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Posted on 04/02/2011 9:16:29 AM PDT by Paleo Conservative
(Reuters) - Southwest Airlines grounded 81 aircraft from its Boeing 737 fleet for inspection after a gaping hole in the fuselage forced one of its planes to make emergency landing in Arizona on Friday, the company said on Saturday.
Southwest (LUV.N) and Boeing (BA.N) engineers will inspect the aircraft to try to determine the cause, Southwest said in a statement. Passengers heard a loud noise and suddenly saw a hole about mid-cabin.
Southwest Airlines is working with the National Transportation Safety Board and the Federal Aviation Administration on the ground in Arizona to determine the cause of a sudden drop in cabin pressure on Southwest Flight 812 from Phoenix to Sacramento on Friday, airline officials said.
(Excerpt) Read more at reuters.com ...
The same thing (but worse) happened some years ago to a flight near the Hawaiian islands. A stewardess got sucked out and was lost in the Pacific Ocean. No explosives involved- it was a metal fatigue issue, if I recall correctly.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aloha_Airlines_Flight_243
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OMG. Thanks for that link. That must have been a terrifying plunge. Sure it’s meant to save them, and allow breathing again, but I might have died of a heart attack lol.
I’m no expert, so I can’t answer whether people can be sucked out of a man-sized hole. I just Tweeted this to Barney Frank to get his opinion. /sarc
ROFLOL!! Sooo not expecting that line. I'll be in the ER..recovering :)
The cause of the loss of cabin pressure is the big frickin' hole in the side of the jet. What they want to do is find the root cause of the structural failure. Reporters are idiots.
Could have been worse. In 1988, a flight stewardess flew out the window at 20k feet when the fuselage broke apart mid-flight.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Aloha_Airlines_Flight_243_fuselage.png
The hole was overhead, so the wind would have to be strong enough to lift a person straight up. Decompression would have been complete in a second or so with a hole that big.
“Passengers heard a loud noise and suddenly saw a hole about mid-cabin.”
A loud noise? All of the local station passenger interviews are reporting an explosion or pop similar to a shot gun blast.
The hole in the ceiling is for the unloading of passengers only, no parking.
They lost a flight attendant from the Aloha Airlines flight in the 1980s, so the answer is “yes”, people can be sucked out.
There is also a case of a pilot being sucked out when a cockpit window failed and the co-pilot had to fly solo (saw it on the show Air Emergency, don’t remember the year or airline). The pilot lost consciousness nearly instantly. I hope for his sake he never woke up.
That was Aloha Airlines and one stewardess was sucked out because she wasn't in a seat. ALL the passengers survived even though the aircraft looked like a convertible with the top down. The idea that you will be sucked out of the hole or that the aircraft goes into an unrecoverable dive is an invention of Hollywood.
Flight Attendant - Would you like some peanuts? Cookies? Aluminum patch?”
Get used to this kind of stuff folks. We’re going to see more and more of it. Reminds me of all the accidents in the old Soviet Union because no one was really doing their jobs.
In our case, Obama has hijacked the resources of the entire federal apparatus to focus on implementing his ideologies, so there are very few resources left for the various federal departments to do their actual jobs of helping to protect the public. Does anyone here realy think the Department of Justice, FBI, ATF, Department of Homeland Security, FDA, FAA, HSS, Department of Education, Department of Transportation and all the rest are focused on what’s good for the citizens of the U.S.? Or are they all focused on implementing Obama’s ideology instead?
There was one not long ago where a crack that you could see daylight through was discovered during boarding. Several people saw it, gave it a funny look, and kept walking back to get seated. One guy grabbed a flight attendant, told her he isn’t flying on this one, and told her to go tell the captain. That jet was grounded.
Holy cow.
The people in that plane appear to be too calm. I’d have the oxygen mask on and the guy seated next to me would be sitting in the aisle with a surprised look on his face while I held his seat cushion screaming, “My personal flotation device! My personal flotation device!”
So many classic lines from that movie - that “conversation” may be the best esp when they began to argue. Truly a ROTFL moment.
It isn’t the age of the aircraft so much as it is the cycles on the airframe. Southwest is a short haul airlines, those acft go through many cycles a day. What happened is a crack induced by metal fatigue. The aging aircraft inspection initiative got put on the back burner when planes quit breaking in half (Eastern in the US and several European carriers overseas) and the tops quit blowing off planes like the Aloha flight.
A lot of the improvement came because noise requirements caused older planes to be retired. The current fleet has now aged, and the problem has resurfaced.
LOL!
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