a risk they chose to take.
As well, it's my opinion, I'm not stating fact I'm not assigning blame, I'm just stating that I think that it was a poor choice to change a sequential checklist item to a simultaneous one, especially considering the things I've seen personally, one of which ended up in the death of a friend, and it could have been prevented had an ill-advised change in the checklists not occured almost 20 years ago.
