The crew of an Air France Airbus A330 detected a fuel leak about an hour after departure from Brazzaville, Republic of the Congo, and, despite company procedures that called for shutting down the engine and landing as soon as possible, they continued operating on both engines for about 1 ½ hours— in the air and later, on a taxiway, the French Bureau d’Enquêtes et d’Analyses (BEA) says.
None of the 147 people in the airplane was injured and the airplane was not damaged in the Dec. 31, 2020, incident, which occurred on what was to have been a flight from Brazzaville to Paris.
The BEA said, in its final report on the incident, that the “fire hazard was underestimated by the crew,” in part because the danger was not clearly indicated in the procedure or in supplementary manuals.
Shutting down the engine — which leaked 5.7 t of fuel during 141 minutes of flight time — would have not only prevented the fuel from “being dispersed into potentially dangerous areas” …
