Jetliner Diverts to PBIA With Smoky Cockpit
By Chrystian Tejedor and Ken Kaye, South Florida Sun-Sentinel
Jan. 31–The acrid smell of burning plastic was the first sign that something had gone wrong aboard American Airlines flight 1738.
Then the cabin went dark.
“We were getting kinda nervous,” said Cody Wanner, one of 24 Messiah College students onboard the Pennsylvania-bound plane diverted to Palm Beach International Airport on Wednesday night. “Then they told us there were electrical problems.”
The Boeing 757 with 139 passengers and seven crew members landed safely at Palm Beach International about 9 p.m. The plane was bound for Philadelphia from San Juan, Puerto Rico.
Most passengers arrived in Philadelphia aboard another American Airlines plane Thursday morning.
Palm Beach County Fire-Rescue took the pilot, three flight attendants and one passenger to a hospital because they suffered from slight smoke inhalation. The co-pilot was treated for cuts to his hand when a cockpit window shattered.
No one suffered injuries described as life-threatening, Palm Beach County Fire-Rescue Capt. Don DeLucia said.
According to federal and American Airlines officials, the smoke was apparently caused by a heating mechanism that is located between two tempered glass panes of one of the cockpit’s windows. The inner pane shattered when there apparently was an electrical surge, officials said.
The heater acts like a car’s defrost and is intended to keep windows from fogging when they are exposed to the extremely cold temperatures at high altitude.
The outer window pane was not breached and the plane did not lose cabin pressure, said American Airlines spokeswoman Mary Frances Fagan.
According to Palm Beach County Fire-Rescue Capt. Don DeLucia, the smoke was coming from a malfunctioning heater for the plane’s windshield. The inner pane of glass shattered and injured the co-pilot. No one tried to open a window.
Some flight attendants scurried about the cabin looking for flashlights and fire extinguishers when problems were first detected, said Wanner, the passenger.
The flight crew explained they were 90 minutes away from an emergency landing at Palm Beach International, then showed passengers what to do in case they needed to use emergency slides to evacuate the plane, Wanner said.
“That’s when I really didn’t think it would happen because they made it seem like we would only [use the slide] in a worst case scenario,” Wanner said. “It didn’t really seem like anything bad had happened with the engine.”
Passengers around Wanner, however, cried. His classmates from Grantham, Pa.-based Messiah College held hands and prayed.
Paul Null, who was flying back home to Pennsylvania, wrote a farewell letter to his wife, son and daughter.
“[I] came to terms with it and wrote farewell letters to my kids and wife. That’s pretty tough,” Null told news partner WPTV-Ch. 5. “Never done it before hope I never have to do it again.”
Peter Knudson, spokesman for the National Transportation Safety Board, said the same problem has occurred five times since 2004 on Boeing 757-200s — the same kind plane that made the emergency landing in West Palm Beach on Wednesday night. There also have been electrical problems in the windshields of Boeing 747s, 767s and 777s, the safety board said.
For that reason, the safety board has recommended the Federal Aviation Administration issue what’s known as an “airworthiness directive,” requiring airlines to repair the heating element problem. The FAA has yet to do that, safety board officials said.
“We’re certainly familiar with this particular issue,” Knudson said.
The other 757 incidents included:
–Jan. 21, 2004: An Air Greenland 757 had an electrical problem with its windshield while it was still on the ground in Copenhagen, Denmark, preparing for its flight.
–Jan. 25 2004: An American Airlines 757 declared an emergency after takeoff from Dallas-Fort Worth International because of smoke in the cockpit. It returned to the airport and landed safely.
–May 2, 2004: An American Airlines 757 from Miami to Caracas, Venezuela, had a fire in its windshield.
–Feb. 23, 2006: An anonymous report of smoke and fire in the windshield of a 757 was made to NASA’s accident reporting system.
–April 23, 2006: An American Airlines 757 diverted to New York’s John F. Kennedy International after a short in the window heating element resulted in smoke in the cockpit.
When pilots see or smell smoke in the cockpit, the first thing they do is don oxygen masks and smoke goggles, said Steven Wallach, a Boca Raton-based aviation lawyer and aviation consultant.
“It’s an extremely dangerous situation,” he said. “The pilots can be incapacitated by the smoke if they don’t get the masks on soon enough.”
Further, if thick enough, the smoke could prevent the flight crew from seeing their instruments or outside their windows, added Wallach, a former airline captain.
After they have put on masks, emergency procedures call for pilots to investigate where the smoke is coming from — and its smell can be the first major clue.
“There are various types of smoke, and they smell different,” he said. “It could be electrical smoke or from fuel. You go through an isolation procedure, where you try to find the cause and eliminate it.”
While rare, smoke or fire in airline cockpits can be deadly.
In May 1996, smoke in the cockpit was thought to have disabled or impaired the pilots of a ValuJet plane that crashed in the Everglades near Miami. All 110 on board were killed, after a major fire erupted in the DC-9′s forward cargo compartment.
In September 1998, an electrical fire started in the cockpit of Swissair Flight 111, a jumbo jet that had taken off from New York bound for Geneva. While attempting to make an emergency landing in Halifax, Canada, the flight crew was overcome by smoke and the plane crashed in the ocean off Nova Scotia, killing all 229 on board.
In November 1973, the cockpit of a Pan Am 707 freighter filled with smoke, and the crew attempted to make an emergency landing in Boston. The jetliner crashed short of the runway, killing all three flight crew members. The source of the smoke was never determined.
If their cockpit fills with smoke, pilots can’t just open windows to let it escape, at least if the plane is at high altitude and pressurized, Wallach said. But, they are able to de-pressurize the cabin and attempt to make a rapid descent — a tricky undertaking, he added.
The safety board and the FAA said they will continue to investigate Wednesday’s incident.
By Chrystian Tejedor and Ken Kaye. Information from the Associated Press was used in this report.
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