7 ms·
How often do plane stowaways fall from the sky?
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- MattRogish 14y agoWheel-well stowaway is just about the worst thing you can do, ever. The wheel-wells are unpressurized, unheated, and designed to snugly fit the wheels in there (airplane designers don't waste space!). If you're not crushed to death upon retraction then you're almost certainly going to freeze to death or die of hypoxia. Just don't do it.
- astrodust 14y agoHitching a ride on a boat full of drug-running pirates is actually safe by comparison.
- colanderman 14y agoBut actually preventing someone slipping into the undercarriage depends on checks and procedures that are not always present, Shanks warns. "In a lot of places around the world, the control of movement and airside control areas is not the same as what we have here." "It's much easier in some locations to access the airside areas than it is in the UK. The only way it could be prevented is if the rest of the world tightened their procedures." I would think the obvious solution would be to slap a big old multilingual warning sign on the wheel wells, clearly stating "flying in wheel wells WILL result in death by asphyxiation, hypothermia, and severe physical trauma".
- ZoFreX 14y agoThis really shows up how much of our security is theatre - if people can get into the wheel well of a flight landing at Heathrow there's very little stopping someone putting a bomb there. Yet legitimate, paying travellers have to jump through all the hoops.
- njharman 14y agoI did not see statistics on # of people stopped, # of people who were deterred, and less than a 100 succeeded in hundreds of thousands of flights. Attempting to stop people or bombs in under carriage would EXACTLY BE SECURITY THEATER. That is an overreaction to insignificant but recently hyped/fear mongered threat that results in no statistically significant reduction in risk. But, writes up good in the papers. People thinking like you are why security theater can exist.
- ZoFreX 14y agoThe statistics lacking is a very good point, and a large oversight on my part. However, I wasn't saying that we should be trying to stop this. I meant to show up, conversely, that a lot of the existing security is there merely for show.
- pvarangot 14y agoThe guy most likely got into the wheel in another less secure airport, and fell near heathrow when the plane was preparing for landing.
- bduerst 14y agoSo close.
- danielweber 14y agoKeeping bombs out of the cargo bay is one of the things we seem to do very well, and has little to do with all the screenings we instituted since 9/11. How many planes have been bombed by someone sneaking something into the wheel well?
- run4yourlives 14y agoNone, yet. I can't imagine it would be too hard to place a bomb in the wheel well of a plane parked in Nairobi, for example. The biggest issue would be avoiding the pilot's pre-flight check. That wouldn't be to hard to do if you are a member of a ground crew that has access to the aircraft after the pilot is on board. BTW, we keep bombs out of the cargo area well because there was a time we didn't do this well at all. Then this happened: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_India_Flight_182 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_India_Flight_182 along with this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_Am_Flight_103 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_Am_Flight_103
- astrodust 14y agoThis presumes people this desperate and, at the same time, willing to undertake such a fool's errand would be literate. It would also have to be a very big sign to cover even half the languages spoken in India. What might be better is having a camera or motion sensor in the wheel well that can look for surprise guests.
- DanBC 14y agoI'd be interested to see graphic designers attempting to create suitable, er, designs / graphics / logos to warn of the danger.
- astrodust 14y agoIt's probably a challenge on par with creating a warning sign for nuclear waste that will make sense 10,000 years in the future (http://www.salon.com/2002/05/10/yucca_mountain/ http://www.salon.com/2002/05/10/yucca_mountain/).
- adambyrtek 14y agoI bet this would be as successful as warnings on packs of cigarettes.
- ChuckMcM 14y agoIt is a sad thing when someone is so desperate that they will attempt this. Its a stupid thing when someone who watched a movie thinks this is actually possible and tries to re-create it on a lark. Maybe a message that said "Be sure to clean off the dead people who try to stow away here." So that people attempting it would realize they were in fact already dead. Even with a canister of oxygen, at 35,000 feet you can't breath if you aren't in a pressure suit. Just doesn't work that way.
- pdx 14y agoEven with a canister of oxygen, at 35,000 feet you can't breath if you aren't in a pressure suit. Why not?
- brianchu 14y agoDid you read the article? "At 18,000ft (5,490m), experts say, hypoxia will set in, causing weakness, tremors, light-headedness and visual impairment...Above 33,000ft (10,065m) the lungs require artificial pressure to function normally."
- pdx 14y agoAbove 33,000ft (10,065m) the lungs require artificial pressure to function normally. So, you don't know either. Why did you respond then? The pressure from an oxygen canister can be down regulated to anything you choose, including 1ATM.
- praptak 14y agoI doubt that human lungs can withstand this much difference between inside and outside pressure. I haven't found the maximum non-harmful difference but a quick google found that maximum expiratory pressure in men is 97 cmH2O. This is only about 0.08 atm. So I wouldn't count on the canister alone, unless it is connected to a full-body suit.
- ChuckMcM 14y ago
- gadders 14y agoI've got "It's Raining Men" on my internal jukebox now :-(
- rmprescott 14y ago>How often do plane stowaways fall from the sky? just once
- raganwald 14y agoReminds me of... I approached a couple of old fellows top-roping a route on the Niagara Escarpment. I asked if they would be long, as I wanted to do the route. They invited me to jump on their rope. I had a look. It was dirty and the sheath seemed to be detaching from the core. The end was kinked and frayed. How of ten do you change your ropes, I asked in horror. "Every time they break. Why?"
- sageikosa 14y agonyuk nyuk
- binarymax 14y agoThere must be a way to monitor wheel well activity with cameras? And abort the flight if someone tries to get on?
- makmanalp 14y agoOr, you know, secure the airport properly to see nothing bad or unusual is happening...
- praptak 14y agoIt was only 73 recorded deaths starting from 1946. This would be one of the crappiest cost/result ratio in lifesaving efforts in the history of humanity.
- archangel_one 14y agoIt should be possible, but I guess airlines probably aren't keen to spend money on something like that since they won't see it as their problem. Their paying passengers aren't the ones dying.
- accarrino 14y agoI'm pretty sure that military pilots have to go unpressurized to 25,000 feet in order to be qualified. however they don't have to stay there for very long. and certainly not as long as the duration of a commercial flight.
- nettdata 14y agoWhen I did my training (Canadian Air Force, in the early 90's), we only had to go through controlled hypoxia training that allowed us to experience high altitude sickness, and therefore (hopefully) recognize the symptoms of it so we could react to some failure at altitude. We basically had to do menial tasks, like read a deck of cards, play "paddy-cake", etc., and then put our oxygen masks back on once we thought we were too impaired, while a technician was there with us. However, I think the simulated altitude was 20k or 25k feet. Needless to say there's a reason that O2 is (legally) required in unpressurized aircraft for anything over 10k feet.
- jcoby 14y agoHere in the US oxygen is required for the primary crew at over 14k cabin altitude. At 12.5-14k it's required after 30 minutes. No requirement under 12.5k. I have flown at 12k for 1 hour and could tell that the air was much thinner and that going much higher would have started to impair. I think that most commercial aircraft run somewhere between a 6k and 8k cabin altitude and as such a whole different set of rules apply. I don't know for sure - I'm only a private pilot.
- lectrick 14y agoAnyone who googles "wheel well stowaway" finds out the risk. In one google. I almost want to go to the class graduation ceremony of every high school in america and say "tl;dr AT LEAST FUCKING GOOGLE IT." :)
- lsh 14y agoWe all know how to deal with these parasites in the landing gear: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=JijblXY0Mkc#t=6s http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v...