

How often do plane stowaways fall from the sky? - quonn
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19562101

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ChuckMcM
It is a sad thing when someone is so desperate that they will attempt this.
Its a stupid thing when someone who watched a movie thinks this is actually
possible and tries to re-create it on a lark. Maybe a message that said "Be
sure to clean off the dead people who try to stow away here." So that people
attempting it would realize they were in fact already dead.

Even with a canister of oxygen, at 35,000 feet you can't breath if you aren't
in a pressure suit. Just doesn't work that way.

~~~
pdx

        Even with a canister of oxygen, at 35,000 feet you can't 
        breath if you aren't in a pressure suit.
    

Why not?

~~~
refurb
Partial pressures.

You can breath at 35,000 ft without a pressured suit, but go much higher and
you can't.

At sea level, you have 760 mmHg of air pressure. Oxygen is 21% of the air
mixture, so you have a partial O2 pressure of 160 mmHg.

At 35,000 ft, air pressure is 179 mmHg [1], so if you breath 100% pure oxygen,
you're getting the same amount of oxygen you'd get at sea level.

Go up to 50,000 ft and the air pressure is only 83 mmHg, so even breathing
100% oxygen, you're only getting 50% of the oxygen you'd get at sea level.

[1] [http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/air-altitude-pressure-
d_46...](http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/air-altitude-pressure-d_462.html)

~~~
sliverstorm
Sea level is not the minimum oxygen levels tolerable by your body. Why, just a
month or two ago I climbed to 14,000ft. Made me dizzy and nauseous , but the
partial pressure was somewhere around 80mmHg.

~~~
sneak
Unless you hadn't showered for a long time prior, you were probably nauseated,
not nauseous.

~~~
akavi
The OED attests that silverstorm's usage is the older one, predating yours by
8 years (1604 vs 1612).

Regardless (and I feel like such a broken record saying this), meaning in
language is determined by consensus, not dictum, and at least for me (a 21
year old who grew up in the United States), "nauseous" can have no meaning but
"sickened". "Nauseating" is what I would use for your meaning.

------
rmprescott
>How often do plane stowaways fall from the sky?

just once

~~~
raganwald
Reminds me of...

I approached a couple of old fellows top-roping a route on the Niagara
Escarpment. I asked if they would be long, as I wanted to do the route. They
invited me to jump on their rope. I had a look. It was dirty and the sheath
seemed to be detaching from the core. The end was kinked and frayed. How of
ten do you change your ropes, I asked in horror.

"Every time they break. Why?"

------
colanderman
_But actually preventing someone slipping into the undercarriage depends on
checks and procedures that are not always present, Shanks warns.

"In a lot of places around the world, the control of movement and airside
control areas is not the same as what we have here."

"It's much easier in some locations to access the airside areas than it is in
the UK. The only way it could be prevented is if the rest of the world
tightened their procedures."_

I would think the obvious solution would be to slap a big old multilingual
warning sign on the wheel wells, clearly stating "flying in wheel wells WILL
result in death by asphyxiation, hypothermia, and severe physical trauma".

~~~
ZoFreX
This really shows up how much of our security is theatre - if people can get
into the wheel well of a flight landing at Heathrow there's very little
stopping someone putting a bomb there. Yet legitimate, paying travellers have
to jump through all the hoops.

~~~
danielweber
Keeping bombs out of the cargo bay is one of the things we seem to do very
well, and has little to do with all the screenings we instituted since 9/11.

How many planes have been bombed by someone sneaking something into the wheel
well?

~~~
run4yourlives
None, yet.

I can't imagine it would be too hard to place a bomb in the wheel well of a
plane parked in Nairobi, for example. The biggest issue would be avoiding the
pilot's pre-flight check.

That wouldn't be to hard to do if you are a member of a ground crew that has
access to the aircraft _after_ the pilot is on board.

BTW, we keep bombs out of the cargo area well because there was a time we
didn't do this well at all. Then this happened:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_India_Flight_182> along with this:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_Am_Flight_103>

------
MattRogish
Wheel-well stowaway is just about the worst thing you can do, ever. The wheel-
wells are unpressurized, unheated, and designed to snugly fit the wheels in
there (airplane designers don't waste space!). If you're not crushed to death
upon retraction then you're almost certainly going to freeze to death or die
of hypoxia. Just don't do it.

~~~
astrodust
Hitching a ride on a boat full of drug-running pirates is actually safe by
comparison.

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binarymax
There must be a way to monitor wheel well activity with cameras? And abort the
flight if someone tries to get on?

~~~
praptak
It was only 73 recorded deaths starting from 1946. This would be one of the
crappiest cost/result ratio in lifesaving efforts in the history of humanity.

~~~
DanBC
...but in the context of aircraft (where we go through ridiculous security
theatre; and where we cannot use any technology; etc) we're used to that kind
of spending.

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lsh
We all know how to deal with these parasites in the landing gear:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=JijblXY0Mkc#t=6s)

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lectrick
Anyone who googles "wheel well stowaway" finds out the risk. In one google.

I almost want to go to the class graduation ceremony of every high school in
america and say "tl;dr AT LEAST FUCKING GOOGLE IT." :)

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accarrino
I'm pretty sure that military pilots have to go unpressurized to 25,000 feet
in order to be qualified. however they don't have to stay there for very long.
and certainly not as long as the duration of a commercial flight.

~~~
nettdata
When I did my training (Canadian Air Force, in the early 90's), we only had to
go through controlled hypoxia training that allowed us to experience high
altitude sickness, and therefore (hopefully) recognize the symptoms of it so
we could react to some failure at altitude.

We basically had to do menial tasks, like read a deck of cards, play "paddy-
cake", etc., and then put our oxygen masks back on once we thought we were too
impaired, while a technician was there with us.

However, I think the simulated altitude was 20k or 25k feet.

Needless to say there's a reason that O2 is (legally) required in
unpressurized aircraft for anything over 10k feet.

~~~
jcoby
Here in the US oxygen is required for the primary crew at over 14k cabin
altitude. At 12.5-14k it's required after 30 minutes. No requirement under
12.5k.

I have flown at 12k for 1 hour and could tell that the air was much thinner
and that going much higher would have started to impair.

I think that most commercial aircraft run somewhere between a 6k and 8k cabin
altitude and as such a whole different set of rules apply. I don't know for
sure - I'm only a private pilot.

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gadders
I've got "It's Raining Men" on my internal jukebox now :-(

