It used to be possible to lower the ventral airstair in commercial airliners while in flight, but the FAA ordered design tweaks after the Dan Cooper incident.
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I love the simplicity of the design!
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I encountered one only a few weeks ago - everything was ready to go, but the main door wouldn’t lock. Apparently the crew of the previous flight had started to open the door still armed, noticed and disarmed it, but the slide had slightly deployed, so the door wouldn’t fully close again.
It cost me ~5 hours whilst a replacement plane was flown (empty) from Berlin to Manchester, and it cost the airline ~£300 compensation per passenger (more than the ticket price), plus two planes being out of commercial use for a day.
I don’t know what this person was charged with, but those sort of expenses - plus the cost of scrambling two fighters - soon add up. Defrauding* the company of tens of thousands of pounds, perhaps?
.* probably not the right legal concept, but I don’t know the terminology.
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Cargo area is pressurized with the rest of the plane - just not heated.
It’s basically a giant aluminum tube. You can’t just pressurize half a tube.
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Come on, that’s ridiculous and you know it. How about stop with the whataboutism.
We do know that if a door is opened in mid-flight, it can in fact kill people. We also know the words that came out of her mouth. It was that she wanted to kill the entire plane. We also know we live in a society where witch doctors aren’t considered to be real in terms of things like curses.
It’s also all moot, because the court did not charge her for attempted murder.
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In the sense that, if there was a hit man who had a means of killing people such that no one could prove it was done by material means, then yes, the client would be off the hook. Legally they would not be homicides. The clients considered delusional, the deaths coincidental. (Until someone could prove a rational, non-natural cause of death.)
And now that I’ve said that, I just realized this is literally the Agatha Christie story “The Pale Horse.”
This is also making me think of some supposed hit men offering services on the “Dark Net.” They take money, promising to kill the target… then do nothing. In terms of law enforcement, it’s apparently all a bit of a mess, with no one being prosecuted, even though the people paying are contracting for a killing… Mostly nothing’s being done because too many things are happening in different jurisdictions and cops are lazy fucks, but also I think there’s an element of, “the person trying to hire a killer is a bit delusional to believe in this” at play, too, so it’s not being treated very seriously.
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Damn, this person is a danger to the public. This is a case where imprisonment is not a punishment, but in order to protect the public. Two years is not nearly sufficient.
Yeah, blond white chick gets off easy. What the everloving fuck?
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Wheels could be up after a crash and the instrument which tells you the plane is moving could be broken off by impact.
So, no.
I would expect a raft to be blown off by air movement if it opens in flight.
tens of thousands of pounds, perhaps?
An aviation blog I read said 86k GBP
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I think there was a skydiving club that bought an old 727 (minus Cooper vanes)- for them, being able to open the airstair in flight is an important feature…
I’m not so sure.
Her actions could have caused panic, riot, and/or exacerbated/triggered stress-related health issues (both physical and emotional) for passengers. A person unstable enough to make this threat (and to attempt to act on it) definitely poses dangers to crew. (Even if that danger is not the door opening itself.)
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The RAF has acknowledged that scrambling two fighter planes was the result of an error. It’s in this story.
Which I’ve just watched episode one of the Beeb’s latest dramatisation of, and which I am waiting for episode 2 of, on Sunday.
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Yes, I saw that, but error or not, it’s still an expense!
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Oh, sure. No dispute. Just adding more info for BBers’ benefit. The reason the error happened is part of the on-plane story.
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You know, the discussion here about how difficult it is to open a door because of the greater air pressure inside, made me wonder whether that would also be true if there was a fire in the cabin. Adding combustion products and heating the air could add considerable pressure, even on the ground.
I’ve seen a few adaptations of it before. It looks like this time they didn’t try to turn it into a Miss Marple story. (For some reason they keep trying to do that…)
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If the pressure is already greater inside the cabin, how would increasing pressure by heating air inside the cabin make it easier to open the door?
Maybe I’m confused about what you’re asking, though.
I’m not implying that it would be easier to open the door. I’m worrying that if there was a fire onboard, even on the ground it might be impossible to open the doors to escape.
NB on the use of the airstair by DB Cooper. ISTR that he still had to direct the plane to fly low enough for the cabin to be at ambient pressure before he could open it.
Does anyone think that Death Note was a documentary here? Because it’s not.
We’re talking about a real person who made a real threat and acted to carry it out. Her ignorance doesn’t not mitigate that she made a threat and moved to carry it out.
If I see a gun, pick it up and declare I’m going to shoot everyone up, does it really matter if I’m ignorant of whether or not it is loaded, if I’m acting as if it is?
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Ah, thanks for the clarification.
My entirely uneducated speculation would be that by the time there was enough heat to make a relevant difference to internal pressure it would be too late to matter to anyone inside, anyway. But as a technical question, it is interesting.
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