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Contact photographer Nigel Harris
What: LOT Polish Airlines Boeing 767-300 en route from Warsaw to Chicago
Where: Chicago
When: Jul 17th 2010
Why: The flight made a safe landing in Chicago. However, after landing, the left brakes and tires were smoking and on fire. The captain told passengers that the brakes had fractured and caused damage to the hydraulic lines leading to the fire.
Emergency services put out the fire while on the runway–it is not mentioned if passengers disembarked, before, during or after emergency services were deployed.
Although the left tire and brake were replaced, on return to Warsaw on the 18th, the same plane suffered another brake fire on landing.
George’s Point of View
I know I’m being a back seat driver again, because it’s impossible to know from my armchair in California what’s happening on the ground in Chicago and Warsaw, but it seems to me that there is obviously something going on.
Either the wrong brakes were replaced, or the brakes were not replaced, or the pilot consistently lands too fast, or the wrong (i.e. flammable) grease lubricating the brakes caught fire, or the thrust reverser is flawed or something else is going on that caused the brake fire to repeat on the return flight. Let’s hope LOT’s home base in Warsaw will get to the bottom of it before the plane has to land on a tabletop runway like Mangalore, or an unsurfaced runway like TAM Airlines Flight 3054 at Congonhas-São Paulo International Airport.
