Originally Posted by
sweeks
I always wondered how safe it was for aircraft to have magnesium parts in their landing gear.
when I was part of a training team for shipboard firefighting & mass casualty events the policy was any class Delta fire was jettisoned. Period. If that was a $30,000,000 aircraft, so be it. Better than burning a hole through the deck all the way through the keel catching everything ablaze all the way down.
The standard procedure on land was to drown it in a wide nozzle mist to remove heat from everything around it until it burned itself out. Hitting it with a solid stream would cause it to explode & have bunches of little Delta fires everywhere, including on yourself. Not recommended.
Class Delta fires create their own O2 & burn hot enough to crack the water to H & O2 before it even reaches the flame. There's not much anybody can do about it once it's started. On the plus side, they're really hard to get started.
