Frontier 10/5/24 hard landing, gear fire, no injuries

Must have been one hard landing to cause a fire. No injuries and didn’t deploy the evac shutes.
 
I have no idea how a hard landing would cause a fire.

You would expect, especially at LAS, that it was hot brakes leading to a brake fire but that takes several minutes before the fire starts. Temperature peaks after about 15 minutes.

My only guess is that one tire failed and the metal on pavement cased it but I don't really see that in the short video.
 
Based on audio, flight crew was in O2 masks long before the landing due to smoke in cockpit. It would be odd if what appears to be a post-landing landing gear fire is related to the smoke in the cockpit, other than the desire to quickly get the aircraft on the ground resulted in an inadvertent hard landing with tire failure.
 
Airbus has some of the most convoluted emergency checklists. They can be even more confusing because at one point they required you really understand the systems. That helped in understanding the how and why when running checklists. With the new dumbed down training that is no longer the case. It once was for example a standard oral question to know exactly what you would have available in the emergency electrical configuration by memory. It’s nice to know things like the FO’s comm panel will be inoperative as well as anti skid, reverse thrust and most spoilers as well as vhf2 and transponder 2. The shift to direct law with gear extension is important as well. All might be factors in this emergency. Yes most items are mentioned in the ecam but in the heat of battle they go in one ear and out the other.
 
So the impetus behind going (emergency) min electrical config on any electrical-complex airplane is to neutralize the source component of an electrical fire in a time-sensitive way. That's the hammer, not the scalpel.

Landing that eJet with all important electrics shut down may indeed have become the bigger emergency, than the smoke fumes elimination. Was the party trick (landing major-electrics-off) necessary, or was it an overreaction. I guess the investigation will determine if they attempted to troubleshoot/regain major bus components and it went back to smoke, or did they decide to just full send it/we're making the news bois. I

That landing footage illustrates the need to at least consider trying to bring some major AC components back to make the letdown a bit less... histrionic. Better lucky than good though, cuz they smoked that thing on landing roll like you read about. Any landing everybody walks away from though is good enough, so winning. Please consider joining our Discount Den Program and don't forget to tip your flight attendant. And no fighting on the aisles now, we're not NK! :thumbsup:
 
If you start with the smoke checklist and set electrical emergency configuration according checklist, the idea is to restore most of the electrical systems shortly before landing (3 min or 2000'AAL) to ensure stuff like normal brakes are working.
I do agree those checklist are quite convoluted, and the smoke/fumes/avionics smoke is maybe the worst.
 
I don't think it's an over-reaction: time to a hidden fire becoming non-survivable is 7-35 minutes based on prior examples. The FAA estimates on average only one third of aircraft with a hidden fire may reach an airfield before the fire becomes uncontrollable.

Random smoke smell is how most of these incidents started and AC 120-80A points out that even a few minutes has made the critical difference between everyone survives vs half the PAX die before they can evacuate.
 
Larry in TN said:
I have no idea how a hard landing would cause a fire.

You would expect, especially at LAS, that it was hot brakes leading to a brake fire but that takes several minutes before the fire starts. Temperature peaks after about 15 minutes.

My only guess is that one tire failed and the metal on pavement cased it but I don't really see that in the short video.
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They were on back up electronics with the RAT providing emergency power. No anti-skid protection available.
 
BillTIZ said:
They were on back up electronics with the RAT providing emergency power. No anti-skid protection available.
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That would certainly do it. Didn't have that information earlier. Initial coverage made it sounds like the wheel fire was the beginning of the event.
 
BillTIZ said:
They were on back up electronics with the RAT providing emergency power. No anti-skid protection available.
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And (according to the chart shown by Blancolirio), no reversers!
 
my biggest question is why give up over 4000 ft of runway and land on the short one?
 
Your set up from 30 or more miles from the airport to land on a certain runway. You've briefed it, settled on it between the 2 of them, and you have a clear mental model of about what to expect. You've ran the performance numbers and found it adequate. With every thing else they might have had going on. It was probably the wisest decision to do what the plan was than to try and institute a new plan, without the time available to do so adequately.
 
Jeff767 said:
It’s an Airbus, no one knows what happens if you land on a runway you have not programmed!
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not true. programming the box only gives you navigation information and numbers based on the pressure, wind temp and mins callouts. push the red button on the stick and it flies just like any other airplane. if you have the wrong runway the only difference is the line on the nd will not be in the right place. besides that its takes only a couple of button pushes to change runways.
 
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