Originally Posted by
FMI
Attending recurrent, our instructor had placed their portable smoke machine in the sim.
Generally they allow it to puff a couple times then shut it off as we run through the emer descent scenario, nothing new.
This time however, the machine stuck in the full "on" position and within a couple minutes filled the sim so full, I couldn't see my hand in front of my goggles.
We were 0/0, couldn't see the PFD's, MFD, radios.. nothing. We had selected mask and inter-phone from the mem items, but everything to follow was futile at best.
With 25 years of flying professionally, I sat there trying my best to feel around my cockpit in the midst of an emergency descent and couldn't help but think of this crew and what they had to be experiencing. Add to it the heat, stress and frustration of comm relays, etc.
Sim instructor couldn't see anything, we had to shut down and evac the sim.
Ended up setting the smoke alarms off in the sim bay and evacuating the entire building, class rooms and all.
It was an eye opening experience I'll never forget as I sat there doing everything I feasibly could to control my bird.
So, as it has been stated here many times, we must learn from this crew who were in an impossible situation.
Smoke in the cockpit or any sign of an onboard fire, find some pavement "now".
And may we never have to deal with this tragic event.
RIP brothers.
The conditions you're describing, as well as the ones described in the report are an accurate representation of what the environment will be like if you can't get the smoke out of the cockpit. Goggles and masks will keep you breathing, but will do little to allow you to find the controls you need to get back down. The key is, as others have said, get down immediately before smoke conditions become untenable.
My last shift we had a serious house fire, and were in 0 visibility conditions. I could not see my gloves with them on my mask, let alone my partner on the hose line, and he was closer to me than 2 seated crew members in a cockpit. The only way we could move around was by crawling and feeling for things like walls and furniture and could only find the fire by listening for crackling and using my thermal imaging camera. Trying to fly in those conditions is as close to impossible as there is, and it says a tremendous amount about the crew that they worked so hard right to the end. My thoughts are with them and their families and friends.
A working fire in a house doubles in size every 30-60 seconds depending on conditions. I am not aware of what the stats are for an airliner, but ValueJet, Swissair, and now UPS don't paint a picture that is much more optimistic than a building fire.
The lithium battery fire described likely put out CO levels well above what we call the IDLH level (immediately dangerous to life and health). If CO production was above 1200 ppm the captain would have had a severely degraded level of consciousness in just a few seconds, and could have been unresponsive in as little as 30 seconds. It is analogous to the TUC tables in the event of a depressurization at high altitude.