by Francois 26 Replies latest jw friends
Did any of you see this story in the London Times, I believe it was? A Russian-built cargo plane was taking Zimbabweian army troups along with their families to a new location. There was a catastrophic failure in the pressurization system which blew off the two giant cargo doors in the back of the plane creating a gigantic vacuum which sucked out every passanger on board, 129 people, at 7,000 feet - about a mile and a quarter up over Congo I think it was.
This story made my skin crawl.
francois
Yes Francois, I just read this in the weekend Globe & Mail newspaper.
When I read what happened, I shuddered. Awful!
Sad...sad indeed.
I hated flying before I even heard this on the news..... Tragic, those poor people.
Take a look at the nearest clock, and watch 35 seconds go by.
That's about how long it would take for a person to go from 7,000 feet to 0 feet.
I read that story the other day. Very sad because families were involved. A similar incident occured in Hawaii a few years back and they made a TV movie out of it.
Guest 77
Um, no, I missed it, but thanks for sharing!
Francois,
"If you can't do something about it, why worry? .. if you can do something about it, why worry?"
Dali Lama (who can be a real prick sometimes)
unclebruce
ps: I need more information - ie: was the FASTEN SEAT BELT sign on?
Unclebruce, this plane was a cargo plane, so seating was extremely limited thus, most of the people that were sadly and unfortunately sucked out of the plane due to intense decompression, were probably crammed at the back of the plane.
There was seating for a limited amount of people, I believe, less than 20.
So the folks who were crammed in the plane were simply at the mercy of some unforseeable fate.
Such a pity. But the very plane in question had had many safety problems, including one very devastating crash several years ago, killing several hundred people.
There are some interesting news links via: http://www.yahoo.com and of course:
It was a military carrier (one of those ancient Soviet jobs), and the backside fell open. Ouch.
Sorry guys but at ten thousand feet decompression will not suck you out, most aircraft are pressurised to about 8 to 10 thousand feet when flying at 28 thousand or there abouts so even if this aircraft was flying at 10thousand the pressure differential would have been minimal. The aircraft involved was an il76 russian built transport which is big but not huge and has fold out seats for about 120 paratroopers which makes me think they were grossly overloaded and they simply fell out especially if they were sitting on the inside of the clamshell rear doors.
