8 ms·
Finnair Flight 915
- 9nGQluzmnq3M 7y agoIt's worth noting that Finnair hasn't lost an aircraft since 1963, and are by some measures thus the safest airline out there. They're no minnow either: while not huge in the US, they've made a killing by exploiting their geographical location as the fastest transfer hub between northern Asia and Europe. https://www.finnair.com/hu/gb/home/rakastevagen https://www.finnair.com/hu/gb/home/rakastevagen
- mac_was 7y agoWell they would surely loose this one if the missile didn't blow up before impact...
- estomagordo 7y agoI love how "rakastevagen" => "rakaste vägen" is Swedish for "the shortest path", but also sounds a bit Finnish to me, a non-Finnish speaker. Reminiscent of "rakastan", which a Swede would know from "minä rakastan sinua", or "I love you".
- misja 7y agoRakaste vägen is the aggregation of the Finnish word Rakaste and the Swedish word vägen. There are quite a few words in Finnish that are borrowed from Swedish.
- rsaarelm 7y ago“Rakaste" is the superlative of the Swedish rak, meaning straight. It is not a Finnish word.
- dehrmann 7y agoBecause it's slightly surprising... Despite being neighbors, Swedish and Finnish are only distantly related. Finnish is closer to Hungarian, and Swedish is similar to the other Scandinavian languages and Germanic languages.
- ggm 7y agomade a killing colloquial but also.. apposite given what nearly happened (happy Finnair customer btw)
- mwilcox 7y agothere's a good soviet russia joke here.
- donaltroddyn 7y agoSurely Ryanair takes that crown, an airline which has never had a fatal accident, and which is an order of magnitude larger than Finnair (~130,000,000 passengers annually vs ~13,000,000).
- nl 7y agoQantas.
- donaltroddyn 7y agoAlthough Qantas has not had a fatal accident for ~70 years, it has a much smaller fleet and has had far more non-fatal incidents and accidents than Ryanair. The real contender is Hawaiian Airlines, a ~90-year-old airline with no fatal accidents. Still, it's an order of magnitude smaller than Ryanair (~12,000,000 annual passengers).
- joyjoyjoy 7y ago"location as the fastest transfer hub" Not sure what this means. How is Helsinki better suited for this than Moscow to serve Asia<>Europe? Aeroflot is one of the most underrated airlines.
- cantrevealname 7y agoThis is good story to recall whenever someone says that governments, organizations, and other big groups of people can't keep secrets. This was kept secret for 27 years (1987 to 2014)! I imagine that the pilots told their wives, friends, and other pilots all about it. Nobody was even asking them to keep it secret. Probably hundreds of people knew what happened, but the public and the Finnish Transport Safety Agency didn't find out for decades. Whenever I hear some incident that's made the news, I wonder about hundreds or thousands of worse incidents that same day that didn't make the news for whatever reason.
- VBprogrammer 7y agoIf the copilot had gone directly to the media this would have been all over the news. At least, I hope it would given the recent spate of outrage driven pieces I've seen about women wearing risque clothing (before anyone objects, they are completely within their rights to do so) being asked to cover up or being removed from a flight.
- zerr 7y agoOn a similar note, Soviet government denied the existence of Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact until 1989: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pact https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pac... Another interesting fact - while on the German side, Ribbentrop was executed in 1946, Molotov enjoyed a happy life, although, similarly to Ribbentrop, he was also involved in massacres and crimes against humanity.
- keketi 7y agoVery true. A similar incident, also from Finland, was the downing of the passenger plane Kaleva. It was shot down by Soviet warplanes during peacetime. The vague publicly stated reason for the crash was that there was an explosion of foreign origin. The Finnish government knew that the plane was shot down by the Soviets, but chose to withhold this information for foreign policy reasons. The airline's CEO confided the truth to the pilots' widows, who were sworn to secrecy. The true story was kept secret for almost 50 years until a Finnish aviation historian happened to find a copy of a Soviet air force officer's memoirs which describe the incident. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaleva_(airplane) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaleva_(airplane) https://yle.fi/aihe/artikkeli/2018/04/24/matkustajakone-kalevan-tuhosta-1940-vaiettiin-vuosikymmeniksi https://yle.fi/aihe/artikkeli/2018/04/24/matkustajakone-kale... (in Finnish)
- pastrami_panda 7y agoReminds me of the brutal sinking of the swedish passenger ship Hansa by soviet, 84 people died with only 2 surviving. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Hansa_(1899) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Hansa_(1899)
- pintxo 7y agoHansa was sunk during WW2, I would not compare this to anything happening 1987.
- officemonkey 7y agoThe North remembers.
- sfafsafdsaf 7y agoAnd the South remembers the barbarian raids that ended only when Sweden's back was finally broken and Finland liberated. See what I did there?
- pastrami_panda 7y agoWell, it clearly shows the 100+ year pattern of using foreign civilian transportation vessels for target practice.
- sfafsafdsaf 7y agoThe ship was built in the 19th century. It was sunk in WW2 when Sweden was a de-facto ally of the Nazis who, also, used citizens as target practice.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]