io wrote in message ...
> SYDNEY, July 2 (AFP) - Five passengers of a Qantas 747 were injured when
>two escape chutes malfunctioned after a fire in the landing gear triggered
a
>panicked evacuation, Australia's national flag carrier admitted Wednesday.
> The 347 passengers were ordered by the captain to evacuate through the
>inflatable chutes when a ground engineer spotted smoke from one of the 16
>brakes of Flight QF6 from Frankfurt moments after it landed at Sydney
airport
>early on Wednesday.
Now let's see. Have I got this right?
You have 350 people (in a sealed air-conditioned metal tube) who are about
to start disembarking via another metal tube, both tubes being about 2
floors up.
The ground staff tell you you have a fire in a brake assy - at ground
level, obviously.
So what do you do? You evacuate the passengers via emergency slides TO
GROUND LEVEL WHERE THE FIRE IS and where presumably fire appliances are
trying to gain access to it!
> He said passengers were not told why they had to evacuate and could not
>tell that anything was wrong from inside the plane.
Entirely typical for Qantas - tell passengers nothing.
> Some relatives of passengers complained of unnecessary delays in
informing
>them what had happened.
> Charles Knight, 44, had been waiting for his sister's family to arrive
on
>the flight when he first heard media reports that something was wrong.
> He said his brother-in-law phoned him to say everything was okay but
other
>people waiting were unnecessarily alarmed. "I think there are some really
>worried people here and I think it's quite unnecessary for that to be the
case,
>" he said.
Entirely typical for Qantas - see above.
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