Southwest Accident

[Guest John_Cillis]

Could have been a lot worse, I was on the ground once when our Delta 737 engine exploded.....

https://www.cnn.com/us/live-news/southwest-flight-emergency/index.html

[cleonpack93]

Damn, that's not good. Shrapnel actually penetrated the fuselage in-flight. One passenger dead.

A moment of silence for those affected.

[fppilot]

Sad.  First fatality in the history of Southwest from what I read.

[Adrian123]

Sad, Never seen such destruction.

 

[Guest John_Cillis]

Yes, was surprised at the damage and as another mentioned, I think it's the first fatality in what is considered one of the world's safest airlines after Qantas.  They talk about the aircraft free falling but that is standard procedure to rapidly descend when the cabin depressurizes.  It could have been a far worse accident, I imagine an angel was on that wing and guiding the aircraft home.  Still a fatality is a fatality and it is always sad when that happens in aviation or any form of transportation.

John

[n4gix]

Strange that I did not notice any "shrapel holes" in the fuselage though, just the blown out window.

[KevinAu]

There was a child killed when the Southwest jet overran the runway at Midway many years ago.

[Patco Lch]

1 minute ago, KevinAu said:

There was a child killed when the Southwest jet overran the runway at Midway many years ago.

To me Midway just looks like a dangerous place. Such a small area with very high traffic totally surrounded by business and residential areas just right outside the airport boundary.

[HiFlyer]

An example of what can happen when the ubiquitous technology that surrounds us fails catastrophically. Very sad, and now multiple families are affected, and one is grieving.

[Guest John_Cillis]

8 minutes ago, KevinAu said:

There was a child killed when the Southwest jet overran the runway at Midway many years ago.

Oh, I think I remember that, was the child on the aircraft or ground?  If ground this would be the first in-flight SWA fatality, regardless fatalities in the US and European airlines are becoming increasingly rare.

[KevinAu]

2 minutes ago, Cactus521 said:

Oh, I think I remember that, was the child on the aircraft or ground?  If ground this would be the first in-flight SWA fatality, regardless fatalities in the US and European airlines are becoming increasingly rare.

On the ground. A passenger in a car crushed by the plane.

[n4gix]

3 minutes ago, PATCO LCH said:

To me Midway just looks like a dangerous place. Such a small area with very high traffic totally surrounded by business and residential areas just right outside the airport boundary.

Several months after that runway overrun, I was returning from a trip on Southwest. For some reason the PF landed way long on 31C. In fact he landed after the second runway crossing (4L/22R). Finally he managed a hard landing and stomped on the brakes as well as max reverse thrust. We managed to turn off the runway right at the very end...

[KevinAu]

1 hour ago, PATCO LCH said:

To me Midway just looks like a dangerous place. Such a small area with very high traffic totally surrounded by business and residential areas just right outside the airport boundary.

Yes, it is. I still remember a capt said to me one time when I was a young fo just before I was about to begin the circle to 22....wise words which I still remember to this day which I try to follow...”Don’t f—k this up.”

[Guest John_Cillis]

28 minutes ago, n4gix said:

Several months after that runway overrun, I was returning from a trip on Southwest. For some reason the PF landed way long on 31C. In fact he landed after the second runway crossing (4L/22R). Finally he managed a hard landing and stomped on the brakes as well as max reverse thrust. We managed to turn off the runway right at the very end...

My worst landing was on a Lufthansa flight into Bologna Italy from Frankfurt.  The pilot flared from what I estimate about ten feet too high, and the 737-300 slammed into the ground at Bologna, so hard it broke cologne bottles in my suitcase, which I found when I got it from the turnstile.  That landing felt like a chiropractor making a massive and terminal spinal adjustment.  Passengers hissed and booed at the landing, it was that bad, but I held my silence knowing that sudden chop on a warm Italian day where the weather was percolating, that a sudden downdraft could happen. 

Fortunately on that flight, out of the blue, I met a former colleague from India who I had not seen in over a year.  Serendipity.  He was a good former Information Technology colleague named Ravi.  I was sitting in the concourse in Frankfurt Germany, delirious with jet lag  having flown in from Phoenix with a stopover in Pittsburgh, then non-stop to Rhein Main, when a dark and mysterious man rose out of the blurry crowd my jet lagged eyes were seeing.  I squinted and looked at the suspicious character in my Jet Lag Hallucinating mind and then he spoke "John, what the heck are you doing here?":

I recognized him immediately and said "Ravi, I am flying to Bologna Italy to do some work for Holiday Inn there".  Ravi said "Me too, I have just flown in from Delhi to work for my client in Bologna".  My head was spinning, small, small world.  And this has happened to me not once, not twice, not three times, but four times with different people in different places.  I was a road warrior before I went out on disability and these serendipitous events would just happen during my travels, once or twice a year.

Sorry I digressed from my opening post, when accidents happen I like to celebrate the lives of my fellow world travelers here in the forums, even if their world is limited to their home state.

[Bob Scott]

2 hours ago, n4gix said:

Strange that I did not notice any "shrapel holes" in the fuselage though, just the blown out window.

The failed window is 10 rows aft of the lateral plane of the cowl damage...doubt that this was "shrapnel" per se (uncontained pieces of a disintegrating compressor/turbine wheel), but more likely a large piece or pieces of the engine/cowl separating and striking the fuselage well behind the engine.  Most modern turbine engines have a kevlar belt around the compressor and turbine sections to prevent the high-speed rotating components from grenading into the rest of the aircraft.

It also looks like the aft edge of the failed window frame is deformed.  At cruise altitude, those windows have more than a ton of force being applied from the inside due to pressurization, so if the window frame were damaged by impact from a large piece of engine debris, the force of pressurization could well do the rest in removing the window from the jet, causing the kind of explosive rapid decompression they experienced.

All that said, muerto es muerto...

Regards