Posted on 04/19/2018 11:05:50 AM PDT by CedarDave
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Many were horrified on Tuesday upon learning an Albuquerque woman was killed after being partially pulled out of a plane when a nearby window was smashed by debris from an exploding engine.
“Two words: extremely rare,” said Alan Diehl, a former air safety investigator with the National Transportation Safety Board, Federal Aviation Administration and U.S. Air Force, of incidents involving passengers being pulled from planes in flight.
But on Nov. 3, 1973, a similar scenario unfolded on a flight over southwest New Mexico heading from Houston to Las Vegas, Nev.
Then, a Texas man died after he was pulled entirely from the plane when an engine on a National Airlines DC-10 flight blew up. G.F. Gardner, 47, of Beaumont, Texas, was pulled from the plane at 40,000 feet over an area near Magdalena.
His skeletal remains were found two years later during construction of the Very Large Array radio telescope near Socorro.
“That engine literally fell apart,” passenger David Drucker told the Journal in a Nov. 5, 1973, article.
The plane made an emergency landing at the Albuquerque airport, and 24 of the 127 surviving passengers and crew members were treated for smoke inhalation, ear problems and minor abrasions, according to the 1975 accident report by the National Transportation Safety Board.
(Excerpt) Read more at abqjournal.com ...
Good idea to buckle up, then.
So is once in 45 years closer to “rare” or closer to “frequent”?
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Once every 45 years sounds pretty rare to me.
Pretty rapid decompression but once it’s equalized there is no problem walking near it. Would be windy, loud and stuff blowing around - just keep the O2 mask on.
yes, using the word “But” as though it undermines the preceding statement of rarity looks weird.
Cue the golden harp.
—and , IIRC, a passenger was blown out of a British Comet in the early days of jet passenger aircraft-—
You need only go back to 1990, British Airways Flight 5390
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOcm6E10anI
In this accident, the cockpit window blew out due to faulty installation and the pilot’s upper body was sucked out of the plane, the only thing that saved him was getting his feet caught up in the control yoke (which put the plane into a dive). Amazingly he survived and was back at work 5 months later.
WEAR YOUR SEATBELT!!!
The venturi effect of air rushing past that small opening at 400mph would definitely create a continuous suction. How much? Certainly enough to suck a piece of paper out the window, but would it be enough to continue sucking a person out? I don’t know.
I remember that story of the accident in NM.
The way I remembered it the mans remains were never found.
Glad to hear he was eventually found.
Quick thinking [seat-belted] passengers managed to grab a flight attendant on her way up and out, as I recall.
Yeah, I think that's when engineers figured out that maybe airplanes shouldn't have right-angle openings and stress points, but rather round/oval ones like the ones designed for ships and subs.
wasn’t there a Myth Busters episode that covered this topic?
“WEAR YOUR SEATBELT!!!”
That would only help if the pot metal or plastic seats stay bolted down.
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