China Airlines B737-800: Human error, mechanical failure, or pure bad luck?

China Airlines did it again - another serious accident further damaging its rather poor safety record. On 20/8/07 a China Airlines B737-800 burst into flames after landing at Naha Airport, Japan. Check out the raw footage captured by the Japanese press.

So what caused a plane to explode AFTER completing what looked to be a normal flight? There has been reports suggesting a fuel leakage from the engines, possibly from a fuel pipe rupture at one of the engine pylons. If that is the case, then why could the pilot not stop the flames on its tracks? Let us retrace the final journey of this B737-800.

Some news agencies have suggested poor maintenance was to blame. That claim is rather baseless, as even though China Airlines does have a poor safety record, their airliners are NOT maintained by their own mechanics, just as the vast majority of other airlines around the world. Airliners tend to be maintained by contracted specialist companies based in international airports around the world which services numerous airlines, and they would ensure that every plane leaving their hangers are fully operational.

So the cause of the accident came after the plane rolled out to the runway. Well, the ground crew and the flight crew should have spotted a pipe rupture during their preflight checks if it had occurred back at there and then. The flight made a seemingly normal flight from Taipei to Naha. After touching down in Naha and rolling off the taxiway all seemed to be normal. However, after the plane has stopped on its parking slot and was preparing for disembarkation, the PASSENGERS noticed that smoke is coming out of the left engine and informed the cabin crew to evacuate the plane. Surely the flight crew is still in the cockpit and would have noticed that before the passengers! Modern airliners such as the B737-800 (this particular plane in the accident rolled out of the assembly lines 5 months ago) has wings which are rigged with numerous sensors detecting the pressure and temperature changes all across the wing to give the pilots and the flight computers the necessary data to achieve optimum flight conditions. These would have sounded the alarm way faster than the passengers spotting the smoke! What were the pilots doing??

So the left engine is on fire, why didn't the pilot isolate the heat source on the left wing? He should have immediately isolated the fuel tank compartments near to the heat source and pump the remaining fuel to the fuselage/right wing tanks to deny the heat source any further fuel source. That would have at worst meant losing a WING, not THE WHOLE PLANE! Luckily the cabin crew did a good job of evacuating all the passengers before the flames engulfed the whole plane.

The firefighters didn't do a good job either. I'm shocked that (based on the video footages I saw) there were only TWO fire engines that turned up to the scene. Just TWO in an international airport?! So they eventually turned up to the site. Then they decide to wait and observe for tens of seconds before starting to spray on the plane. They've got an airliner on fire! They should be spraying even before they hit the brakes next to the plane! It is obvious from the videos that the fire is largely on the left side (port) of the plane when the fire engines turned up on the right side (starboard) of the plane. Why did they choose to spray from that position? Surely they should be spraying at the PORT side of the plane for maximum effect! And as one can see from the footages they were spraying intermittently at the fire sources, rather than constantly. They could have saved more parts of the plane if they had put in a little extra effort.

There has been a suggestion that the pilots in fact knew something was wrong prior to the landing (apparently passengers were informed that "something was wrong" and that they were instructed to de-plane as quickly as possible). If that is the case, why did the pilots not inform the airport ahead of time so that they could send out the response team and emergency services prior to the landing?

The entire chain of events seemed more like a scene from a fiction. Who is/are to blame for the accident? We shall see what comes out of the investigations taking place right now.