Men Who Killed Qantas - Matthew Benns [4]
Meanwhile, the second officer headed back into the main cabin to find the cabin services manager. They returned to the cockpit together and told Captain Fried there was no sign of fire and there appeared to be no injuries to the passengers or crew. The captain now had to make a choice between an emergency evacuation of the aircraft or an orderly disembarkation. With no immediate danger inside the plane, he decided to ‘hasten slowly’. He was aware it was still raining heavily and there was no lighting outside the aircraft. He had no idea what other hazards awaited. The emergency response teams from the airport had still not arrived. He wanted to wait for steps to give the passengers the feeling of a ‘more regular’ exit and also decrease the risk of injury for the elderly or young passengers on board. Also on his mind was the thought that an emergency evacuation might spark panic among the passengers and could lead to injury. Once the passengers were out of the plane their first instinct might be to walk towards the terminal lights, which would take them across an active runway.
For the passengers it was an agony of uncertainty. With no PA system they had no idea what was happening. Some got angry that the crew were standing by the emergency exit doors apparently ‘doing nothing’. They had no idea that the crew had changed from service providers to trained safety personnel standing on station ready to begin emergency evacuation procedures should a fire suddenly break out. One of the passengers was an off-duty Qantas pilot travelling as a passenger. He suggested the crew inform the flight deck about the fumes. As time went on passengers began to suffer irritated eyes and struggled to breathe. The captain ordered the over-wing doors to be opened for ventilation.
The delay in evacuation also puzzled the Thai authorities. ‘Fire fighters banged on the door, shouting: “Open, open, open”,’ Vichai Prateepprecha, the director of the Department of Air Safety, told the Australian Financial Review. ‘Our rescue teams were on the spot as soon as the plane came to a halt. Our crash investigators want to know why the doors were not open.’6 The final Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) investigation report confirmed that some airport personnel got to the aircraft and conducted an initial inspection before the fire vehicles arrived. They attempted to contact the crew by tapping on the fuselage of the plane but the crew did not hear them. The chief of the emergency services also asked the control tower to tell the pilot to open the doors but the message did not get through. Around ten minutes after the plane had come to a halt, the pilot and crew watched a procession of fire vehicles with lights flashing reach the plane and, because of the earlier failed communication attempts, wait for the evacuation to begin, with floodlights illuminating the nose-down jet.
Back in the first-class cabin Mr Gosper said: ‘I was a bit surprised they kept us in the plane so long. I worked out that [it was] twelve to thirteen minutes before emergency crews turned up … twenty to twenty-four minutes before we left the aircraft.
‘We didn’t know whether the plane would break into fire … there were some very anxious moments. I would have thought, given these circumstances, [we would have] been evacuated from the plane immediately. But one or two of us asked that question twice, particularly when we smelt some burning, and we were reassured by the crew that the smell was from the sudden cutback of the engines and there was no dangerous fire,’ he said.7
Heather Rollo was flying to Casablanca via London for a holiday with her husband, Michael, and son Christopher, eight, and seven-year-old twins, James and Gregory. They were sitting near the damaged wing and were convinced after the plane came to a standstill they were going to die in a fireball. ‘We were just in the dark. We could see we were on grass and the wing was damaged,’ she told the Australian newspaper. ‘The emergency lights came back on after a few minutes and it was very quiet, almost like a death