Yesterday was hardly just another day of commuting by air for the passengers of Frontier Airlines flight 1326 who were traveling from Phoenix to Las Vegas. The flight had reportedly made the trip without incident until they were preparing to touch down at Harry Reid International Airport. At that point, the pilots reported smelling smoke coming from the interior of the aircraft. Horrified passengers looking out the windows reported seeing clouds of billowing smoke coming from the underside of the plane just as it was touching down on the runway. It quickly became obvious that the underside of the plane had erupted in fire. The pilots declared an emergency and taxied toward their scheduled landing area, where the flames were extinguished and the passengers were evacuated from the plane using emergency exits. Thankfully, no injuries were reported. (NY Post)

A plane burst into flames as it landed at a Las Vegas airport on Saturday, as the Frontier Airlines flight experienced a “hard landing”, viral video shows.

Billows of smoke and flames shot out from the area of the landing gear of Frontier Airlines flight 1326 as it landed at Harry Reid International Airport in Las Vegas, Nevada, according to reports.

Frontier Airlines says their pilots smelled the smoke and immediately declared an emergency but it’s unclear if they knew the severity of the fire.

Tyler Hendrick was waiting for another flight when he caught the fiery mess on video.

Frontier flight 1326 from KSAN-KLAS just caught fire on landing at KLAS.

I caught it on video as it landed pic.twitter.com/KGt1Asx3rv

— Tyler (@TylerHerrick) October 5, 2024

The fire was later attributed to a "hard landing." That doesn't make a lot of sense, at least at first glance. That would have needed to have been a seriously hard landing to result in a jetliner of that type literally bursting into flames. So what causes a failure of that magnitude under what are typically tightly controlled conditions? Those planes are built to resist fires as much as is possible and, as you can see in the video, these flames appeared to burst from out of nowhere and rapidly engulf the lower section of the aircraft. 

If you've been following the various air disasters taking place this year, one of the first questions to cross your mind might be how Boeing fits into this dramatic scenario. But that wasn't the case in this incident. While the linked report doesn't mention the plane's maker or model, SeatGuru tracks the various plane models used by all of the smaller-volume airlines and Frontier exclusively flies Airbus craft. They are in the minority in that regard, as Boeing supplies most of the American-based airlines.

An investigation is ongoing and there is at least one thing that we can all be grateful for. "Smokecatchers" along with other fire suppression technologies were quickly brought to bear on the crippled flight and all of the emergency exit technology functioned perfectly. Had they not, a significant technological failure could have evolved quickly into a human tragedy. But more will need to be learned about precisely what went wrong here and how it spun out of control so quickly. This serves as yet another reminder that we still have a long way to go in terms of securing safety for air travel passengers no matter how advanced our technology has become.