Air Crashes

crosspost

What, you think it not?

i.e. Do you think the nature of the accident is strange (unusual, yes, strange, not really, as I mentioned, its happened before), or do you mean it's strange that people have an idea of what happened but haven't had it officially confirmed yet (that's not strange at all, in my book)?

That "Farewell, cousin. Here we're freezing" text was a hoax apparently. I KNEW IT. Well, I suspected it. I should have rung the Greek authorities with my suspicions.

Also the pilots in the 2 Greek fighters that met up with it said they could see the copilot slumped over in his seat, the pilot was not in the cockpit, and two people were up and trying to do something. This is surely unsettling to see when there's nothing you can do about it, and you know they will all be killed.

Yes, but things go wrong with big complicated bits of machinery. What is strange is that it doesn't go wrong more often. Has this sort of accident happened before, apart from the Payne Stewart incident I mentioned already upthread?

(I take it the "fear of flying" folk aren't reading this).

You've all been watching "Lost" and think it's quite easy for the back to fall off a plane and it still to land with half the plane intact and half the passengers alive, haven't you?

Apparently the time frame for people to successfully use those oxygen masks once pressure is lost is like seconds.

One of the cable channels had a day-long bonanza on air disasters. Did anyone see the plane whose top blew off and it still managed to land? It was creepy.

No, the Greek one was a Boeing 737 and the Columbian one was a McDonnell-Douglas MD-82. The flight recorders from the Greek one have apparently been found.

There wouldn't have to be a hull breach for the plane to decompress. The cabin air pressurization system, which takes pressurized air from the core of the jet engines and cools it and mixes it with the existing cabin air, could have failed. The emergency oxygen systems don't respond to the actual level of O2 in the air, only a drop in cabin pressure to dangerous levels (around 15,000 feet?). If the O2 had been dropping over time to the danger level, people would have been hypoxic by the time the O2 alarms came in, slowing their response times.

I've been catching up on back episodes of Air Crash Investigations and the show on the 1987 crash of South African Airways 295 is pretty spooky.

Fire breaks out in a 747's cargo area (it was outfitted with a main deck cargo section in addition to the ones below), smoke fills the cabin, the main hatch is opened in an attempt to ventilate the smoke, and then nothing. A few bodies are found (all of which perished from smoke inhalation instead of the impact) and some scant debris. A year passes until the full wreckage is found 5000m below the Indian Ocean. There's rumors that the plane was carrying rocket fuel that might have ignited inflight (apparently the SA government shipped arms aboard passenger planes to avoid sanctions) but no conclusive proof (and really no conclusive proof of what the cargo was)

Anyway, if you follow this series at all - this is a good episode and there's a ton of additional documents on Scribd

Kids in the hall tell the real Buddy Holly story.

Ack that actually doesn't work.

Here we go.

A dash cam picked up the crash of a National Air Cargo 747 a couple of days ago at Bagram Field in Afghanistan. Trigger warnings ahead...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQyYf9I53JA

Shit.

One of the great lessons learned from big systems failure accidents like Qantas 72 is that everything, up to and including civilization itself, is just one long beta test.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qantas_Flight_72

Great podcast about the scandal surrounding the crash of the Air New Zealand jet into Mt. Erebus in Antarctica:
https://interactives.stuff.co.nz/2019/11/white-silence-podcast/