Analysis | Japan Airlines crash puts spotlight on carbon-composite planes’ ability to resist fire
- The JAL A350, which burned for more than six hours, is the first commercial airliner built mainly of composites to be destroyed by fire
- While composite airliners have been in service for several years, the collision has revived concern about the challenges of extinguishing blazes involving the material
The Japan Airlines (JAL) Airbus A350 crashed into a De Havilland Dash-8 coastguard turboprop plane shortly after landing at Haneda airport in Tokyo, bursting in to flames. All 379 people aboard the A350 were evacuated from the burning aircraft, but five of the six coastguard crew were killed.
Photographs of the wreckage showed the A350 fuselage in cinders. While investigators seek the cause of the collision, the aviation industry is keen to confirm the survivability of hi-tech composite airliners which have transformed the economics of long-haul flight and airlines in the past decade.
The crash “is really the first case study that we have, not only from a fire perspective, but also just from a crash survivability perspective,” said Anthony Brickhouse, an air safety expert at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.
Both Boeing, with the 787 Dreamliner, and Airbus, with the A350, made big bets in the early 2000s that lightweight carbon composites would produce major fuel savings and be less susceptible to fatigue, reducing maintenance.
Shortly after being put into service, the Dreamliner contended with battery problems that led to fires, resulting in its brief grounding in early 2013. A later fire on an Ethiopian Airlines 787 in July 2013 was caused by a short circuit in the jet’s emergency locator transmitter and led to fuselage repairs.
