Posted on 04/02/2011 12:50:50 PM PDT by Yaelle
(Reuters) - Southwest Airlines (LUV.N) said it expected to cancel 300 flights scheduled for Saturday to allow inspections of 79 aircraft from its Boeing 737 fleet, after one of its planes made an emergency landing with a gaping hole in the fuselage.
Passengers aboard Southwest Flight 812 from Phoenix to Sacramento on Friday heard a loud noise and the hole appeared suddenly at about mid cabin, forcing the pilot to land at a military base in Yuma, Arizona.
[Read more at link]
(Excerpt) Read more at reuters.com ...
Bravo to the pilot and crew for bringing the plane home. Isn’t incredible that it landed safely???
Looks like damage from an explosive device in the overhead compartment.
There's not enough info in the article to even begin to guess.
What is odd is that SW is grounding 79 planes(300 revenue generating flights) to inspect them.
Odd because that is what they should do.
Mostly likely, this is metal fatigue that was missed in inspections.
Metal fatigue comes from the number of “cycles” (ups and downs) an aircraft makes that keeps expanding and contracting the material.
Like a detonator going off, but not igniting the explosives.
Did the passengers & crew report any noises to explain the hole? i.e. popping, explosion or metal cracking?
Oooops - the type of loud noise????
It’s not very comforting to think that planes can just burst leaks like this...
Uh.... read the article.
Without any other information, it would seem your supposition is the most logical, as I don't see them grounding 300 flights so quickly unless they are reasonably sure the incident was likely some kind of mechanical 'failure'.
Reality: Its just a thin aluminum tube.
Why do you think most of the doors do not open on a crash-landing? That tube kinks and the doors are jammed.
Yeah... usually the tail just falls off, or one of the engines explodes.
Because they are locked very securely and designed not to 'burst' open during a crash landing.
>Did the passengers & crew report any noises to explain the hole? i.e. popping, explosion or metal cracking?
On the Yahoo original news, the “awake” passengers who knew to place the oxygen masks on their faces, reported that everyone, including the crew started “dropping like flies” due to the lack of oxygen. By the time some one saw “a hole where they can see the sky”, it was game over. Kudos to the pilot.
P.S. I’m not trying to be rude, but it is a very short article, and would answer your question, which is a much better source of knowledge than just blindly accepting MY opinion of what the passengers said or heard.
Their biggest fear is that it is something that was missed in the last airframe inspection.
Planes are nothing more than pressure vessels only a pressure vessel is usually pressurized very few times in comparison to an aircraft. Planes go through multiple cycles daily. Fatigue and corrosion are the main culprits. Southwest is known for utilizing older aircraft in their fleet and this is how they keep costs down. High cycle aircraft are prone to this type failure, remember Hawiian Airlines, that was a high cycle 737 also.
yeap looks like a burn mark on that broken piece that is still there. Most likely, over the burning of the Quran.
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