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Ryanair flight RK 3446 was departing from Palma de Mallorca Airport (PMI) and headed to Manchester Airport (MAN) when a false fire alarm sounded in the cockpit this morning. This led to the evacuation of the aircraft through emergency slides and onto the wings. During this process, 18 passengers were injured with six warranting medical treatment at local hospitals.
While there was no fire and passengers quickly disembarked with some jumping from the wings onto the tarmac and sustaining injuries in the process. There are no slides mounted to the wings and passenger that exited there were forced to jump to exit the aircraft. Paddle Your Own Kanoo shared that during an emergency evacuation “the pilots are expected to lower the trailing edge flap on the wings, which brings them much closer to the ground.” This would have shortened the distance to the tarmac to make for easier evacuations, but it did not happen here. Maintenance teams brought over steps that many passengers used to get down. A replacement flight was scheduled and took off this morning.
Ryanair released the following statement:
A flight from Palma to Manchester discontinued take-off due to a false fire warning light indication. Passengers were disembarked using the inflatable slides and returned to the terminal. While disembarking, a small number of passengers encountered very minor injuries (ankle sprains, etc.) and crew requested immediate medical assistance. To minimize disruption to passengers, we quickly arranged a replacement aircraft to operate this flight, which departed Palma at 07:05 this morning. We sincerely apologize to affected passengers for any inconvenience caused.”
Anthony’s Take: Thankfully, this was a false alarm and injuries were minor. It’s good to see that passengers are not carting out their carry-on bags as is often seen in these evacuation videos.
(Featured Image Credit: @aviationbrk via X.)
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Advertiser & Editorial Disclosure: The Bulkhead Seat earns an affiliate commission for anyone approved through the links above This compensation may impact how and where links appear on this site. We work to provide the best publicly available offers to our readers. We frequently update them, but this site does not include all available offers. Opinions, reviews, analyses & recommendations are the author’s alone, and have not been reviewed, endorsed, or approved by any of these entities.
