Posted on 09/25/2007 4:18:21 PM PDT by George from New England
MOSCOW, September 24 (RIA Novosti) - A 15-year-old boy from the Urals suffered acute frostbite after riding the wing of a Boeing-737 plane on a two-hour flight from Perm to Moscow, Russian radio station Mayak reported on Monday.
After clinging on for the entire 1300-kilometer (808-mile) flight to Vnukova Airport, the boy, named Andrei, collapsed onto the tarmac. His arms and legs were so severely frozen that rescuers were at first unable to remove his coat and shoes, the radio station said.
The airport did not confirm the report. "We have no information on this," the Vnukovo press service told RIA Novosti.
However, Moscow's air and water transport control department said the radio's claim was true. A department spokesman said the incident occurred on Friday, and that the boy's parents were immediately informed, and flew to the capital the same day.
Doctors said it was nothing short of a miracle that Andrei survived the flight, with temperatures hitting minus 50 degrees Celsius (-58 Fahrenheit), the radio station said. The Boeing-737 has a cruising speed of 900 kmh (560 mph).
The boy reportedly made the journey after a commonplace domestic dispute. Angry with his father, who reportedly has a drinking problem, and with his mother for siding with her husband in family rows, Andrei ran away to the neighboring village, where his grandmother lives. On reaching the village, he decided to go on, and hitched a 220-km (137-mile) ride to the regional center, Perm, where he was dropped off at the airport.
It remains unclear how Andrei was able to climb on a plane wing un-noticed, and the Perm Airport security service is being asked some serious questions, the radio station said.
Andrei is now being treated in a Moscow hospital, Radio Mayak said.
Best use of the old bat this week!!!
This myth -- that the Bernoulli effect is what causes lift -- is so pervasive that even most pilots and geeky engineer types believe it. What actually happens is that the airfoil moves through the air at a slightly nose-up angle causing the air to be directed slightly downwards as it flows by. An "equal and opposite reaction" to the downward flow then occurs in the form of a lifting force. So it's actually an airflow vectoring effect, not Bernoulli, that lifts a plane.
The classical demonstration of the Bernoulli effect is to blow air over a strip of paper and watch as it rises, but actually this disproves the Bernoulli effect and proves the vectoring effect instead! If Bernoulli were the operative mechanism the strip would continue to rise and curl towards your face. But what actually happens is the strip rises till it's almost level and then rises no further. This is because the laminar flow is no longer directed downward, as it was when the paper was drooping, but rather outward and therefore not creating any lift.
That lift is caused by airflow vectoring is why symmetrical airfoils can work. It's also why the Wright brothers wing worked. Their airfoil seen in cross section was a curved line, not a volume-containing curve, so the air above and below the wing travelled the same distance. Since the Bernoulli effect requires the upper and lower flow to travel different distances (and therefore at different speeds), Bernoulli couldn't be what lifted the Wright brothers' aircraft. It actually was vectoring, just as it is on modern aircraft.
Pretty crazy, huh?
it’s not a matter of where it grips it... it’s a simple matter of weight ratios... a 4 ounce bird cannot carry a 5 pound coconut...
teeman8r
I don’t believe it!
In the Woody Allen film, Radio Days, a woman has a seizure when seeing one of the neighborhood girls giving a goodnight kiss to "a tall colored man."
The woman's body was frozen in position just as she was raising a cup of tea to her lips. She was transported to the hospital with that cup still at her lips. The people at the hospital said that they had never seen anything like it.
I always wondered why Boeing built the B-17 and her sisters with a symmetrical airfoil, while the other heavy lifter of the era, the B-24, had a very advanced airfoil design. And for several reasons, the B-24 did outlift and outrange the B-17, but was more vulnerable to enemy fire.
Pretty crazy, huh?
Makes perfect sense actually.
When I was about ten years old I got a flight lesson for my birthday. The instructor gave me a brief blackboard lecture on lift that centered on the Bernoulli principle. Seems like I’ve also had science and physics textbooks that described lift according to Bernoulli. Maybe they’re getting it right in the aero texts though. I guess the proof’s in the pudding — there are some pretty good planes being built. That wouldn’t be the case if the engineers had the concept all wrong.
I would imagine that on approach with the flaps down, the air is getting directed downward pretty radically. In fact, the volume of air that would have to be going downward in order to generate an upward force strong enough to float a plane at low speed would have to be huge.
Seems doubtful. You might survive that temperature bundled up with no wind...but with 500 MPH winds on top of it, he’d be an iceberg.
The windchill from being in a -58 degree F environment with 500 MPH winds is -164 degrees. There’s no friggin way he’d survive that.
Yeah, that's true. It fits nicely with how common sense says a wing ought to work. I always found Bernoulli hard to believe, even when I believed it.
Was he holding on really tight? This is bogus.
Damned superglue.
But seriously folks the flight wasn’t that bad infact you could say it was a breeze!
My grandpa told me a story once how when his father was about 15 he decided to hitch a ride on a train ( a distance about 20 miles) But instead of hopping on a cart he clung on to the underside of the train and held on the entire way. When the train finally stopped he was covered in ash and had minor burns from all the cinders.
And boy are his arms tired.
From the article to which you provided the link - -
Andrey’s mother arrived in Moscow and took her son back home to Perm because the family could not afford the expensive treatment in Russia’s capital. A doctor from the Perm hospital, where the boy is staying at the moment, said that the tissue of the boy’s hands started dying away, which may make surgeons amputate both hands of the extreme passenger.
The other thing I have noticed is that Sea level dwellers may have a lower blood oxygen level at 8000' feet than I do at 16,000'. The whole hypoxia thing seems to be very individual specific, but on the whole I think that the FAR's are a very good idea.
There is no way a human being can hold on to a wing in 500 mph winds...
Maybe he did the wheel well thing?
They didn’t say it was that cold for all, or even much of the flight time. That was just the coldest it reached at all.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.