The media is gushing over the heroic deeds of an airline captain on Southwest 1380, which suffered an uncontained engine failure. The stories generally do not mention a co-pilot (example) and therefore it would be impressive for this captain to have been the first person to earn a single-pilot type rating for the Boeing 737-700. However, when the airliner checks in with PHL tower, the first officer’s voice is heard on the radio (full audio). Newsweek identifies this pilot as Darren Ellisor. The big safety innovation of airlines is the crew concept and the multi-pilot crew so it is surprising to me that every time a flight makes the news the media gives us the impression that we are back to the 1920s single-pilot airline system (see below for how Captain Sully was apparently by himself in the Airbus).
[Why is the public apparently more interested in a narrative of a lone hero, be it Captain Sully or Tammie Jo Shults, the Southwest captain? Why wouldn’t a story about five people (two pilots plus three flight attendants) working together to achieve a successful outcome actually be more inspiring? Most of us work on teams so why wouldn’t we be more inspired by a story about teamwork?]
For the pilots of this airplane it was like a normal day in the simulator (they actually said as much a couple of days later in an official statement: “As Captain and First Officer of the Crew of five who worked to serve our Customers aboard Flight 1380 yesterday, we all feel we were simply doing our jobs.”). Essentially all airliner or bizjet sim training is single-engine operation following a failure because flying a working jet with a three-pilot crew (bulletproof autopilot, left-seat captain, right-seat first officer) is actually easier than a lot of single-pilot operations in light aircraft (hence the higher accident rate for four-seaters, even when experienced pilots are at the controls). Thus, the “engine failure then land single-engine” is something that a mid-career airline pilot would have done 500 times or more in a sim that is so realistic it can be logged as time in the actual aircraft. A 18-year-old seeking a multi-engine rating on his or her Commercial certificate would have to demonstrate managing an engine failure in a piston twin and then flying a single-engine approach and landing… solo. The applicant who failed to demonstrate this competently to an examiner would fail the checkride and not earn the rating. Similarly the pilot seeking a type rating for a turbojet-powered aircraft, such as a business jet or a Boeing 737, must demonstrate this capability before being legally authorized to fly the aircraft (only as part of a crew in the case of the B737, which requires two pilots minimum).
What did happen from the pilots’ point of view? The plane depressurized, necessitating the donning of oxygen masks (the ones in front are “quick-don” types accessible by reaching behind one’s shoulder) and then a reasonably rapid descent from what seems to have been about 32,000′. The goal is to get down to about 10,000′ where everyone can take off their oxygen masks. At the same time, the airplane would yaw because of the asymmetric thrust (dead engine on one side). The plane would have been on autopilot at the time and therefore the yaw damper would automatically kick in some rudder to counteract the yaw.
Usually the crew divides responsibilities between the Pilot Flying, who manipulates the flight controls and/or supervises the autopilot, and the Pilot Monitoring, who does everything else, including talk to Air Traffic Control (ATC). The Captain and First Officer, both of whom are fully trained to fly the aircraft, swap these roles after each leg of a trip. If something goes wrong, the Pilot Flying will take over the radios and thus free the Pilot Monitoring to dig into the checklists, typically accessible via a “Quick Reference Handbook” (“QRH”; see this example from the Canadair Regional Jet (CRJ) that I used to fly). It is the Pilot Flying’s job to ask for the appropriate checklist, e.g., “Give me the Engine Fire Message checklist” (though the Pilot Monitoring can suggest checklists, e.g., “Would you like the Left Engine Oil Pressure Message checklist?”). There are some items to do from memory, with the two pilots cooperating so that they can agree on which engine is the dead one and should have its thrust/fuel lever cut off, for example.
Airline training stresses the use of the autopilot in an emergency, which frees the human pilots to concentrate on the checklists and not pulling back, for example, the thrust lever on the running engine. The Pilot Flying monitors the autopilot and the Pilot Monitoring is going through the checklists and making sure that items such as gear and flaps are set appropriately at various times.
The Southwest crew was favored with “Day VFR” flying conditions (i.e., it wasn’t dark and there weren’t low clouds over the runway) and were near a super long runway, the 12,000′ 27L runway at KPHL. Once any fire is extinguished, e.g., by cutting off the fuel or blowing the squib on a bottle of fire extinguishing stuff (that’s about as technical as we got in training), the situation on a CRJ is no longer considered an “emergency” but merely an “abnormal” operation and the pilots go to the “Single Engine Procedures, In-Flight Engine Shutdown” checklist. The APU is started so that there is a backup source of electrical power (in case the second engine quits!) and various switches are set up so that the dead engine is secured. Then it is time for “ABNORM 1-9, Single Engine Approach and Landing.” The CRJ checklist calls for landing with partial flaps, thus resulting in a 25 percent increase in landing distance. Full flaps enable landing at a slower speed, but the extra drag means that the remaining engine would be straining to keep the plane on the standard glide path to the runway.
For a plane that ordinarily can land in 5,000′, landing on a 12,000′ runway with one engine is a normal day at the office (sim). As noted above, this is the very situation for which nearly all of airline sim training is directed, albeit usually in uglier scenarios, such as an engine that fails just as the plane is taking off (a “V1 cut”). The wind was favorable on the morning of April 17, blowing straight down the runway at roughly 20 knots (on the recording you will hear the Tower controller saying that the wind is from 280 (magnetic west-northwest) and a plane pointed down 27L would have a magnetic heading of 267 degrees (“27” is short for “270”, a west heading; the L is because there is a parallel 27R and, to avoid confusion, the final parallel runway is “26”)). This reduces the touchdown groundspeed and therefore the landing distance (I was once a passenger on a B737 landing in Ushuaia, Argentina into a 50-knot headwind, which the pilots said was normal for Tierra del Fuego. The airspeed of 120 knots thus translated into a groundspeed of 70 knots, a slower touchdown than a Cirrus SR20 in calm wind conditions!)
Not to take away too much from the pilots’ achievement, but keep in mind that a Boeing 737 on one engine and no pressurization is still a much more capable aircraft than a typical light Cessna, Cirrus, or Piper. The autopilot is much better (if it even exists in the little plane!). The climb performance is better (not that this crew ever needed to climb). There are a lot more redundant systems. That’s why there is the standard joke about the airline captain who rents a Cessna from a flight school and puts “Will be declaring an emergency” in the remarks of the FAA flight plan form. The Tower controller later asks why and the captain responds “I’m going to be down to one engine, one radio, one navigation system, and no autopilot.”
If you’re looking for heroes, though, think about the flight attendants. They’re in the back of the plane with 140+ screaming passengers. There is a hole in the airplane. At least one person has suffered injuries that will prove to be fatal. Others are injured as well. They have received no training for this scenario. (Most flight attendant training, as I understand it, is directed at evacuations once the aircraft has landed.)
Some questions that friends have asked:
Why is the term “souls on board” used in aviation? Why does ATC ask? Does it matter if there are 50, 100 or 150 on board? Answer: They want to know fuel on board so they can figure out how much firefighting gear to bring to the scene and also S.O.B. so that they know when to stop searching for bodies. It is the standard phrase even for quotidian matters such as filing an IFR flight plan mid-air (e.g., if the weather turns out not to be clear as hoped).
What is an “extended final”? Answer: Based on the plan discussed in the ATC recording, the plane was lined up with the runway about 20 miles away rather than the usual 7 miles or so (for instrument conditions; it might be only 1 mile at a crazy airport such as LGA in VFR conditions; I wrote about this). That makes life easier for everyone.
Dumping fuel? Answer: 737 does not have a fuel dump capability. If you’re too heavy to land you fly around in circles for a while or just try to land gently so that you don’t stress the gear. If you’ve got a serious emergency and the plane is already damaged it doesn’t matter. You just land overweight. Remember that the max landing weight is for an incompetent landing and is mostly driven by how much abuse the gear can handle.
Do you think damage to cowling/wing/window affected flight performance in any measurable way? And if so, would autopilot recognize and be able to compensate? Answer: The autopilot will manipulate the controls to achieve its programmed goal, e.g., airspeed of 210 knots or heading of 180 (South). Airplanes are usually at least slightly misrigged so that the autopilot will have to hold a bit of left aileron pressure, for example, to keep the airplane from rolling off course. So slight damage to one wing would be like a worse-than-average rigging.
[If you want to truly scare yourself, read Nine Minutes, Twenty Seconds: The Tragedy & Triumph of ASA Flight 529, about Atlantic Southeast Airlines Flight 529, which suffered a prop failure and ended up with a huge amount of drag on one wing that could not be corrected by feathering or any other pilot action. The twin turboprop couldn’t hold altitude on the remaining engine. Flight attendant Robin Fech proved to be a true hero.]
So… let’s hear it for flight attendants who put their lives on the line every day and don’t get to log multi-engine turbine time or look out the front windows. Also for any passengers who got right on a replacement B737 and took off again from PHL to Dallas or wherever else they were ultimately headed. And let’s try to remember poor Jennifer Riordan, the unlucky passenger who died.
Related:
- Unsafe at any speed: Philip and a piston twin (turbojets such as the B737 are actually much easier to fly after an engine quits because there isn’t a lot of drag from the dead engine)
- Airbus A320 certified for single-pilot operation (makes a similar point from 2009: “News accounts have not spent a lot of ink on the people who did the toughest job in this incident: Shelia Dail, Donna Dent, and Doreen Welsh, the flight attendants.”)
- Recording of Delta 1889 pilots trying to get out of a hail-producing thunderstorm. They can be forgiven for sounding nervous. A thunderstorm is the primary aviation hazard for which there is no engineering solution and yet thunderstorms are common. See also “Southwest passengers ‘crying,’ ‘screaming,’ preparing ‘to die’ in attempted landing during storm” from just a few days ago. One engine failing on a multi-engine aircraft is not terrifying, but pilots do confront terrifying situations and thunderstorms are responsible for most of them.
- Boeing 767 loses engine 400′ after takeoff (close to the worst possible time; everything has to be done correctly in order to continue climbing); the pilots are not celebrated as heroes, but the media covers the event because Leonardo DeCaprio was on board
The wind of 280 19g25 was also relatively favorable for a landing on 27L considering that the plane touched down at 165kt with flaps 5 instead of 135kt flaps 30.
Flight attendants are trained for medical emergencies, but I imagine a depressurization from a cabin breach is the most panic inducing thing possible on a flight especially since they had to endure 20 minutes until landing.
I suspect the passenger who passed away did so nearly instantly, but perhaps gruesomely. I don’t expect to hear more details, but going “partially out” into 500mph wind would not be survivable. The questions I would like to ask are: Was she wearing a seatbelt? Did any projectiles enter the cabin? Would it have been survivable if she didn’t “go out”? Or was the wind from depressurization likely fatal for the person sitting next to the broken window?
Given that there have been several engine cowling issues in the past few years, I’m wondering if seats 14A and 14F should be downgraded on seatguru?
To Steve, whose comment was “but going “partially out” into 500mph wind would not be survivable”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Airways_Flight_5390
The BA 5390 extrusion occurred at 17,000 feet.
The BAC-111 cockpit window is larger than the passenger window.
Whatever broke the window might have struck the deceased. In the BA 5390 incident, the window blew out, not in.
But it’s still a 500 mph wind.
Parenthetically, the need for a hero fulfills a narrative, whether true or not.
Man explains why woman isn’t a hero when she piloted a plane full of passengers safely to the ground after an engine exploded midair.
Toucan Sam: Thank you for pointing me to one of the rare media stories with the first officer’s name!
Steve: I worked the wind into the original posting now.
Chloe: When I posted a similar note in 2009 about the female flight attendants and the existence of a first officer during the non-routine no-engine landing, women friends cheered the pro-female attitude. Now that people want to celebrate a routine single-engine engine landing (because one of the pilots was female?), pointing out the heroism of the flight attendants is misogyny! Separately, from the point of view of the pilots, it generally doesn’t matter why an engine has quit. The procedures are all the same whether it dies quietly or explodes violently (nowhere near the cockpit!). The only twist here was the depressurization and therefore the need to descend, but that is an hourly event in the sim!
Separately, if indeed the Southwest captain is celebrated for her role as part of the two-pilot crew because she is female, this incident can serve as a guide to gender ID-based affirmative action for pilots. The male pilot can be a hero with a dead-stick off-airport landing from which everyone survives, a landing forced within a few minutes. The female pilot can obtain the same level of public adulation by landing an airplane with 24,000 lbs. of thrust available on a 12,000′ runway, a landing done at the time and place of her choice due to the many hours of fuel available on board and the spinning engine.
Might find the following video informative: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHGBQINW0B0. Video quality is poor, but it conveys the message. I think the event for a person sitting next to a window would be non-survivable for 2 reasons: 1) the metal objects penetrating the plexiglass/fuselage would next be penetrating you, followed immediate by your extraction into the slipstream as well as exposure to the above mentioned windblast. Time of useful consciousnesses outside at 30K’, even if you’re not already dead from trauma, is <30 sec. I've experienced explosive decompression in altitude chamber rides and, even with and oxygen mask on, all the air comes out of you chest. Ironically, her body plugging the window may have helped while the flight crew performed the emergency descent.It's a tough story.
Chloe: http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/leonardo-dicaprio-moscow-bound-delta-flight-blew-engine-jfk-takeoff-article-1.452735
is about a heavy B767 that suffered a contained engine failure at 400′ after takeoff, a much more critical and difficult situation than what the Southwest 1380 flight crew faced (though slightly less critical than the V1 cut in the sim, in which the engine fails just as the plane is about to lift). The first officer is not mentioned by name, per usual. Based on the pronouns, both pilots identified as male. The incident was newsworthy only because the irreplaceable Leonardo Dicaprio was on board as a passenger.
This is a bona fide example of mansplaining. Pilots like this keep women out of the profession.
A great read and a different perspective on the subject about how common it is for pilots to do landing on a single engine. The media needs a hero to write a clickbait article and run advts and so is the emphasis on a single person instead of the whole crew.
I heard that southwest outsorced their maintenance. Could maintenance be somewhat responsible for this thing crashing.
“Man explains why woman isn’t a hero when she piloted a plane full of passengers safely to the ground after an engine exploded midair.”
Chloe, you are expressing bias for making this about gender. Philip said there were heroes, and they were the flight attendants. We don’t even know their gender but in the industry, 75% are female.
Thanks for the explanation, Philip. If the conceit of your article was the “don’t forget the flight attendants! They’re heroes too!” maybe it’s a nice piece. But it is: “the skilled and trained pilot is not a hero, here’s a lengthy explanation why, and the untrained flight attendants were the heroes if you’re looking for any.”
Nick: I’m not sure that ordinary maintenance would have discovered a blade about to detach. Consider the huge collection of components spinning at 30,000+ RPM (see https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/general-electric-j85-ge-17a-turbojet-engine-cutaway for a picture). The engineering effort is awesome and the failure rate is low, but there are so many jet engines spinning worldwide that failures per se are regular events (that’s why airliners have two engines!). What makes this event unusual is that the failure was not contained within the engine as was the design goal.
Here’s an ugly one: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/dramatic-ge-engine-explosion-on-boeing-767-poses-puzzle-for-investigators/
At my Delta subsidiary a captain that I was flying with told me about an engine explosion that had happened to him. He and his first officer followed the QRH procedures just like in the sim and landed uneventfully (and with nobody to celebrate them!). He went down to the maintenance department later to try to figure out what had caused the problem. The logbooks simply said “Catastrophic left engine failure. Replaced left engine.” (Presumably GE would have looked at the pieces a little more carefully, but there was nothing for the airline folks to do.)
Chloe: Flight attendants are not “untrained”! Their training is primarily related to evacuating the aircraft, but it is serious training nonetheless. They need to evacuate the aircraft in 90 seconds. Would you rather (a) be responsible for reading a book and pulling the lever that the book says to pull, or (b) be responsible for getting 150 people (combination of elderly/frail, morbidly obese, non-English speaking, etc.) out of the plane in 90 seconds? That’s the pilot v. flight attendant trade-off.
She is hero but not for safely landing this plane. I’m glad she is an experienced and competent pilot together with the co pilot. She is a hero for being one of the first navy pilots and serving her country. This is a great article. That said, there is nothing wrong with putting someone like the pilot on a pedestal. With all the news lately, we need some good kind. Condolences to the family of the passenger who tragically lost her life, and best wishes tothe injured. I hope this never happens again.
[Response from Philip… Doron: See http://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2018/04/02/americans-versus-germans-and-brazilians/ for different cultures’ attitudes toward whether serving in the military in non-combat situations makes a person “heroic”! (the Brazilian [F-16 pilot]: “Keep in mind that there is nothing ‘heroic’ in defending my country during peaceful times. We all prefer this way, right?”)]
At the meeting of the Central Committee of the Patriarchy last night, it was decided to dispatch a problematic white male pilot armed with our precision guided thought crimes to destroy a female hero.
The plan was to write a blog post about the fact that every airline pilot and their copilot can easily land a single engine plane. Perhaps even include some thought felonies like “a female fighter pilot was a trail blazer in the 1920s, not 80s”. We war gamed that feminists(excluding of course the discredited equality feminists) would interpret anything other than genuflection to press’s narrative as an assault from the patriarchy, and they would respond with a Kafkatrap.
Because a Kafkatrap would make them feel like they won while making them look stupid to everyone else, we would declare silent victory.
[Response from Philip… Tony: I think the earliest significant sized group of female combat pilots were https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_Witches in 1942. Of course there are no pilots today, male, female, agendered, or Martian, who endure the risks and physical hardships that these pilots went through.]
The BA pilot was at 17k feet while the Southwest passenger got sudden exposure at 32000. I think that makes a big difference.
I don’t think the exposure is what killed her or even the 500mph wind. What killed her was the blunt force trauma of being suck thru the opening and her head beating again hard surfaces. She was wearing her seatbelt, BTW.
What’s interesting is that the window that broke is considerably behind the engine. The turbine blade that broke off (and it appears to have been a single blade) would have come out perpendicular to the axis of the engine (on a random vector depending on where in the rotation it broke off) but then the engine casing that shattered from the impact was blown back in the slipstream.
The engine casing looks like it almost complete broken off down to the plane of the fan and that it is made from some fairly brittle material. I realize turbine failures are rare but it looks to me like they could have wound the outside of the engine casing with some light but strong material (kevlar?) that would have held together better or at least held onto the broken pieces more instead of shattering like glass.
Jackie: http://www.dupont.com/products-and-services/fabrics-fibers-nonwovens/fibers/uses-and-applications/aerospace-marine-rail.html says “Many jet engine manufacturers add a protective layer of Kevlar® fabric inside the engine cowl to help catch errant fan blades or massive broken parts flung outward by the engine’s centrifugal force, thus potentially preventing them from damaging the wing or the cabin.”
So your idea has been implemented on at least some aircraft, but I don’t know if it was on this particular design.
“This is a bona fide example of mansplaining. Pilots like this keep women out of the profession.”
No and no. I’m sure Phil would have written the exactly same regardless of whichever gender the pilot was identifying as on the day of the incident. His point was not even to denigrate the “heroism” of the pilot but to note that he/she was the only one getting any credit when the real “heroism” was spread out among a larger group (including the presumably mostly female flight attendants)
What keeps happening in our society is that people with a vested interest in doing so keep turning neutral incidents that have nothing to do with race or gender (cafe manager asks trespassers who refuse to buy anything to leave, pilot makes a routine one engine landing in a large jet) into racist or sexist incidents. Honi soit qui mal y pense.
By the way, the photos from the plane show that no one knows how to wear the oxygen masks despite having been instructed a million times. It goes over your nose and mouth, not just the mouth.
Phil, the photos of the engine don’t show anything that looks like a fabric or the remains of a fabric:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Da_2f2hXUAAATES.jpg
It looks like the casing was made of some sort of honeycomb type material consisting of a thin inner and outer skin with some webbing in between – basically the same idea as corrugated cardboard but made of metal (titanium?) instead of paper.
The plane was around 18 years old so it probably didn’t have the most recent technology in it.
I’m surprised that people aren’t talking about the ATC crew much either. Listening to the tape they did an outstanding job as well.
I don’t know what kind of training they get for this sort of thing, but it was pretty clear that the ATC operator was juggling a busy airspace when someone tossed a lit hand grenade into his 5 ball cascade. He did a great job of thinking on his feet, creating options for different scenarios, and supporting the flight crew, without endangering any other planes.
Certainly seems to me like an easy thing to screw up.
[Response from Philip: ATC is pretty awesome, but remember that they are sitting at a comfy desk. Also the air is not especially crowded. It is the runways at big airports in the U.S. (built for a population of 150 million; serving a population fo 327 million) that are bottlenecks. So as long as ATC vectors and slows other inbound aircraft they can give priority to an emergency aircraft pretty easily.]
Jackie: https://www.aerospace-technology.com/projects/boeing737_ng/ says “The rear of the engine nacelles are constructed of graphite, Kevlar and glass fibre composites.” (so that would be near the combustion chamber and power turbine? Whereas the failure in the photo looks like it was in the front of the engine, i.e., the compressor?)
I’ve been out of the game for a while and don’t know the details of this CFM engine, but a basic design requirement of turbofan engines is that the cylindrical case enclosing the engine must prevent components from becoming missiles as in this failure. The term of art is to “contain” the failure. Thus references to this one as “uncontained”. The most massive rotating components are the titanium fan blades at the front of the engine and the disks that the blades are attached to. The fan can fail from a disk breaking up or a blade breaking as this one. These failures are usually manufacturing defects in metallurgy or tool marks, where micro cracks start. “Metal fatigue” is the gradual growth of these cracks during normal flexing, until the crack reduces the section and the remaining metal breaks suddenly. Normally these defects are caught in ultrasound or visual inspections using fiber optic microscopes inserted through holes (ports) in the engine case. All disks and blades are “life limited” and are retired after thousands of takeoff power cycles even if no defects appear.
A pilot can expect to retire after 30 years without ever shutting down an engine in flight, much less having one explode or come apart. It is a very rare event except in sim training as philg says. Maybe the hero is the remarkable flight simulator that is so lifelike that pilots are qualified without actually flying the plane.
As to social justice, maybe call half of them “himulators” and half “hermulators”? The planes are always femme: “she was totally uncontrollable!”
Great post. Appreciate your perspective. And boy, your friends ask some good questions!
The failure appears to be at the very front, which is the turbofan that sits in front of the low pressure compressor. This basically acts like a ducted propeller – most of the air from this fan bypasses the core of the engine and gets blown out the back where it provides most of the thrust.
When the disks or blades reach their life limits I don’t think they are necessarily scrapped. Rather they are sent back to the manufacturer for remanufacturing and sold back to the customer for around 1/2 the cost of a new part (a significant savings because these parts are very expensive). The remanufactured parts are tested to meet the original specifications and are supposedly good as new. While they are a relative bargain to the customer, they are hugely profitable to the engine manufacturers. It is my understanding that jet engines get sold at close to cost but they more than make it up by selling the customer really expensive parts (with no 2nd source available) for the next 20 or 30 years. Remanufacturing the part doesn’t cost them anywhere close to the amount they charge for them.
https://www.multistation.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/hamuel_hstm1000_hybrid_engl_lr.pdf
Yes, she was “strapped in” according to “witness” Marty Martinez. So if she had her seat belt on how did her body up to her waist and her arms get outside? Rapid decompression wouldn’t be a good time to look for your wallet to find a credit card like Marty said he did though. He said that while everyone else was putting on their oxygen masks he grabbed his laptop but couldn’t remember wear his wallet was. You see, he claims he wanted to contact loved ones and needed to buy wifi time for $8. But evidently he contacted no one and just live streamed what his laptop camera was recording on Facebook.
What happens when the cabin becomes rapidly depressurized?
A hole the size of a window would result in rapid decompression. The crew and passengers would have about 20 seconds to place the oxygen masks over their mouths AND NOSES, which the Martin Martinez’s video shows they did not do properly. With a hole that size the temperature in the cabin would drop quickly to -50 degrees and everyone would turn into ice cubes within one or two minutes. Even if the plane dropped 20,000 feet in a minute the passengers would be extremely horrfied and uncomfortable. There would instantly be an extreme vacuum and things like hats, magazines, papers, etc… would instantly start flying about. We see nothing like this in his video. Instead we see that Marty Martinez calmly searched for his wallet so he could buy wifi and live stream on Facebook.
For people who believe this was a real event…I have some bridges for sale really cheap.
Here is a testimony of an overseas flight which lost cabin pressure but thankfully there was no window sized hole in the fuselage. That would have most likely resulted in the airliner to drop down to at least 8,000 feet for the duration of the flight and that wasn’t necessary. It was a mechanical malfunction. They only lost cabin pressure for three minutes but it was three minutes of hell…
“Once when I was flying from NYC to Italy the pressure in the cabin went off for about three minutes by the clock, over the Atlantic. I’ve never felt such ear pain in my entire life and my ears were still hurting four hours later when we landed. When this happened EVERYONE on the plane was screaming at the top of our lungs. This was more than 20 years ago and I still remember it to this day.”
I didn’t see any uneasiness at all happening in that airplane! What a fake pile of crapola. It’s 100% BS! Those people would have been covering their ears and freezing their asses off if a window was blown out. They wouldn’t be texting or live streaming jack sh*t on Facebook. That would be the last thing on their minds.
There is no way a woman would have hung out that window up to her waste if she was belted in. There was no blood anywhere in any of the photos yet we have one “witness” saying there was “blood everywhere”.
So believe this lie of a Southwest Airliner having an engine blow up or don’t. Do engines blow up? Yep, but just not this time. I know it was all bull just like most of the “news” on our brainwashing machines that we all call TV’s. How did they do it? I couldn’t tell you except they had to have at least swapped planes. But one thing I know for sure is that this event was 100% staged and presented to us as real.
https://153news.net/watch_video.php?v=GHGS5R6MSG2W
https://153news.net/watch_video.php?v=3WAXUDU1X451
https://153news.net/watch_video.php?v=OWN163XUW1A6
[Response from Philip… Chuck: They were only at about 32,500′ when they began descending. The standard “time of useful consciousness” is about 1 minute (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_of_useful_consciousness ). But 1 minute later they were down at 29,300 (see https://thepointsguy.com/news/what-happened-on-southwest-flight-1380/ for the data) where it is closer to 2 minutes. 1 minute after that, at 25,000 ‘ where it is at least 3-6 minutes. So a passenger who never got a mask on might have felt light-headed for a few minutes, but would have woken up within 5 minutes or so when the plane was down to 17,000′.
FlightAware shows about 15 minutes of post-descent flight at a reasonable altitude of around 10,000’. I am a little surprised that someone would be signing up to WiFi and streaming while a window was blown out, but maybe he was sitting far away from the damaged window? And the passengers really didn’t have anything else to do for this 15-minute period.
How cold was it? METARs for KPHL show temperature of 7C on the ground. Typical lapse rate is 2C for every 1,000′ so it would have been an unpleasant -13C outside at 10,000′ (9 degrees Fahrenheit).
If this had been Hillary Clinton at 51,000′ in a Gulfstream G650 it might have been a different story. But 32,500′ is a much more forgiving altitude. Note that FAA regulations require a solo pilot to wear an oxygen mask above 35,000′ and that at least one of two pilots wear a mask at all times above 41,000′ (see https://www.aopa.org/training-and-safety/pic-archive/pilot-and-passenger-physiology/oxygen-use-in-aviation ). So the regulations recognize the difference in time of useful consciousness.
Remember that the Boeing B-17 could fly up to about 35,000′ and it wasn’t pressurized to begin with (more typical operating altitude was 25,000′). The crews had an oxygen system that often malfunctioned and various clothing schemes for staying warm. Of course this was extremely uncomfortable, and people often passed out and had to be revived by crew mates with portable oxygen bottles, but it wasn’t unsurvivable.]
I might be the first FA to comment on this & if I am, then thank you, sir, for what is a rare recognition to the real “First Responders” in all aviation crisis. And, yes I do mean 9/11. Comments after Asiana’s accident in SF where one FA even carried an injured pax off the plane said things like “when the pilots push the button to inflate the slides…” HELLO!?! Um – no. And the pictures of the pax on this flight putting the O2 on their mouth only – well, good for them. Hopefully they didn’t need to help anyone else.
Yes, people ignore us because they are too cool or so seasoned as travelers that they don’t need to pay attention. Yes, people think we are nagging them to buckle up so they don’t walk around & YES the two girls killed on that Asiana flight were thrown from the plane because they weren’t wearing seatbelts on landing & somebody ran them over with a rescue vehicle (think about that for a bit!) but day after day, flight after flight, we continue to do that demo, arm that door & go through that mental review that we may never use.
Or maybe we will. Maybe it’s today. Maybe tomorrow some one person will watch & listen. Maybe it will be you. Maybe.
Jack D,
You’re asking questions that only the perpetrators can answer. I only know she is a VP in Wells Fargo out of the Albuquerque office. We can speculate what happened to her but that’s about all we can do. Personally I would say that she is alive and well waiting for this to die down so her family can join her where the weather is nice. A ‘for sale’ sign should pop up on her property soon unless they’ve taken care of all of that already. There’s a lot of corruption out there.
As for your 149 people we have no data other than the perps data to support that. But yeah, they enlist huge amounts of people for these events. You’d be amazed. And enlist is a good word to use because from my research most of those involved are military. Iv’e watched them in action for years now and they use every trick in the book. But I understand your speculation. I was there and finding out the truth wasn’t fun. Twenty years of digging makes Jack a dull, unpopular boy.
So we can’t go with the data they provide except to use that data against them. They say 7 others were injured. One would have to know who they are and what hospitals they were taken to. I’ve done that on other events. In other events they will reveal the names. I will not say which events but when you search for these people they either don’t exist or they are part of the script and work for various alphabet agencies or work directly out of the military psyop divisions which are easily found on the Google. Some are even people caught doing federal crimes and they are given a job to make the charges go away. For example, Physicians caught double billing Medicare will be offered a part. Usually they will stand in front of the press and tell the world how horrible it was in surgery treating multiple gunshot wounds or whatnot. When in fact there were no wounds or even a shooter for that matter. But before or after the event you can bet that the hospital is planning or has already built a new $200 million dollar wing. And that hospital, if you dig back a few years, was on the verge of bankruptcy or thinking of selling to one of those big health corporations. Sad but true.
The Google is not your friend but we can still use it from time to time. The fact is that Google is complicit. DuckDuckGo is a better choice to get more honest results. Google will hide a lot of results they don’t want you to see.
Yes, many times the people will make claims in court. But if you follow the claims from these events you will ultimately find dismissals or sealed, out of court settlements.
I know this sounds crazy but the facts speak for themselves. If you watched the videos I posted then you know there’s problems with the story. But this story is just one of many. This is a small story compared to the others. I wasn’t even going to bother with this event but Jefferson Girl got me going on it. It’s a small story but it has a big influence on how people think. I dare say that this event was developed to push the MeToo movement for the most part. We now have our female hero. I would expect that she will be featured on all of the morning shows and The Ellen DeGeneres Show. That’s how this stuff works. Mind control for the masses.
One last thought. We are told that a window was hit by a fan blade or something from the engine. Those windows have three one inch thick panes of super strong acrylic in them. Somehow this piece of the engine blew out the entire pane (all three) as shown in the pictures posted. But when we look at the damaged wing we see much more superficial damage from other parts moving at a similar speed. They simply removed the panes in my opinion. Seat belt on the seat and no blood anywhere to be found. A “witness” said that there was glass everywhere. Another “witness” said there was blood everywhere. Things that make you go hmmm…..
Lynda: I do listen to the brief and read the safety card! Flying the CRJ was easier than flying the four-seat SR20 for transportation (bad weather? climb above it; nasty ice accumulating? melt it off; feeling hot? open the monster A/C vent; feeling tired? have the other pilot back you up), so I always thought that the FA had the toughest job on our 50-seater. Working for Delta/Comair gave me a lot more respect for the FA’s job and to show that respect I always make a point of listening.
Chuck: I am not qualified to respond to everything that you’re saying, but “We are told that a window was hit by a fan blade or something from the engine. Those windows have three one inch thick panes of super strong acrylic in them.” is contradicted by http://www.aeronewstv.com/en/lifestyle/in-your-opinion/2959-what-is-the-thickness-of-a-commercial-aircraft-window.html (0.47-inch thick outer pane and 0.16-inch inner pane). You would need a great reason to add three inches of heavy acrylic to every side window in an airliner. That’s a lot of weight.
Also, on the cold temp/oxygen issue, as gruesome as this is to contemplate, there was a passenger stuck in the damaged window. So the cabin may not have completely depressurized. Airliners, especially older ones, are full of leaks in the pressure vessel. Thus cabin air is constantly being replenished with bleed air from the engine compressors. So a partially blocked single window failure may not leak that much more than the usual collection of leaks from holes punched for cables, etc. The final NTSB report will perhaps contain a description of the maximum cabin altitude reached, but it may never have gotten to 32,500′.
Steve (who asked “Philip, you’re an elite computer programmer, and a guy who’s flown jets and helicopters. How do you manage to so successfully bridge fields where “crash” has such different meaning and such different consequences?”): It is easy because “crash” is not part of the ICAO standard radio phrase book!
philg,
Did you watch the videos in the links I posted? You really should do that.
Everything you posted is about how it was possible to survive and how the story can be true. FlightAware isn’t reliable in situations like these. All of that data can be faked. I personally followed the flight paths of a plane in South America that was involved in a fishy story. The plane they said that crashed actually took off and landed safely in a completely different area. There was missing data from where the flight supposedly took off from. My point is that the data can be easily manipulated.
[Response from Philip… Chuck: I did watch the first one. The passenger seemed basically credible, albeit confused (he thought that he was going to crash and maybe die despite the fact that he was on an aircraft with hours of fuel remaining and enough power from the remaining engine not only to cruise, but to climb).
If it took the guy a few minutes to get organized and get his electronics out, the photos that he was taking were done at a point where the airliner was already down to an altitude where oxygen was no longer necessary.
The FlightAware data are harvested in real time from FAA computers so I don’t see how they could be faked by the same enterprise that consumed $2.1 billion to create an ecommerce site (healthcare.gov; see https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-09-24/obamacare-website-costs-exceed-2-billion-study-finds ). You’re saying that the FAA and Southwest and FlightAware and the folks at KPHL and the passengers all conspired to make it look like this monster GE/Safran engine blew up? Doesn’t it make many of the foregoing folks look bad? People are already criticizing the FAA for not requiring Southwest to do more inspection and Southwest for not doing more inspections (I don’t know enough about engine internals to speculate on whether an inspection would have revealed this problem).]
philg,
Ok. I see that you can’t see what I see. Like I said, I get it. It’s right in our faces everyday so we can’t see it. But it doesn’t take the entire agency or all of the agencies to fake this stuff. Just the folks with the power will do. I would suggest you watch the other two videos as well. Of course, I realize that here, on this venue no amount of evidence or even proof will suffice for those who refuse to see. There will always be an excuse or a reason how what I know to be a fact can’t possibly be true. Oh well, twenty years of research down the drain then. My life is a waste.
Do not question your reality.
The people on your TV are there to tell you truth.
There is no deception going on.
Everything is fine.
Do not question authority.
This couldn’t possibly be a drill.
A woman, while wearing her seat belt, was sucked out of the window to her waist.
The window is made of three panes of one inch thick super strong acrylic.
This really happened.
Do not question it.
Believe the people that make a lot of money telling you the truth.
They would never lie to you.
This woman is a hero.
Do not question it.
Go back to sleep.
Everything is alright.
Chuck: There does seem to be a conspiracy to hide the exact thickness of the B737 windows because, though I found the part number (see https://www.aviall.com/aviallstorefront/p/PA140N2139-1S=4I ) the exact acrylic thickness is not mentioned.
https://io9.gizmodo.com/why-is-there-a-hole-in-airplane-windows-1703660371
shows the full assembly (except for the innermost “scratch pane”). Also there is the little breather hole to let the cabin pressure through to the outer pane (so if the outer pane fails you would be guaranteed to have at least a small leak). Keep in mind that the aluminum skin is only about 1mm thick so a stack of three inch-thick acrylic blocks would be a little strange.
https://patents.google.com/patent/US20070069080A1/ is a patent application from Boeing. It describes the “prior art” windows as having an outer layer 0.35″ thick and the middle layer at 0.22″.
https://patents.google.com/patent/US20130313366A1/ is from Boeing’s supplier, GKN. It is interesting because it talks about how the windows bow out and create drag in flight.
https://patents.google.com/patent/US4793108A/ is a 1983 Boeing patent. The outer window was 0.22 inches thick and the inner one just 0.1 inches.
https://patents.google.com/patent/US5443912A/ says that conventional aircraft cabin windows start at 0.35 inches thick but they actually need to be only 0.28 inches thick. This allows 0.07 inches of tolerance for grinding back to clear after scratches.
Thanks for prompting me to think about the cabin windows. Usually I am just cursing the light aircraft “transparencies” (as they are called by suppliers) for not having https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_glass#Electrochromic_devices
Phil, somehow I don’t get the feeling that you are going to be able to change Chuck’s mind just by showing him the actual specs for window thicknesses.
For the rest of us, if you’ve ever seen a cross section of an airplane, it’s really scary how thin it is (1 mm is less that 1/16th of an inch for non-metric types). It’s about the same thickness as the sheet metal on your car except that your car is made of steel and this is aluminum which is softer.
Nevertheless it works just fine – this was the first passenger death on a US airliner since Colgan in 2009 and the last one before that was in 2006. This is remarkable given the depths of human stupidity and the natural tendency of complex machinery to fail in various ways (especially stupidity which accounts for more crashes than equipment failure, especially if you count stupidity AFTER an equipment failure which often turns survivable situations into unsurvivable ones). For systems to have been put in place to overcome these tendencies to such a great extent is a great accomplishment. Compare that to automobiles where over 100 people die in the US every single day. Or to the days of my youth when it was typical to have 5 or more crashes involving US airlines every year.
Going back to the “heroic pilot” argument, you could say that the pilot was heroic for what she DIDN’T do, which was taking a bad situation and making it worse (e.g. confusing which engine failed and shutting down the remaining working engine, etc.).
[Response from Philip… Jack: To your last point, it shouldn’t have been the captain (voice on radio) securing the bad engine, but rather the first officer (anonymous non-hero!). Is he a hero for not screwing up what he’d done in the sim hundreds of times (otherwise would not have passed checkride or recurrent training) and in a piston twin dozens of times (otherwise he would not have earned a multi rating)? Sure, why not? In the U.S. you get to be a hero just for showing up!]
Other than sticking a passenger in the opening what would be a good object commonly found on airplanes that could be used? Once the aircraft is down to a lower altitude and speed I suppose it is OK to fly with a window open but it would still be more comfortable for the passengers (psychologically if nothing else) if you could plug the hole somewhat. Other than a human body, what would plug the hole reasonably well and not just get sucked right out?
[Response from Philip: That is a good question. I think one of those roller bags would work pretty well, with most of it still in the airplane. 200 knots is a strong wind, but people flew that fast in the open-cockpit days (not in cruise, but in dives!).]
philg,
I have to admit that I got the 1″ thickness from something I read online by someone I thought knew what they were talking about. I did read up on how they make the windows and it was pretty impressive. The breather hole made sense and I remembered seeing them on my flights. Cabin windows aren’t as strong as cockpit windows but cockpit windows are made from thick tempered glass. If the woman went out a blown out glass window then I could understand why the witness would say there was glass everywhere. But that’s not the case. They are saying she went through a blown out acrylic window which would not result in “glass being everywhere” as there is no glass to be…anywhere. That’s a real puzzler don’t you think? Those windows would probably be pushed in all in one big chunk or maybe even a few chunks but it for sure wouldn’t result in “glass everywhere”.
Cabin windows may not be as strong as cockpit windows but they are made from acrylic and they are pretty strong.
I don’t know what this person’s credentials are but I’m going to take him at his word…
“In the passenger cabin alone where the danger from impacts isn’t a factor the pressurization difference between the inside and the outside is sufficient to apply a force equivalent to 0.5 kg per square centimeter of glass higher still in some aircraft. This means that a window say 40 cm by 50 cm would experience in excess of 1 metric ton of force which is equivalent to trying to support a 2013 Hyundai Accent on each and every cabin window.”
I highly doubt that a woman, who according to Marty had her seat belt on, went out the window to her waist with her arms dangling as one woman said. It just doesn’t seem possible unless the seat belts are made from bungee cords. It would be understandable only if they were bungee seat belts.
I find it even more implausible that Marty would decide to look for his wallet before donning his oxygen mask. Then pull out his laptop during the emergency of rapid decompression so he can buy wifi to live stream the event after finding a credit card. Then he finally puts his mask on improperly when most of us would be holding those masks tightly to our faces and covering our noses too. It just makes no sense. It seems like a stupid mistake that the script forgot to cover.
Where’s the unkempt look? Why aren’t they showing signs of the cold? Why is not one hair out of place? Me, I probably would have emptied my bowels from the drop in elevation alone. But these people just look as though there’s no problem at all.
https://is.gd/2NX6eL
I also have a problem with where the seat is that the woman supposedly went out the window. On Tuesday we are told it is row 17. But row 17 is not over the wing. “The engine exploded and when it exploded it broke a window in row 17,” Martinez said.”
But on Wednesday they magically changed it to row 14 which is over the wing. https://www.seatguru.com/airlines/Southwest_Airlines/Southwest_Airlines_Boeing_737-700_new.php
This is the same thing that happens with all of these events. People point out problems in the story and the next day, like magic, the story heals itself. And we’ll never hear a peep from Marty about the little discrepancy.
I’m pretty sure Marty would know which row he was in and therefore which row the VP banker from Wells Fargo (flying economy class) would be in. And yes I’m suggesting she would not be in economy class. Her territory covered a huge area of NM and Texas. She was not someone who would need to fly economy in my opinion. It’s just a thought.
But the seats do bother me and them changing their story bothers me too.
https://i.imgur.com/EPxDvra.jpg
https://is.gd/2EBV9G
Of course the reports of “blood everywhere” is the most disconcerting. The mention of it is horrific but it’s still odd that we don’t see a trace of blood in any of the pictures.
https://is.gd/2PVcx7
I’m just a guy wondering and asking questions because nothing is adding up. I know nothing about planes. But I would think that if I did know a lot about planes I would be really scratching my head and wanting my questions to be answered. I think that by now you have to admit that something is not smelling right with this story.
Lynda B:
Since you would be the most familiar with the passenger areas in airliners I was hoping you could tell me what we’re looking at here.
http://i67.tinypic.com/2i74kt1.jpg
Last question. Why didn’t they use the inflatable escape slides?
You have an excellent blog here and I appreciate you hearing me out and your last reply about the windows was quite good. Thanks
Good article. The main thing is the Captain acted like a Captain!!
[Response from Philip… True! Especially when interviewed later she made essentially the same point as in the original post. She was part of crew and they used their training.]
Jack D,
This really isn’t about window thickness. If I got the thickness of the window wrong it doesn’t change how strong they are one tiny bit. This is about super strong windows. This is about something happening that would have shook everyone to their core. This about the unbelievable horror of a window blowing in at altitude. The unimaginable horror of a woman instantly being sucked out of the window to the waist even though Marty said she had her seat belt on. This is about how nobody on the plane looks horrified at all. Not one mussed up hair to be seen.
This is about how the narrative (script) changed from row 17 on Tuesday to row 14 on Wednesday because the photos show the window over the wing.
This is about eyewitness accounts of “glass shattering” and “blood everywhere”.
“Tranchin said the passenger next to the broken window was hit by glass and “covered in blood,” he said.”
“Marty Martinez, a passenger on the flight, posted a video on his personal Facebook page stating he was “recording his last moments.” Martinez told CBS News there was “blood everywhere” on the aircraft.”
This is about Jennifer Riordan and how passengers finally got her back in her seat. “Many passengers kept trying to pull the woman back into the plane for a long time, until two men were able to get the woman back in her seat, they said.”
How did the seal up the hole? That’s the story I want to hear about. It should be a good one. But I’m sure the article I read where a man put his back to the window to seal it up has been scrubbed off the net by now.
I have questions that no one seems to care about let alone have answers for.
Chuck: The windows are not “super strong”. Like everything else on the airplane they are as light and weak as possible without being so weak that they will fail. They are designed only for one kind of force, i.e., pressure from the inside of the airplane. Even a scratch in the window is considered a risk that can lead to a failure. A chunk of metal that had been spinning at 30,000 RPM is going to come through a plastic window just like a bullet would. But it probably doesn’t even need to do that. If it just taps the window and adds some momentary stress the window will crack and fail.
Eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable. See https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-the-eyes-have-it/
Why wouldn’t they use the slides? If there was no fire there was no urgency to get off the airplane after the “abnormal” (not “emergency”) single engine approach and landing.
The main issues I have with your theories are (1) it is not obvious who benefits from lying about this and (2) 200+ Americans would have to keep a secret (and this is a country where a young attractive person can’t have sex with an old unattractive person in exchange for cash without broadcasting the news).
Chuck: but don’t you think it’s odd that whe was an executive for Wells Fargo? I mean if the window glass was rigged to fail, and her pony express had been delivered, wouldn’t it have made more sense if shed had been a back office analyst for Goldman Sachs? Follow the the rainbow to the end of the pot… See where that leads you.
Why didn’t they use the inflatable escape slides?
That one is easy to answer. The plane had landed safely. They had foamed down the engine just in case it was still on fire (it wasn’t but the firemen felt that they had to do something.) There was no rush to evacuate the aircraft. It was no longer dangerous. It is, unless they have towed it off by now, probably still sitting on the spot where it taxied off the runway after landing. The passengers could have stayed on the plane all day and it wouldn’t have made any difference to their safety at that point.
Any time you deploy the slides there is a chance of injury. If the plane is on fire or sinking in the water then you have no choice but to evacuate using the slides – the risk of not evacuating immediately outweighs the risk of the slides. But in this case there was no reason for the passengers (once the injured passengers had been evacuated) to make a normal exit from the plane onto the air stairs that had been brought up for this purpose.
I think you are exaggerating the direness of the situation. Very soon after the decompression the plane descended and slowed and having a window open would be similar to having a window open in your car while you were on the highway. It would have been annoying and noisy, especially to those seated close to it, but it would not have been a scene from hell, except for that poor woman.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/04/southwest-airlines-protested-airworthiness-directive-designed-to-prevent-engine-failures/#p3
First investigation facts and official speculation. Looks like Jackie’s version; the blade shattered the engine case and cowling, part of which fractured the window, which then failed outward and airflow slammed the victim. No window fragments found in the cabin.
We all love our jobs! We are all trained for emergency situations! In these situations it takes a competent crew, a village you might say! Flt 1380 had stellar pilots and stellar Fa’s, it kicks in when put in the situation.
It’s so terribly sad for all of us! We love our passengers!
Superstew: Thanks for sharing. I once had the honor of listening to Doreen Welsh, the flight attendant who was injured in the back of US Air 1549 (which pilots Sully and Skiles landed in the Hudson River). She was candid that one of her first thoughts after the plane came to a stop was to get out the nearest exit door and save herself, but that instead she gathered up her injured self and began doing her job of herding the assorted passengers out of the over-wing exits, not knowing whether staying longer inside the partially submerged plane would result in her death from drowning (e.g., if the plane suddenly sank). To me that is a heroic decision.
Last chance. And if you can’t see a problem with the stories after reading this then I know that you all have cognitive dissonance. Read it twice if you must. Let it sink in.
From an interview with Matt Tranchin…
Matt, what were the flight crew instructing you to do?
Well, um, given the circumstances, they were great, um…as kind of giving an indication of how terrifying it was. Um, some of the crew couldn’t hold back their horror. Um, and some were crying, um, as they looked out, um, the open window, um, onto, ah, the engine. Um, we actually received internet access, um, and texting capabilities, um, ah, a couple minutes after it happened. – Matt Tranchin, Community Organizer, Obama White House Office of Public Engagement Staff Assistant
From an interview with Marty Martinez…
“We were probably going down for 10 or 15 minutes. And, of course, everyone is freaking out, everyone is crying. It was the scariest experience,” he told CBS News. “I thought it was going to be our last few moments on Earth.” Martinez also told CBS News, “Once that window exploded and to see the flight attendants all crying we knew that something was really bad.” – Marty Martinez, CEO of Social Revolt Agency (community organizer)
Some passengers reported that they thought they were going to die – and one, Marty Martinez, posted a Facebook Live video that showed his terror – before the airplane managed to land safely. There were also reports from passengers that a passenger suffered a heart attack and that the woman was hit by shrapnel. – HEAVY.COM
“No window fragments found in the cabin.”
The cabin window blew out with such force that none of the materials were recovered inside the plane, baffling investigators, he said. “We didn’t see any shards of glass [that blew in] — I say glass, but it’s Acrylic,” Sumwalt said. “We found no evidence at all of any broken acrylic inside.” – Washington Post
Passenger Matt Tranchin said the flight took a turn when he saw a “huge explosion and glass shattering three rows ahead of me.” He said “Only one person was injured on the flight. And that person was taken out of the plane as soon as it landed.” – Matt Tranchin, Community Organizer, Obama White House Office of Public Engagement Staff Assistant
“On Tuesday, Southwest Airlines Flight 1380 from New York to Dallas suffered a catastrophic engine failure that killed a passenger, injured at least seven more, and caused an emergency landing in Philadelphia.” – https://www.cntraveler.com/story/what-the-southwest-airlines-flight-1380-emergency-tells-us-about-aviation-today
___________________________
Cabin windows are super strong because they have to be. But even a scratch can cause a failure due to the high pressures. They are inspected often.
“In the passenger cabin alone where the danger from impacts isn’t a factor the pressurization difference between the inside and the outside is sufficient to apply a force equivalent to 0.5 kg per square centimeter of glass higher still in some aircraft. This means that a window say 40 cm by 50 cm would experience in excess of 1 metric ton of force which is equivalent to trying to support a 2013 Hyundai Accent on each and every cabin window.” – Pretty much the definition of “super strong”
___________________________
Transcript from OU Professor, Hollie Mackey. A Professor of Women’s Gender, who says she sat in the same set of seats as Jennifer Riorden, who was employed by Wells Fargo, and tried to pull on her belt loops while she was hanging out the window…She’s waiting for the go ahead to take her seat belt off because she needed to use the ladies room but the flight attendant tells them to keep their seat belts on…
And so I was about to get something out of my bag and cuz I sat there thinking well maybe they’re gonna allow us to get up in a minute. So I didn’t get anything out for a while and then as I was waiting I thought well this isn’t getting any better so I’m just gonna get my stuff out and work on it because I had some things I wanted to work on during the flight.
And and then there was a like a loud kind of boom and kind of like whooshing, sucking sort of sound at the same time. And the masks dropped down which of course you never see happen. And I looked over very quickly and I saw that that Jennifer was in distress and so…
___________________________
The engine blew first with a loud noise and caused the plane to jerk according to every other witness. Then the masks came down. And THEN the window blew. Evidently she didn’t hear the engine noise like everyone else or feel the plane jerk/shudder.
___________________________
Later in the transcript…
And then I put my hand over on Jennifer’s back. And then the woman from behind me, you know, she was kind of rubbing my back trying to be supportive of me. And then she was trying to ask me to come to the back of the plane when a long time passed and there was nobody coming to help us. And and people were trying to flag down the flight attendants and nobody was coming. And we couldn’t understand. We thought there would be a sensor or something that would be saying, you know, it was a problem. And we learned later that they knew about the engine but they didn’t know about the distress in our row.
And so the flight attendants, when they could finally get up out of their seats and attach their oxygen and come and check the passengers. There was somebody with a baby that needed help and just people along the way that there was a lot of distress. Not chaos, right they I mean, I think the passengers I thought were remarkably calm and we trusted that we were in good hands. But you know we were trying to flag people down and at one point one of the flight attendants had come close and we thought though that she was coming to us. And then she turned around to help somebody else who was in distress. But then as soon as one of the flight attendants saw exactly why we were trying to to get help then they acted very quickly.
___________________________
Evidently the flight attendants didn’t think that the unbelievably loud roaring noise of decompression from a blown out window was out of the ordinary. Gee, I wonder why it’s so cold in here? And why do we have oxygen masks on?
I guess they had to stop and comfort a baby on their way to find out what all the fuss was about. Never mind that silly old blown out window and that lady hanging up to her waist out of the window. (yet she has her seat belt on according to four different sources). If any of you believe any of this tripe I will remind you that I still have one last bridge for sale…cheap.
___________________________
And in case no one noticed…
https://abcnews.go.com/amp/Business/wells-fargo-agrees-pay-billion-settle-customer-abuse/story?id=54616833
It’s news any time that a woman isn’t earning money on her back.
Chuck: The good news is that Robert Mueller and his team of 50 (or 100?) should be done with their Russia/Trump investigation within the next year or two (or maybe it will take more than four years to investigate a president elected to a four-year term?). That will free them up to delve into the questions that you raise, including finding a motive for killing a manager responsible for a nationwide bank’s community relations in New Mexico and “Greater Texas” (see https://missiongraduatenm.org/who-we-are/vision-council/jennifer-riordan ).
[Separately, the windows on a B737 are only about 10×14″ each, according to http://www.airlinercafe.com/forums.php?m=posts&p=54098 , which means that at an 8 psi differential they need to handle about 1000 lbs. of load (oval, not a rectangle shape). This sounds like a lot to carry, but there are aluminum ribs around the edges of the window frame. A 3 lb. aluminum bike frame is strong enough to support a 250 lb. rider over bumps. We should let a mechanical engineer tell us if it is the acrylic that has to be strong or the window frame (or both?). I think that acrylic is actually quite strong, inherently, though the patent cited above makes it clear that the acrylic used in an airliner is not thick enough to prevent bowing out in flight (under the 8 psi load) and causing aerodynamic drag. Once it is bowed out it will become more vulnerable to cracking and failure with an impact. For the window to fail without cracking it essentially has to be pulled apart from either side, I think. Consider how tough it is to just pull apart the narrowest wooden dowel from Home Depot. If you had a super strong person on either side pulling absolutely straight the dowel will hold just fine. It is only if the dowel can be bent or cracked that it comes apart. Even a piece of paper has pretty good tensile strength. If you don’t rip the paper you can tug on either side and it will hold together.]
philg,
I agree that Trump, the Clinton’s, the Bush family, etc, etc… will never pay for their crimes. Also no one will ever go to prison for the banking scandals leading to the economic crash that put 50 million people on food stamps (SNAP). But I think little miss perfect, Jennifer Riordan, is up to her neck in the Wells Fargo scam which involved creating 3,500,000 (three million five hundred thousand) FAKE bank accounts while they forced their employees to “cross sell” because the CEO of Wells Fargo liked the slogan “Eight is Great”.
Like all bad news this Wells Fargo fiasco news was released on a Friday. The news was that Wells Fargo had to pay ONE BILLION DOLLARS in fines for their decade or longer scam. I’d like to see who actually gets this money. I doubt we’ll ever know. But as most people know news released on Friday is mostly forgotten about by Monday.
I think that Jennifer Riordan had a big hand in the fraud perpetrated upon the Navajo Tribe which is in her territory and falls into her “Community Relations” purview. Telling elderly Navajo, some that couldn’t even speak English, that if they wanted to cash their checks they had to open several accounts with Wells Fargo and then pressuring them to purchase other needless products is part of a separate lawsuit that is still ongoing. Not a very nice thing to do to the elderly of any nation. https://www.daily-times.com/story/news/local/navajo-nation/2018/03/05/wells-fargo-seeks-dismissal-navajo-nation-lawsuit/390622002/
As you should be able to tell from my post the strength of the window is not the important part. Very little hinges on the strength. I was just pointing out that they are very strong.
The important part is the conflicting testimonies by what looks to be a bunch of actors hired to play roles in this Southwestern flight 1380. I downloaded a YouTube video of an interview with “hero firefighter” Andrew Needum. In the half hour video he states that he was in row 8 on the right hand side of the plane and that his son was sitting in the window seat. This information was confirmed by his family standing at his side. His wife, daughter and his mother were in row 7 across the aisle. He was in the aisle, his father was next to him and his son was by the window in row 8. There’s only one problem with that. Row 8 on the right hand side of the plane has no window. Maybe that’s why the video, which I luckily downloaded two days ago, is no longer on YouTube and has been replaced by a much shorter version which omits that information. The video is now only 15 minutes long instead of 30 minutes long. It still has the part where he says his son was by the window but the part where he is asked where he was sitting is missing since it was towards the end of the interview. Why would they do that?
So when you add up all of the list of things I’ve pointed out we can only conclude that we have a serious fake news problem here and around the world. We are being controlled by the people providing us with false news while our governments (plural) stage fake news in the form of terror attacks, school shootings and other control tactics such as this obviously staged plane incident involving community organizers, a “Women’s Gender Professor”, and a guy who’s wife was supposedly on the flight. But this guy’s own Linkedin account says he worked for a very sketchy company called ‘Go West Creative Group’ who is headquartered in Nashville with offices in LA and NY and brag about how they will load up their trucks with all of the media equipment and come to your location to promote your business in a way that few can understand. It’s done subliminally and Nashville just happens to be the big news of the day in what looks like another phony shooting show. Friends of mine are working on that one as I type. I’m still compiling evidence in this flight 1380 “event”.
This isn’t the only company out there like this. It’s 100% brainwashing in your face passed off as brand marketing and advertising. Their motto is ‘ Manifesting not marketing, but memories’
http://www.gowestcreativegroup.com
Believe it. We’re all being hoodwinked. It’s much bigger than we can imagine. This is just a tiny piece of an enormous picture puzzle and our tax dollars are funding most of it.
How could I leave Obama out of that list? He’s the one who signed into law that propaganda is now legal to use on the citizens of the USA. Some people still aren’t sure on this point, so just for the record, yes: US government domestic propaganda use against American citizens has been fully made legal.
The newest version of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) includes an amendment that would legalize the use of propaganda on the American public, reports Michael Hastings of BuzzFeed. – http://www.businessinsider.com/ndaa-legalizes-propaganda-2012-5
And yes this is the same Michael Hastings who died in a mysterious car crash and the evidence mounts that he was murdered.
National Defense Authorization Act of 2013, in which the Smith-Mundt Act was officially amended to allow American pro-government propaganda materials produced by the State Department and Broadcasting Board of Governors to be released inside the United States.
In other words, from then on Government use of propaganda against the American people became legal in the “interests of national security”.
In an effort to assuage the women outraged that anyone dare not recognize the captain as a hero, I am sharing the analogy my husband offered after speaking to Philip at some length. Akin to calling a plumber a hero for fixing a leak. That said, I’m the commenter on FB to note her nerves of steel, and that anyone would be proud to possess her impressive CV.
Suzanne Goode: “effort to assuage the women outraged that anyone dare not recognize the captain as a hero”
We need to distinguish true heroism, e.g., the civilian who runs into a burning building or teacher who takes a bullet to protect kids, from the professional ‘heroism’ of someone fulfilling their professional duties.
The first problem is that our society is so degraded by indulgences that we now consider dutiful behavior as heroic.
The second problem is that the women’s movement is so militant that ordinary duties are now considered heroic, so long as the duties are being performed by a woman, and anyone who disagrees is a deplorable heretic.
Perhaps we should begin labeling men as heroes whenever they perform expected, but challenging duties. For example, we could call Trump a hero if he is able to remain faithful to Melania for a year.
I have 27 years working on jet liners which started in the Air Force. My main
systems were A/C and pressurization. Later I worked on all systems on the flight line at Douglas Aircraft in Long Beach, Ca. Do a type search on National Airline DC-10 flight 29 and read the similarities of these two stories. The planes name was Barbara and I worked on the repairs when it was flown into Douglas.
Everyone keeps saying Riodan was sucked out the window but in reality she was
pushed out. The force from the air pushing on her would’ve been close to one
ton of pressure and if she started thru the window hole she was going out
period. A lot was said about ear pain and how cold it would’ve been but nothing
mentioned about how foggy the cabin would’ve gotten. I have pressurized
hundreds and hundreds of planes and know this to be a fact. you can;t see
your hand in front of your face it’s so foggy. These BS stories need to be exposed and these actors need to be prosecuted
John Talley,
If you’re the John Talley from Texas then you, sir, have my ear.
I believe you mean flight 27 but please correct me if I’m wrong.
https://aviation-safety.net/database/record.php?id=19731103-0
This proves that the entire Southwest Airliner engine failure on 4/17/2018 is a completely made up fantasy that never happened except in a script made for the gullible masses. Anyone using critical thinking would realize this once this event is held up to the light.
I’ve read hundreds of comments on high altitude decompression and this is the first time that someone has said that the cabin becomes so foggy you can’t even see your hand in front of your face. Of course that makes perfect sense.
It seems that the government and Wells Fargo both wanted Ms Riordan to make a hasty exit from the public eye. But she never exited the plane because, obviously, she was never on the plane. Evidently she will never give testimony in a courtroom about her actions or the actions of those below her as Wells Fargo employees. This would be very handy for Wells Fargo in the federal lawsuit that the Navajo Nation has against Wells Fargo.
This begs the question: Where is Jennifer Riordan?
It’s now been proven 16 ways to Sunday that this engine failure did not happen. At least not on this particular flight.
That said, just as our Commanders in Chief get away with murder, this information will never be allowed to be presented to the masses. The people who own and run the main stream media won’t allow it because these are the same people who own anything and everything in this world worth owning.
Thank you very much for your comment here John. We need more experts like you to come forward and help wake up more people to the deception that saturates our world.