Delta Air Lines 767 engine fire

28 Feb 2005 Delta Air Lines 767 engine fire

On a recent flight from Zurich to Atlanta, the Boeing 767 I was flying in had a fire in the right engine just about 20 minutes after takeoff. Capt. Birdsong and his FO diverted us down to Nice, where we landed without incident. I guess all that recurrent training paid off!

Here are some photos after we landed. I was a bit too thick to get some pictures of the fuel being dumped – that was rather impressive, and got the flight attendant’s attention as well. One thing they need to do is train the FAs for this type of incident, since they were all pretty worried. I was sitting very close to the rear galley, and could hear the conversations. I took a moment to reassure them, since if we are taking the time to dump fuel, and had bypassed two very good landing sites (Geneva and Lyon), then things were under control in the cockpit. Of course, I could have had it all wrong!

The fire was non-existant by the time we landed, but the fire crew was on hand to spray some foam around just in case.




This guy was coming around to snatch my camera from me. Not sure why, but I got him to come to his senses and give it back to me. I guess he is normally on the top secret airport patrol.

A nice, 24 hour delay, and all I got from Delta Air Lines was – nothing! What was really cool is that we went to the terminal, and the flight crew stayed with the aircraft. Not sure why, but it was not going anywhere. When the plane load of people arrived at the terminal, no one knew what to do with us. We hung around for a few hours until we were finally sent to a local hotel, which was pretty decent.

We left the next day, which happened to be inauguration day in the US. I *really* didn’t want to fly on that day, and, as you can expect, there were lots of problems for any flights that wanted to pass within a few thousand miles of DC. I eventually got to Austin to see my mom, but I missed one of her last days on Earth due to this delay.