On Fire In The Middle Of Nowhere | Air France Flight 062

This is the story of Air France flight 062. On the 17th october 2002 a boeing 777 was being prepped for a flight from paris charles degaulle to los angeles the pilots had their work cut out for them. They were prepping for an ETOPS flight, ETPOPS stands for extended twin engine operations performance standards or more colloquially known as engines turn or passengers swim. The thing is when it comes to twin engined planes on long flights redundancy is the name if the game unlike on quad or tri jets if one engine quits you dont have a lot of margin to get the plane to a safe landing spot. So ETOPS mandates that the plane is maintained to a certain standard and the main thing is that twin engined planes arent allowed to fly more than a set time away from a suitable diversion airport. The embraer e2 can fly 120 minutes from a diversion airport, the 737 max can do 180 mins can do a whopping 330 mins away from a diversion airport. Flight 062 took off and it made the slow trek across the north atlantic and hours after it took off it was flying over the vast desolate canadian north as it made its way south towards the US Canada border. As the jet cruised at an altitude of 36000 feet the passengers in rows 42 to 44 noticed an unusual smell and notified the cabin crew, the captain wanted to investigate and he left to investigate. With the captain out of the first officer was monitoring the instruments. When he started to smell something. Then the forward window on the captains side caught on fire in the bottom left corner. There were some papers in the cockpit and they too caught fire. The first officer was caught off guard, this happened right as the relief first officer was walking in he immediately grabbed the fire extinguisher and started fighting the fire. He dumped the fire extinguisher into the fire and the fire was smothered, then as the extinguisher ran out the fire returned. The chief cabin pursher rushed another fire extinguisher into the cockpit and they proceeded to use the new extinguisher till that was spent, thankfully the fire didnt seem to reignite. The captain then came back to the deck and took stock of the situation. The plane at this time was over the hudson bay in northern canada the ETOPS diversion at this point was the city of winnipeg. But the thing is the captains windshield was pretty badly damaged and they did not know if the fire would reappear. The closest airport to the plane that could handle a 777 was churchill airport in northern manitoba. Now im going to glaze my home province a bit, here are the things that chuchill has going for it, its got a runway that it 9195 foot runway that can accommodate a 777 in an emergency. Its very beautiful and its got more polar bears than people. But it is desolate, the town has a couple hundred people living there year round and landing a 777 189 people onboard into the town would immediately grow the population by about 30%. It also did not have a dedicated airport firefighting team and airport rescue was provided by the town of churchill. Making matters worse the ILS to runway 33 was not serviceable at this time, the pilots did not know this at the time. So with them partially in the dark they had to make a choice, push onto winnipeg with better infrastructure or land the jet at churchill that was 290 nm away. They had to think fast and they made the decision to divert to churchill, they would be landing their giant 777 in the middle of nowhere. The first officer recovered a binder that held all the documents they would need for this diversion . But this flight now got weirder, the binder was locked by this metal wire and a lead seal. The first officer could not for the life of him open the binder, making matters worse the air france had removed churchill from the list of approved diversion airports a year ago because the airport did not meet the ARFF requirement for ETOPS, so no one had really planned on how they would land a giant plane there. To make matters even worse they couldn't even get in touch with the winnipeg area control as they were too far away. The first officer transmitted a mayday call on 121.5 MHZ the guard frequency. This was picked up by a plane that was further along and then passed to the