Yesterday Delta flight DL673, the daily Boeing 757 from Atlanta to Quito, Ecuador with 199 passengers onboard, caught fire after touch down. At that capacity every single seat on the plane was occupied.
The plane had departed Atlanta but turned around due to a mechanical problem.
Upon landing the plane’s brakes “locked up” and the “main landing gear caught fire but was quickly extinguished.” It was then towed to the gate for further extinguishing.
Here’s a passenger’s video:
@Delta Plane on fire on the runway at Atlanta Airport. Speculation as to what it was.. looked kinda significant… just throwin it out there @FoxNews @NBCNews #news? pic.twitter.com/tZyjCECAiI
— Ronnie Fernando (@Ron_tron3000) March 30, 2018
Atlanta’s runway 27 Right was temporarily shut down to be inspected for damage and to remove any debris from the incident.
Passengers were accommodated on another aircraft and made it to Quito about 5 hours behind schedule and in the middle of the night.
I has just boarded an AA flight in ATL Terminal T and was sitting on the left side in first class. I saw several fire engines head slowly towards runway 27, could not tell what was going on. The fire station is located just north of the terminal so they had to go past us to get to runway 27L.
We backed out and headed towards runway 27R. We paused at the end of Terminal T and I looked out the right window and saw about 5-7 fire engines all lined up next to the terminal facing the runway. Looked to me like they were waiting for a plane to come in on 27L.
That is probably when they shut down runway 27L and 27R because we then make a left turn and then another left turn and went in-between Terminal A and Terminal B and headed to the other side to runway 26L. We got in a very long line that didn’t move an inch for quite a while. I looked out the left window and saw thick black clouds. The storm was coming in. I saw on the weather radar the storm was going to be upon us soon and was hoping we could head out before it got to us.
Come on line, hurry up.
One plane landed on the outside runway 26R. Another then took off on the inside runway 26L. Another landed. Another took off. Was not very quick.
I had a friend leaving on the Qatar ATL-DOH flight from Terminal F that was leaving at the same exact time as I was. Well for some reason, I won’t make any written disparaging remarks against any or any , it was held back and not allowed to get in line to depart and thus was 2 hours and 25 minutes delayed in its departure. I am sure you have read many articles that describe who is unhappy that Qatar is here. That caused many to miss their connections in DOH. This may have made the and very happy to hear they could inflict incidental damage on Qatar. After all, there is who is very unhappy that Qatar is allowed to be at this airport.
Finally we took off before the rain reached us and I was able to snap a few pictures out of the left window of a plane surrounded by the fire engines. I did not see a fire. I didn’t know what had happened. When I landed, I searched all the websites and newspapers last night and there was no documentation on what happened.
This morning I did read about this in the papers. It is now around 9PM and I am now reading about it on this blog, so this blog is about 12 hours late in reporting the news.
It would be helpful if pilots would give us information instead of keeping us in the dark. Just say, hey, runway 27L is closed because of a plane coming in for such and such reason, so they are sending us over to runway 26L and blah blah blah. To those on the plane, it may be all blah blah blah but people like me would like to know.
Keep us informed. Don’t know why you pilots won’t do that.
Now all you critics out there, please don’t attack me on what I wrote. And please don’t attack Gary on what he writes.
If you want to hear what’s going on, listen here:
https://www.liveatc.net/search/?icao=KATL