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Probe after Sydney plane drama
SYDNEY, Australia (CNN) -- An investigation has been launched after two escape chutes aboard a Qantas airlines Boeing 747 failed during an emergency evacuation at Sydney airport. Five passengers were slightly injured in the evacuation which came after the plane made an emergency "hard landing" Wednesday morning. A police spokesman said one of the aircraft's tires caught fire during the landing, leading the captain to order an emergency evacuation of the 347 passengers on board. Two of the inflatable door chutes failed during the evacuation, causing some of the injuries, Qantas said. "What happens in an emergency deployment of the slide raft or the chute is that obviously not all of them necessarily work the way you want them to," Qantas official David Forsyth said. "As I understand it, there was a problem with two of the chutes." Five passengers, including a 75-year-old woman, were treated at a hospital after the evacuation, according to an ambulance spokesman. One passenger, Gordon Garratley, 51, told Australian Associated Press he saw one of the chutes collapse as people were evacuating the plane. "There were about two or three people coming down. They would have had a fall of about 10 feet (3 meters)," Garratley said. English passenger Jasper Byrne, 27, said people on the plane began to panic when they were told to evacuate. "People were literally crying when they got off," Byrne said. "Someone was having an asthma attack when she got off." Qantas today said small fires were "not uncommon" in aircraft brakes. "You might have one or two of these [fires] every six months or so ... given the sort of energy these brakes have to absorb when they're stopping a large aircraft," Forsyth said. Flight QF6 arrived at Sydney International Airport from Frankfurt, via Singapore, at 0520 local time (1920 GMT).
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You might have one or two of these [fires] every six months or so.
