A pilot’s emergency checklist may be too long to let them control fires in
the air. So says an interim report last week from the
Canadian Transportation Safety Board (TSB) into Swissair flight 111, which
crashed off Nova Scotia in 1998 killing 229. The Swissair pilots’ checklist on
smelling smoke takes 30 minutes to complete, but the plane crashed 20 minutes
after the first report of smoke. The TSB says lack of proper fire-fighting
equipment aboard aircraft and inadequately trained aircrew amounts to a “safety
deficiency.”
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