Opening a plane door mid-flight
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
I don't know about you but I actually find this story reassuring, despite the sensationalism.
tldr: if someone is about to open the cabin door mid flight, and it's actually going to open, buckle up your seat belt and you will be fine.
In high school, PCP was a thing and would generate stories such as taking a wine bottle to the head without effect. Maybe it's just morbid curiosity, but I fly a lot and am as concerned about mentally ill passengers as I am anything else...
If he had a tendency to behave this way, or a serious mental illness, was there any way to know before he boarded a plane? Did he take a prescription med and have an unexpected side effect? Or was it illicit combined with profoundly bad judgement?
Or did he just have a really bad day and decide to end it and take a plane load of souls with him?
Hoping there is follow up on this story with an explanation.
Cialdini explains it very well in his book "Influence". Despite thinking that we are perfectly logical, we often look at others and look for social proof to decide what the appropriate behavior for a situation is.
So, when nobody is acting, we don't either. This is subconscious, it's not a rational decision.
This lasts until we receive instructions on what to do, which allows us to break out of the effect. That is why in streets accidents, instead of asking for generic help, it is better to ask people to call an ambulance.
I suspect that the passengers that intervened did so only after the attendant explicitly asked for help. And even after that, the effect was probably still so strong that most passengers stayed in their seats.
Not "someone call for help!" But point at someone and say "call for help now", point at someone else and say "do this action now".
The more you know
In this case the flight attendant should have said "You in seat 1A perform the eye gauge"
Edit: s/stewardess/flight attendant
Is stewardess "politically incorrect?"
I'd care more about the individual upgrade to "flight attendant" vs. "steward/stewardess" based on level of professionalism if they were actually competent and professional, which is not particularly supported by the evidence on US domestic airlines. Flight attendant or cabin crew is more convenient to use when referring to groups, still.
(Crew chief or loadmaster are the true professionals in this space...)
News articles don't say (it's not an important detail), but we may speculate that there were people on the sidelines who were waiting for an opportunity to enter the fray.
But also, everyone involved seemed to be continually surprised about how difficult it was to get the guy under control. Personally I'm not sure that, if I were on that flight, I would've bothered if I saw that three or four people were already engaging. The bystander effect (aka "someone else's problem") isn't always completely illogical.
It probably happened quite fast, too. As I understand it, happened in an area between bulkheads where there aren't any seats. The fight likely wasn't visible to everyone on board, and by the time enough people rose to engage, it might have been over. Again, just speculation.
Lastly, there's also obviously a limit to the number of people who can engage in a fight in cramped airplane cabin.
I'm a fairly large guy, and prone to have jumped in the middle of this. I can only imagine how difficult it would have been to navigate the cramped seats and isles, where surely everyone was gawking and rubbernecking, just to get to the galley, where 2 small people have a hard time standing side-by-side, and help in the fight. Two people tussling in that space is about all it's going to allow, and the troublemaker was clearly on something I ain't on, to take a beating with a wine bottle, and keep fighting. There's just no good answer here, except for the pilot to ask, over the intercom, if there's a Jackie Chan on board.
I read it as "If still at low altitude, the door actually would open". In othrr words, because they were at a high altitude, the door didn't open and everything turned out alright.
The second of these two clauses refers to what actually happened; the first is counterfactual. But since they didn't put the facts about altitude in TFA the impression is that both are true.
http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/crime/florida-man-c...
> Hudek, who was sitting in first class and traveling on a “dependent pass,” ordered one beer before takeoff and showed no signs of intoxication, FBI Special Agent Caryn Highley wrote in the complaint.
> About an hour into the flight, Hudek briefly went into the lavatory, according to the complaint. He then went back out and asked one of the flight attendants a question in the galley area, the complaint says.
> Hudek returned to the lavatory for about two minutes. After he walked out he lunged toward the emergency exit door, grabbed the handle and tried to open it, the complaint alleges.
Be it shorter work weeks, social safety nets, and/or less focus on perfection in (social) media.
This kind of dramatic event is very rare. You could focus some attention on early intervention services that work with people experiencing first episode of psychosis. Ideally those services would be all age, but pragmatically I guess 14 to 35 would cover most people.
About 1% to 2% of the population has a psychotic illness. I think that prevalence, with the rarity of events like this is reassuring.
You're far more likely to come to harm on a plane from a drunk or drugged person, or from someone dropping their bag on your head as they get something from the overhead locker.
And this risk from drunk / drugged people shows perhaps another thing to target: phobias are very treatable. People don't know this, and can't afford the treatment, so they self-medicate with alcohol and meds and drugs.
IF I hadn't just read this sentence on this article:
>Nevertheless, things wouldn’t have been quite so dramatic as in Iron Man 3, where all the passengers get sucked out of a hole blown in an aircraft.
I would have never believed possible that it came from BBC, as well as - since one or more bottles of wine were involved in the incident - the presence of a stock photo of two bottles of wine (unopened/completely full) and a half full glass, resting on a wooden crate is something that would be maybe appropriate to a wine related blog.
Maybe, but I still don't understand why the younger should be fed with crappy "dramatization".
And younger as they might be they should know how a bottle of wine is made and need not an illustration of it (that continues making little sense).
No, the pro-tip would be ... box the hell of the guy. Your fist/knee is a very reliable weapon.
You are likely to break your hand if you try to boxe someone out of the blue, especially if you hit the skull.
Kicking is a better option if there are no weapons.
The melee option is not bad either in the configuration they had (not much space to show off martial arts skills learned in a J Chan movie) - with a few people on him he is not likely to be able to move.
Source : 14 years of self - defence, had to use my skills only once, ran away twice.