The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has released its preliminary report on a dramatic emergency landing of a Frontier Airlines Airbus A321 at Harry Reid Airport in Las Vegas on October 5, 2024, which resulted in flames and smoke shooting from the main landing gear.
Frontier Airlines Flight 1326 was in the final minutes of its flight from San Diego to Las Vegas, but as an otherwise uneventful flight came to an end, flight attendants told pilots that they could smell a chemical odor in the cabin later the same smell spread through the cockpit. As it became more and more stinging and biting, the pilots quickly put on their oxygen masks and began working through an emergency checklist to combat a possible fire on board. Two minutes before the emergency was declared, the onboard computer system recorded a failure in a fan cooling the avionics compartment.
While the captain and his co. were working through the checklist, some of the aircraft systems failed or only partially functioned. To make matters worse, the emergency checklist instructed pilots to put the plane into “electrical emergency configuration” as they had yet to determine the source of the smell. This disabled the screens, radio and transponder on the first officer’s side of the flight deck.
The captain ultimately focused solely on landing the aircraft safely and relied on external visual cues during the approach. The captain’s primary flight display (PFD) was now showing only ‘limited data’. As the jet touched down on runway 261, the main landing gear tires exploded. Smoke and flames began shooting from the main landing gear, but the fire extinguished itself just before the aircraft came to rest on the runway.
The airport fire department, which was on standby due to the declared emergency, arrived almost immediately and sprayed the landing gear with foam. The cause of the smell on board has yet to be determined. The NTSB noted in its preliminary report that the emergency checklist used by the pilots includes a provision for restoring electrical systems before landing to allow for the recovery of inoperable systems. But apparently the anti-lock wheel brakes weren’t working. Which: NTSB/DMM
