Hacker News Reader

Comment by s5300 | Hacker News Reader

I’d at first read the plane was without passengers and just being flown somewhere… and I thought, great.

Today I read that it was full of passengers, and the two people supposed to be in the two seats in the row the panel blew out happened to miss their flight.

If that’s true… what an interesting set of statistics coming together.

Amount of people that sleep through flights Amount of panels that blow out of passenger planes Chance to be seated next to said panel

View on HN

I'm just going to leave you with this frightening quote: "They said there was a kid in that row who had his shirt was sucked off him and out of the plane and his mother was holding onto him to make sure he didn't go with it."

Shirt sucked off him. Mother was holding onto him. Oh hello, a thousand nightmares of my youth.

I suppose after that you’ll be either absolutely unafraid of planes or never go on one with a shirt again.

Wear your seat belt while in the seat.

The seat is still there, firmly attached to the plane. In all likelihood a passenger in that seat, if they were wearing their seat belt (as they should have, it wasn't at cruising altitude, and you should wear your seat belt anyway when seated), would have been severely frightened and annoyed, but probably uninjured. Maybe some hearing loss.

Although I'm not an aerospace engineer, Airplane seats only have a a simple lap-belt, are rarely adjusted to the proper tightness, and are designed to accommodate all body sizes. I could certainly imagine a lap-belt not being adequate to keep a small child from getting sucked out of the seat.

The seat is at the very least missing some fabric and cushioning. Winds that can do that to an airplane seat probably wouldn’t leave a human uninjured.

Agreed, I wouldn't be surprised to see some light injuries, but on the other hand that seat cover is velcro'd on at the top and comes right off for cleaning. Not much really holding it there.

We are seeing the "inverted Swiss cheese" model of disaster avoidance: you are only safe if several independent, random events go your way.

I mean, of course it is better that the seats were not occupied, but there is no reason to treat it as if those people for sure would have died if they were on the plane.

It sounds like if they were on board and wearing seat belts they would have been fine. Possibly very shaken, but fine.

> wearing seat belts

After the segment of fuselage fell to the earth, after the giant hole opened, after the kid's shirt was ripped away, passengers were standing up at their seats and in the aisle, and flight attendants had to plead with them to sit down and buckle up.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com