Posted on 06/18/2009 12:58:32 PM PDT by Steelfish
Found: Galley kitchen from doomed Air France flight discovered floating intact in middle of Atlantic
By Mail Foreign Service 18th June 2009
[Pics in URL] Floating in the middle of the Atlantic, this galley kitchen is the latest piece of Air France Flight 447 to be recovered by salvage crews.
The wreckage is extraordinarily intact despite being part of an plane that experts believe broke apart in midair.
Even some of the drawers, containing a selection of ready-meals for passengers, remained wedged securely inside the unit
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
Usually though, if it’s a bomb, the loonies are lining up around the block taking credit for it. We haven’t heard a peep from the malcontents.
How many were involved in this search with the best technology?
Back in the good old days when smoking on planes was legal (in the back of the plane), smokers were frequently the only survivors of plane crashes.
Again, this assumes the plane broke apart in the air, and not after hitting the water. Collor me skeptical so far to that assumption.
>>The tail is basically a little plane all by itself.
Could you elaborate?
Yes, she fell about 30K feet and lived, as I recall?
Supposedly a stewardess lived fromr Ron Brown’s plane crash in Bosnia too- but died enroute to hospital from punctured artery
When flying overseas in military deployments, we used to joke about sitting in back because “They always recover the tail section”
Vesna Vulovic -— The Woman Who Fell to Earth
[plane bombed at 33,000 ft and she lived, spiraling down in tail]
On January 26, 1972, a 22-year-old flight attendant named Vesna Vulovic was not where she was supposed to be. She was cruising at 33,330 feet above Czechoslovakia (now Czech Republic) in a DC-9 airplane, but her schedule had been mixed up with that of another stewardess named Vesna, and she was subsequently placed on the wrong flight. But Vesna was happy for the mistake; it afforded her the opportunity to see Denmark, and to stay in a Sheraton Hotel, which she had always dreamed of doing. But the mix up was not so fortuitous as it seemed.
A terrorist group known as Ustashe had placed a powerful explosive on this particular plane. The Ustache was a far-right nazi/fascist group in Croatia which was implicated in over two dozen terrorist attacks against Yugoslavia after World War 2. Vesna’s flight, JAT Yugoslav Flight 364, was with an airline based in Yugoslavia.
While passing over the city of Srbska-Kamenice, the explosive device detonated. The DC-9 was torn into pieces, and the plane’s wreckage, along with its 28 passengers, fell through the sky for three long minutes before striking a frozen mountainside.
A German man, upon arriving at the crash site, found all of the plane’s passengers dead, save one. Vesna was lying half outside of the plane, with another crew member’s body on top of her, and a serving cart pinned against her spine. The man had been a medic in the second world war, and did what he could for her until further help arrived.
At the hospital, her parents were told that although there was still life in her body, she would not survive. Her skull was broken and hemorrhaging, both of her legs were broken, and she had three crushed vertebrae. But three days later, she awoke from her coma, and asked for a cigarette.
Vesna was paralyzed from the waist down, but she was alive and conscious. Two weeks after the accident, her doctor told her what had happened, and gave her a newspaper to read the story, but the memory of this event would escape her, as did everything from one hour before the accident to one month after, due to amnesia. Later, she underwent surgery that restored movement to her left leg, and a month after that, she regained movement in her right leg. Eventually, she was able to walk again.
By the following September, she was eager to go back to work, but to avoid publicity, the airline gave her a desk job. She never suffered any psychological trauma as a result of the incident, and never experienced any fear of flying. She is still alive today, and flies with some regularity. She has a positive philosophy on life, stating, “I believe we are masters of our lives - we hold all the cards and it is up to us to use them right.”
Her good fortune in surviving the accident is most likely due to her low blood pressure, which caused her to pass out quickly and prevented her heart from bursting. But despite her positive outlook on life, Vesna does not consider herself lucky. Thirty years after the crash, she said to Philip Baum in an interview, “I’m not lucky. Everybody thinks I am lucky, but they are mistaken. If I were lucky I would never had this accident and my mother and father would be alive. The accident ruined their lives too.” It’s a valid point, along the same lines as arguing that the event wasn’t a “miracle,” given that there were 27 people who didn’t survive. The assertion that “it could be worse” is small comfort to the pragmatic, because certainly, it could also be much better.
Vesna currently holds the Guinness World Record for the highest fall survived without a parachute, at 33,330 feet.
http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=18
It would reach terminal velocity after a few 1000 feet and for something that shape with a lot of drag, (and obviously low density -- it floats) it probably hit the water at around 100 mph or so. Fast, but not 'very' high speed. As to 'damage' it's hard to tell.
Yes, see post below yours.
Guiness book world record holder.
“we” don’t know what the French govt and intelligence service may have heard. Not all terror “messages” are intended for the general public- just for the “crusader” Sarkozy
Sure, think about a tail of a typical plane -— horizontal stabilizers and a verticle stabilizers.
The stabilizers are as big (or bigger) as the wings on a small private plane. You chop of the tail of a plane and the tail will either glide or spiral rather gently to the ground.
The utmost tail of a plane is, by far, the most survivable part of a large passenger plane, IMHO, for this reason (and because the front of the plane sucks up the impact even if the plane does not break up).
It also happens to be the loudest in a lot of planes, which is why the cheap seats are there.
I think this one is going to end up relegated to the same “unsolved” status as TWA Flight 800.
Eerie it is. Thanks for the pic post!
Take a bow.
That “big floating piece” is only about 8 ft wide, assuming the handles on the food tray bins are 5” wide.
True. But usually it’s something like make demands or threaten to do it again, that sort of rubbish. And remember that often they don’t go to the intelligence services, they go directly to the media. Who may or may not make it public before contacting authorities.
Yeah, lookin at the picture, the two in Row 43 probably drowned, which sucks.
Sit in the back, planes do not back into mountains.
Vince
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