what about that greek crash about a year or year and a half ago where everyone in the plane was knocked unconscious and there were some escort jets that saw a stewardess franticly trying to manage the controls before it hit a mountain. i recall something about passengers txting people on the ground some time before the crash saying it was really cold

thats a freaky one, dont think the cause was ever discovered

this article coverts that

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helios_Airways_Flight_522

interestingly, it also says that the SMS from the plane passenger was a hoax

but yeah, its been quite a terrible accident

There's also the one where a 747's engines keep intermittently cutting out and restarting. At one point all engines were off and they were gliding.

Once they got onto the ground they found their paint job had been sandblasted by ash from a volcano eruption; they'd been flying right through the cloud, which is what had killed their engines.

two interesting sites about plane crashes, for someone who - like me - has too much free time and is interested in the subject, or is simply scared of flying

http://airdisaster.com/
http://planecrashinfo.com/

Well, if the cabin and cockpit seperate, there isn't anything left except what you use to control the plane. Even without power you can still control the plane using the rudders, ailerons and elevators. Besides, even with a parachute, the impact would probably break everyones back.

thanks for posting that, like i said, very freaky

Most of the bodies recovered were burned beyond visual identification by the fierce fires that raged for hours in the dry brush and grass covering the crash site. However, it was determined that a body found in the cockpit area was that of a female flight attendant[5], suggesting that she was indeed trying to prevent a crash. DNA testing revealed that the blood on the aircraft controls was that of flight attendant Andreas Prodromou, a novice private pilot, suggesting he was the other person the F-16 pilots saw in the pilot's seat. Autopsies on the crash victims showed that all were alive and maintained cardiac and respiratory function upon impact, but it could not be determined whether they were conscious at the time.

The investigation showed that the cockpit door was locked during the flight. However, in the last few minutes of the flight, as the engines consumed the last drops of fuel, power was cut to several parts of the plane, including the cockpit door. This resulted in the door unlocking, giving access to the two.[6]

The two flight attendants most likely didn't know the code as the purser had probably already lost consciousness. It is speculated that they had retained their awareness using oxygen bottles.

you'd be really suprised when you knew the possibilities for big planes to land.
The can land on their belly, on dirt, roads, fields and yes even on water......
the only crucial part during landing is the speed they have when touching
down. If they can keep the speed low before touching down a lot of other
stuff can go wrong without causing hundreds of casualties.

There's a documentary that shows the abuse to a plane it is required to
withstand before it will get approved for use as commercial airliner. That
shit is unreal those test pilots have titanium bowling size balls as well as
insane flying skills.

plus i think there are issues with parachutes on jets. they have them on some small aircraft, but i think there would be major stress issues, when diploying a parachute on a jet going 500 miles per hour (or whatever speed)

one more interesting point as it relates to this thread is that in the cases where the compensation is determined for crash victims, the length of time that they are aware they are going to die plays a major factor in amount of compensation. for instance, if the passengers find out 10 seconds before its X amount, if they find out 2 min before, it could be 3 times what X is

heh interesting

btw whats the compensation for survivors? lets say 200 people die and 5 surive? ocassionally it happens...

edit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Airlines_Flight_123

japan airlines accident in 1985 - 520 fatalities! and 4 survivors!

well, my first thought is, "they got it" :)


but good question, i guess it would all depend on how convincing their attorney is ;-)

but i really have no idea

I think all the compensation ends up in a class action type thing that gets drawn out forever and then paid in small pieces over the course of a period of years. Probably not enough to really work out that well unless you play it smart. I guess just being happy to be alive isn't good enough for some people.

are you talking about me? come on, it was just a hypothetical question

but seriously, why not get somethign of it? you get one Million from McDonalds cause your coffee was too hot... so I'd expect a survivor of a serious plane crash would get something too.... not to mention that he obviously would be quite likely severly injured as well ... it's not that 200 people die and 1 superman survives without any sratches :) if there are a few survivors in a big plane crash, they must be severly hurt

No, I wasn't speaking to anyone specifically, I was just saying in general. I can understand getting paid if you were injured to the point where it kept you from working again, but the whole money for "mental anguish" or whatever is total bullshit. Just say it like it is, suing to be lazy and live off someone elses money. It's lame. Honestly, being alive when 400 other people you were with died would be such a life changing event, I'm not sure money would even matter.

Yeah, we never heard what the conclusion was.....

that's the main safety related problem in jet transport.

the stall speed (touch down speed) is so high (maybe like 125mph) that simple physics causes lots of damage when things go wrong.

if you have to crash land an airplane and you want to walk away from it without a scratch a single engine cessna with a stall speed of under 50mph (and even less ground speed if you land into the wind) is the way to go because a competent pilot can dead stick one in and get it stopped in 300-400 ft, not the two miles that a jetliner might need to get stopped.

Watch this video you fuckin retard and think yourself lucky we have people that are educated enough to do such a thing.
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=7ae_1183872776

Cars are like airplanes, only much larger and much more complicated. The difference is when your car breaks down you can pull over. When an airplane breaks down...... your going down. Period.

Just look at that huge case against GM a few years ago. Their cost-benefit analysis concluded that it would be cheaper to pay out any potential lawsuits rather than fix a known design flaw.

http://www.citizen.org/congress/civj...les.cfm?ID=570

The people were originally awarded $4.9bn but it was later reduced to a little over $1bn. Guess they calculated wrong. Big business can be sickening at the best of times.

Bilo, the vast majority of aviation accidents are related to poor maintenance and negligence. In those instances you can bet your ass the airline should be liable for mental anguish. Okay, so Joe Citizen might not die, but maybe his wife did. Or how about the guy sitting behind him who died and left behind a family? All because an airline decided to ignore the recommendations of a manufacturer to save an insignificant amount of money each year.

Hell, even if you survive and have no connection to anyone else on the flight, you don't think the smell of burning human flesh, or the sight of dismembered bodies is sufficient mental anguish? You'd happily walk away without compensation when more than likely, it was the fault of the airline that caused the accident? Bullshit.

for sure....

That must have made a hell of a noise, both inside the aircraft and in the surrounding area. :helpme

Wow nice vid.

BTW did you guys hear about the Brazilian airplane crash update? It appeared that the plane was indeed technical not okay. The reverse power of the engines did not work. But TAM(the airliner) said that Airbus said that was not a reason for not flying. So they just let it flew....

And i was already nervous about flying ...

Saturday evening, perfect time to bump a thread about plane crashes

One thing that bugs me about plane crashes is being in them.

One thing that bugs me about plane crashes is, you know how when a plane goes down and gets trashed, the first thing they go looking for is that black box which is almost always intact, right?

Why don't they make the whole plane out of that black box material? :D

I'm a private pilot and fly small single engine aircraft.

As someone mentioned above, airplanes are as complicated as it gets and pilots do not necessarily know the mechanics of the bird. Sure, they can fly it safely, but when the shit hits the fan it is a whole different story. If the emergency is serious, both pilots will be concentrated on keeping everyone alive. However, there might be some emergencies where you have margins, like the Helios flight, and this is where one concentrates on the problem while the other flies the plane.

According to the last info I read on Helios, the official report claimed that the pressurization switch was set to MANUAL instead of AUTO and the cabin was not pressurized. In the B737, the pressurization switch must be checked on startup, before takeoff and after takeoff, so it is highly unlikely that the pilots missed it, but let's go with this version.

After 10,000 ft the air gets too thin to be able to breathe and people in commercial flights rely on pressurization to be able to do so. When passing 9000 ft, an alarm sounded on that Helios flight alerting the crew that there was a problem. The problem is that there isn't an alarm for each system, so only the MASTER CAUTION sounded. This alarm may sound for a number of reasons, so if the cause is not immediately recognized, it is time to hit the books.

The oxygen masks on Helios dropped at about 13,000 ft, but the plane continued to climb to 34,000 ft. This is the greatest mystery of all and quite unexplainable, unless the pilots were already crippled by hypoxia (shortage of oxygen in the blood which causes disorientation, miscoordination, etc.)

So you have two pilots with hypoxia in the cockpit with an alarm going off, neither of them can find immediate apparent causes nor are they aware that they're suffering from hypoxia, the co-pilot starts reading the book and trying to make sense of anything until he passes out. Its a recipe for disaster. If they couldn't dive the plane to a safe altitude (below 10,000 ft) to get oxygen, there's little chance that they were thinking about landing the plane.

Night-time emergencies are even more fucked up because you can't see anything below and on really dark nights, it is hard to fly a plane without an artificial horizon. That being said, it is nearly impossible to pick a safe place to land since you don't know what is below you.

FYI, some time last year, a British Airways 747 from NY to London had an engine failure shortly after takeoff. The pilots called in to their operations center and they were instructed to continue the transoceanic flight with only 3 engines. They adjusted the rudder to compensate for the difference in thrust and flew the whole leg like that. They had to land in some other UK airport because they were running out of fuel since the rudder trim created parasite drag and they needed more power than usual to fly at the same speed.

Any time you fly, it is likely the airplane you board does not have all the systems working, specially on older models. There's a tolerance level and only in severe cases, the plane is tagged as NO-GO. I've heard of pilots flying daytime without artificial horizons which is an absolute suicide if you're caught in the clouds.

If you guys are interested in seeing just how fucked up the airline business is, I suggest you check out Whisky Romeo Zulu and Fuerza Aerea SA. Both are films by an argentinian ex-pilot-turned-filmmaker and he calls out all the crazy things he lived and saw while being a captain of a 737-200 for Aerolíneas Argentinas.

If people only knew...

Too heavy. It would require half of the Persian Gulf to power an LAX to NY flight :1orglaugh

O'rly?

I heard that black box shit was light. :D

It is, but if you compare it to the standards and materials that planes are built with, it is too heavy.

But was the humor of it lost completely on you? :D

interesting - just read/skimmed it

looks like one of a few crashes where no evident cause for the accident was found....

Also someone explain to me why the 2 black boxes (voice and data recoders) only record the last 30 mins? Those things cant record more...

In more than 1 case i heard the investigators say too bad we only have the last 30 minutes as there were problems before that already.

Its 2007, we can record fucking anything for as long as we can but we cant record voice and flight data longer than 30 mins???

Franck you should be the new president of the International Airlines Association (ok, just made this name up)

IM not sure how far this plan was carried out, But I believe Roosevelt passed a law that ordered every state that had highways under construction, to build them with every X number of miles completely straight. So in the event of a war time emergency, they could land aircraft on the road ways. So at least in the US, they have a place to land some of those.


Not sure where I read that, or when.

From memory that was caused by the perfect concentration of fuel vapors and oxygen (a relatively narrow window) ignited by a spark from the fuel quantity sender inside the centre tank.

Even though the front part of the aircraft broke off, the remainder was still in powered flight for some time. People who were not injured in the initial explosion would have had an absolutely terrifying ride before their section hit the sea. :(

It is false for the US, but Cuba does have highways that double as emergency landing strips.