I'm told at the gate the cabin service manager overheard the pilots talking about slides. She just went ahead and deployed them (I presume this means called for an evacuation?) which was unnecessary.
I'm more intrigued how they taxied to the gate with the tyres in that state?
I'd expect that they weren't in that state. After an abort, the tyre heats up over time, as the heat from the brakes slowly makes its way into the surrounding structure and tyre. Eventually the fusible plugs will melt, and deflate the tyre, but you could well be at the gate by then.
Aborted take-off can mean a lot of braking power required to stop safely.
It would mean all of it initially....but there is nothing to stop you kicking the autobrake out, to modulate the braking and so reduce the heating. As you can see if you look at FR24, they came off the runway quite quickly, but then had to taxing about 2km to the gate. Modulating the braking would have reduced the heating a lot. Basically, there was no reason to exit the runway so quickly after a stop from about 155 knots ground speed.
That in turn means the tyres will heat up. One tyre shows damage, the others may have deflated without any visible damage.
Fusible plugs. The aft tyres are the ones that are damaged, and I'd suspect that happened in the turns. If I recall correctly, you need to keep taxi speed down to about 3 knots with a deflated tyre. FR24 does not show them doing that, so either they just didn't or more likely the tyres were not deflated.
What jumps into my mind as an explanation - and I’m likely wrong but we'll know the facts in due course - is that the aircraft returned to the gate to debark the pax and either the smell of burning rubber from the stressed tyres penetrated the cabin or an actual fire broke out and smoke was visible outside.
You don't evacuate based on smell.
If the airbridge is not connected and there’s a possibility your plane full of fuel and people is on fire then evacuating via slides might be the prudent option. A few seconds can make a big difference in a fire emergency.
True, but was it actually an emergency? Doesn't seem so to me.
How can you land the plane then
Same as usual. You'll ensure there's a runway inspection after landing, and also have engineering look at you before you taxi too far.
With one blown tyre, not a major problem, and the plane is much lighter.
Exactly.
I think we might need to ask the pilot on this, but if the problem was serious enough that they rejected the takeoff it's likely something that would have caused problems in flight. I understand it was a sensor probe and something similar caused the loss of an Air France flight over the Atlantic some years back - coupled with some pilot misjudgement.
AF crashed because at least one of the pilots couldn't fly.
There is no information that I've seen on exactly what caused them to decide to abort. It was at quite high speed, actually quite a bit faster than I'd be using for an abort due to sensor/ADR/IRS.
An evacuation wasn't ordered by the pilots. It was mistakenly ordered by the CSM according to my source.
Oops.
Yeah, I saw that. I don't know the facts, but if I was a CSM and I found the cabin filling up with smoke I wouldn't wait for the captain, because if the thing did go up in flames I'd have to be one of the last off and might not make it.
Not their call at all. A wheel well/landing gear fire is likely to take quite some time before it causes issues. This is actually tested by the manufacturers, who do a max effort abort, and then sit for at least 5 minutes after ignition before the fire crews are allowed to approach.
www.abc.net.au
