If the oxygen tanks aren’t blowing up, the doors are blowing off.

I sure hope the wings weren’t Snap-Tite assemblies…

More than likely, the Qantas 747 scare was the result of an oxygen tank that exploded in the cargo bay. This opened up a hole in the fuselage that resulted in a loss of cabin pressure and forced the crew to take the plane down 20,000 feet and make an emergency landing.

Every airliner has such oxygen tanks: that is how those oxygen masks above your seat work.

This was very close to being Lockerbie 2. If more tanks explode, and the hole is bigger, then you have potential for catastrophic failure. Once the fuselage is torn like that, anything can go wrong. The plane can break up, debris can get sucked into engines, resulting in engine and/or hydraulic failure…you name it!

More than likely, I’d say this was the result of fatigue failure. Flying trans-oceanic routes can tend to do that to an airplane, as the structure can easily suffer corrosion fatigue.

In 1988, an Aloha Airlines 737 landed safely–but a flight attendant was sucked out of the plane–when a large part of the fuselage near the first class section broke off in mid-flight. I was a 3rd-year engineering student at the time, so we made morbid jokes about “the new Boeing 737-C (convertible).”

Also, in 1988 Pan Am Flight 103 suffered a disastrous decompression, as a catastrophic decompression–caused by a bomb in the cargo hold–led to a separation of the aircraft into several pieces, with a debris field spanning over 80 miles. No one survived. Several people on the ground in Lockerbie, Scotland, also died.

I’d say–compared to those cases–that the passengers on the Qantas flight got out of this one quite lucky.

A van driver at Dallas-Fort Worth Airport fell asleep–due to a medical condition–and crashed into a passenger jet. No one on the jet was injured.

Gene Damschroder, a former World War II pilot and Republican lawmaker in Ohio, has died in a plane crash. Five others on board (including a 4-year-old girl) were also killed.

According to Rex Damschroder, Gene’s son, “Someone said they heard the engine sputter.”

Given that the plane was 40 years old, it could have been mechanical failure. Hopefully, Damschroder had performed his pre-flight checklist, which would have included checking to ensure that the plane had fuel.

When you’re about 200 miles above the earth, and your urinal breaks down, you can’t just “hang it over the edge.”

With that in mind, two weeks is a long time to wait for a fix. 😉

Last week, a T-38 crash in Mississippi killed two pilots; today, another T-38–part of a EuroNato Joint Jet Pilot Training regimen–went down, killing both pilots. T-38 flights have been grounded.

The T-38 Talon, deployed in 1959, has been the premier jet trainer for the Air Force. It is capable of supersonic flight, and is used to ease student pilots into high-performance flight regimes.

The EuroNATO program is reserved for the best of the best students. Typically, they are the cream of the crop from the Air Force Academy, or Embry-Riddle. (I knew a couple of ROTC students who got EuroNATO slots.) For a EuroNATO crew to go down is very serious, and I would suspect that this is due to mechanical issues.

He simply failed to execute his checklist.

When pilots do not execute checklists, bad things happen. The Comair disaster in Lexington (wrong heading), Kentucky was such an example, as was the Detroit crash of 1987 (flap settings). Landing a fighter plane tits-up is also evidence of checklist failure.