The Fire Within Flight 797

Despite a skillful pilot, 23 die in a jetliner blaze

The Air Canada DC-9 was approximately 25 miles northwest of Cincinnati when controllers at the Federal Aviation Administration center in Indianapolis heard the pilot's calmly spoken words: "I have a fire on board." It was shortly after 7 p.m. Thursday, and Flight 797, carrying 41 passengers and a crew of five from Dallas and Fort Worth to Toronto, had smoke creeping forward through the cabin from a rear lavatory.

Air space was quickly cleared for the jetliner to land at the nearest airport, Greater Cincinnati International in Covington, Ky. In the 17 minutes it took to reach the runway, the crew shepherded passengers to the front of the 101-seat plane; some on board held napkins and wet cloths to their faces against the choking fumes. By the time of touchdown, so much smoke had filled the cockpit that Pilot Don Cameron could not see his controls.

On landing, four tires blew out as the pilot braked to a stop. When the jetliner screeched to a halt, the forward passenger door flew open, sucking in oxygen and releasing smoke. Though well prepared by the crew for emergency evacuation, passengers had barely 30 seconds to slide down rubber emergency chutes and run 100 ft. before the fuselage erupted in flames. Said one survivor: "Five minutes before landing, we couldn't see anything in the plane for the smoke. It was the kind of situation where you expect someone to scream, but no one did."

Despite the crew's best efforts, 23 passengers, some of them still in their seats, were found dead after the blaze was extinguished by 19 pieces of fire equipment surrounding the plane. It was the first loss of life in a commercial airline accident since Jan. 11, when three crew members of a United Airlines cargo jet were killed when it crashed into a swamp near Detroit just after takeoff. Among those who perished were Curtis Mathes Jr., 54, chairman of Curtis Mathes Corp., a Dallas television manufacturing firm, and Canadian Folk Singer Stan Rogers, 33.

Questions about how the fire started and generated such acrid smoke through the DC-9 began to arise even as a makeshift morgue was set up at the airport to identify the bodies, some of which were badly charred. A team from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), the FAA and the FBI arrived to sift through the ruins of the plane for clues. NTSB officials suspect that the fire may have been started by a cigarette in a back-cabin lavatory. In Washington, aviation officials debated once again whether more stringent regulations regarding fire-resistant materials inside jetliners should be imposed. The disaster was likely to put pressure on the FAA to formulate a fire-prevention policy for airline cabins. ∎