True enough that Oxygen bottles, and even the liquefied kind, both industrial and medical, have very robust stop valves. But if one or more happens to be connected to a delivery system all bets are off. Breathing regulators are very easy to adjust the flow, some by just a bump of, say, a knee, gear bag, etc. I have regulators that can adjust from barely breathing to running a cutting torch. Some adjust with a tee handle. Some with a slider knob. Some just use a black knob with a tiny pointer and you have to actually look at the flow meter to know what it’s doing.
And who’s to say a regulator wasn’t connected and leaking oxy into the cabin for , maybe, days, ahead of the flight? That Mexican crew simply might not have been watching for such a thing since it’s not likely that this patient needed Oxy? There would not be an instrument panel readout on bottle status and there’s no smell, no noise, just a real rich atmosphere.
Unless the medevac plane was totally fly-by-night the oxy bottles would have been clamped into wall bracket arrangement. That eliminates handling individual bottles during flight, etc. That, in turn, requires a manifold arrangement to connect all the bottles. Any one valve can keep the system at the ready which would be desirable for hauling seriously injured folks.
They haven’t told us yet whether the plane was coming apart in the air. But the debris field seems to be large and might indicate that. And that’s more support for my notion that there was an event in the cabin that knocked the thing out of control? Something either jammed a yoke forward or broke the tail off. That’s my notion and I’m stickin’ to it.
My grandfather always burned all his trash. One day it was my turn. Somehow an aerosol can got in the trash. Boom! Luckily I wasn’t hurt.
Another time at a keg party someone threw the empty keg on the bonfire. You’ve never seen people run so fast.
-SB
***True enough that Oxygen bottles, and even the liquefied kind, both industrial and medical, have very robust stop valves.
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Does anyone know how large the O2 bottles were on this aircraft?
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If not a spark, there could have been an exploding lithium battery in a crew member's cell phone, or, in a piece of the monitoring equipment onboard. (Were there any exploding Mossad pagers onboard?)
And, don’t discount what a slowly enriching atmosphere does to human physiology...you get high and then pass out as the Ox increases.
A slow leak spreading into the operating cabin through the air system?