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It’s been a little more than a month since I wrote about Air Florida Flight 90, which crashed in the Potomac River back in 1982. Coincidentally, it was just 2 days later when Flight 1549, under very different circumstances (bird strikes), landed in the Hudson River. Of course, with no loss of life and only a few injuries, the outcome for the passengers of “The Miracle on the Hudson“ was much different than for those of Flight 90, where only five survived.
Today we want to look back at another frightening incident in the world of flight. It’s another one I remember vividly from the news and, because it’s pretty recent, maybe you do as well.
On February 24, 1989 (just a couple months before the events of Flight 232), UAL Flight 811, a Boeing 747-122, departed from Honolulu, headed for a stopover in Auckland, New Zealand. Roughly 15 minutes into the flight, the forward cargo-door blew completely off the plane. The cargo door, of course, sits below the cabin areas, but the plane was already above 22,000′. That means there was very rapid decompression, which actually pulled the floor above the door down, and five rows of business-class seats were sucked from the airplane, taking nine helpless passengers with them.
It would later be determined that the cause of this accident was double-edged. First, the door’s latching mechanism was too weak. The flaw had been fixed in some 747s, but not in many others. Second, this particular 747 was the victim of a short in an electrical switch. That switch was supposed to cut power to the cargo door when it closed, but it didn’t. Then a short circuit caused the latch to be essentially given an “open” command and, because the door was still powered, it simply obeyed the command, and the large pressure differential did the rest…at the cost of nine fatalities.
But, as we’ve so often seen, nearly every flight disaster has a hero. Often times it’s the pilots and the case of Flight 811 was no exception. They were able to maneuver the plane back to Honolulu and successfully land the plane with no additional loss of life and only a few injuries. What’s so heroic about landing the plane, you might ask? Well, after the fact, United Airlines ran a whole series of tests in their simulator involving the loss of the front cargo door. And never once, despite all the attempts, was the plane able to be landed.
Aircraft are mammoth machines with millions of parts and thousands of miles of cable and wire…all designed and built by people. Any human error can have disastrous consequences. But on the other side, there is the super-human effort of people placed in these circumstances that can sometimes mitigate, or even prevent, the loss of life.
