Wednesday, 14 November 2007
>> know-this-incident time!
ok im sorry i haven been sharing any interesting stuff recently. i still haven gotten any stuff to add your knowledge, so im just sharing sth i got from one of my fave prog, Air Crash Investigation.
Incident name: Aloha Airlines Flight 243, April 28, 1988.
this air accident was considered one of the most remarkable in air history mainly becos the plane passengers managed to survive despite the fuselage being so badly broken. imganine one third of your roof on top flies off and u are flying as though u are in a CONVERTIBLE plane. Rapid decompression takes place, leaving u gasping for air in the high altitude! the plane had to descend as quickly as possible so tt the passengers can breathe.
one of the survivors recalled that, when he looked above his head, it was the blue sky on top!
haha anyway the fantastic pilot actually managed to save the lives of all passengers except an air stewardess who was thrown out of the plane when the roof ripped off (seriously i dunno how it feels to die like that). it was a BIG miracle that the plane did not break into 2 parts, cos it was only held tgt by the structure below... investigations later revealed that it was something to do with metal fatigue, in which the metal plates lose their strength of bending due to stress ... as explained below:
Part of the design of the 737 was for stress to be alleviated by
controlled area breakaway zones. The intent was to provide controlled depressurization that would maintain the integrity of the fuselage structure. The age of the plane and the condition of the fuselage (that had corroded away and stressed the rivets beyond their designed capacity) appear to have conspired to render the design a part of the problem; when that first controlled area broke away, according to the small rupture theory, the rapid sequence of events resulted in the failure sequence. This has been referred to as a "zipper effect."
here are 2 pics that i found on the net to show the damage (see how the passengers can still stay in such a plane and yet not die!:
oh yah this incident is also the reason why i told the girls when we were on plane to tw, that MUST PUT ON THE SAFETY BELT!!!!!!!!!!! without them, the people would have died long ago.
8:49:00 pm;
