Airlines: August 2009 Archives

Electronic what???? Yup, cigarettes, and I had never heard of them until today. Perhaps you had.

Well you've probably heard about the FedEx MD-11 incident at Minneapolis-St Paul on 14 August. After landing the crew had a lower forward cargo fire warning. They discharged the halon bottles and called the firefighters who eventually found a cargo container on fire - I mean with actual flames coming out of it. They used about 200gal of water to extinguish it.

You'll perhaps remember the Bangkok Airways ATR 72 crash at Koh Samui in Thailand on 4 August - the aircraft left the runway and crashed into a former control tower. Captain killed and four of the 68 passengers seriously injured. The talk is of heavy rain, stiff crosswind and maybe windshear.

I was on holiday at the time and was barely aware of the incident, but as you can imagine the rescue operation was pretty dramatic. And, courtesy of the folks involved, here it is.