ON April 17 a United Airlines Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner jet with 238 passengers, 11 cabin crew and four flight crew left Sydney for San Francisco.
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The Dreamliner looks like a nice-enough jet. The first of the 787s was rolled out in July, 2007, and the first of the stretched 787-9 versions appeared in September, 2013. Boeing is reported to have spent $32 billion developing the 787s as its most fuel-efficient plane, capable of replacing the 767s. So it’s fair to say the company put a lot of time, effort and money into living the dream.
All good to know if you’re a planespotter, or someone about to step on board a plane for a long haul flight, as I am on Monday.
Anyway, back to flight UAL870 bound for San Francisco.
Things apparently followed their standard course for the first hour or so of the flight. Most likely a couple completely ignored all advice to be at the boarding gate with plenty of time to spare, and burst on the plane at the last second, wondering why people looked at them with faces normally reserved for sidestepping nasty things on footpaths.
No doubt about 20 people held up another 200 as they tried to shove an obscene amount of hand luggage – including a pile of things in plastic bags, a large lambswool jacket, a neck brace, a pillow and a pink metal cosmetic case - into overhead lockers, while simultaneously making last minute phone calls to people named Gavin, Naomi or Sebastian, with final instructions about what to feed the cat.
It seems, from the Australian Transport Safety Bureau report of flight UAL870, that apart from the normal tedious disruptions relating to actual travellers, things went smoothly – until cabin crew switched on the rear galley ovens to prepare meals.
In the commendably understated way that the bureau presents these incidents in its occasional short investigation reports, it noted that “After the two ovens were switched on, there was a short burst of smoke which set off a fire alarm in a nearby toilet for about one minute”.
Two things to note here.
If you are about to go on a long-haul flight and are thinking about having a fag in the plane toilet, it looks like the smoke alarms do actually work and you will be caught, fined, forced to make a statement to police, etc etc.
And two, a “short burst of smoke which set off a fire alarm in a nearby toilet” on a plane, differs from a “short burst of smoke which set off a fire alarm in a nearby toilet” in, say, a single-storey building, where you can just wander out a side door until the situation is sorted.
A case in point. Quite a few years ago I was sitting at work, minding my own business, when smoke started rising from the back of a computer a few metres away. There was no one working on it at the time and something like that had never happened before. Computers had made weird noises and just refused to turn on, but I’d never experienced a self-combusting one, or a computer with a smoking habit.
On the day the computer started puffing I happened to be the only person down that end of our very large office.
“There’s smoke coming out of the computer,” I yelled at no-one in particular, with the kind of deadpan yell you reserve for unlikely events that you can’t believe are happening, even if they’re happening in front of you.
“There’s smoke coming out of the computer,” I yelled at no-one in particular, with the kind of deadpan yell you reserve for unlikely events that you can’t believe are happening, even if they’re happening in front of you.
And in that time-honoured way of offices and emergencies, nobody responded. They only did when the smoke set off the building’s smoke alarms and people started complaining about the noise.
The computer didn’t catch fire, but the smoke was thick and it stank. Someone unpulled the power plug. Someone else rang someone in head office who arrived a couple of hours later and took the dead computer away.
I was congratulated for being so laidback about the whole event that I kept on working until the smoke alarm went off, although I was warned you can be too deadpan in emergencies, given that no one realised we were potentially in one because my deadpan announcement lacked the necessary hysteria.
But back to flight UAL870.
The Australian Transport Safety Bureau notes that after the short burst of smoke set off the alarm there was a “strong chemical odour and an electrical smell, as well as a blue haze”.
It doesn't mention what passengers made of all this, but the crew were all systems go. They noticed that one of the ovens displayed a “FAILURE” message, followed by a message about a broken fuse. Cabin crew pulled all relevant circuit breakers, switched off all electrical sources, and some of the flight crew arrived with fire extinguishers. The captain kept flying the plane.
He also decided that because they couldn’t be sure what was going on in the galley, the flight would return to Sydney. The Australian Transport Safety Bureau noted the airline had a similar incident with another Boeing 787-9 on June 2, and a software update in the ovens was found to be the problem, and fixed.
The bureau has the uncanny knack of producing reports like this just before I get onto a plane to travel a long way away from home. This time it’s to Iceland and Norway. The last time I headed for London the bureau released a report on the incidence of bird strikes in Australia, complete with a rundown of the birds most likely to incapacitate jets.
I thank them for that, but I’ll worry more about getting stuck beside a screaming baby, or a large person with an aversion to showers, than plane problems.