Survival at High Altitudes: Wheel-Well Passengers (1996) | Hacker News Reader

Survival at High Altitudes: Wheel-Well Passengers (1996)

rosap.ntl.bts.gov

19 pointsNaOH7 comments

"At all cruising jet altitudes, the PP0 2 is below that required to support brain consciousness. All jet wheel-well stowaways at these cruise altitudes will lose consciousness from hypoxia."

So they always pass out but sometimes are able to wake up and manage to get out. Barely. Usually they die.

Wish we didn't have places so terrible to live that a person resorts to this.

It would seem likely they were consumed by the proximate concerns of evading notice and making it to the plane and had no idea or thought about the dangers of being at such high altitudes.

Five of the ten in the table were flying from San Diego, Lyons, Sydney, Paris, and Lisbon.

Though the stowaways may have had individually terrible reasons to try this, I don't think of those five places as being particularly terrible.

I dunno, being a refugee legally in San Diego is enough to get you sent to an Ecuadorian prison camp these days.

I wondered what the story is of the 14 year old who tried to stow away on a flight from Sydney to Tokyo? They weren't exactly escaping political oppression in a third world country.

The story is here:

https://allthatsinteresting.com/keith-sapsford

Someone even (by chance) got a photo of him falling.

Wheel wells are heated from equipment inside, some measurements say ~ +20° C vs exterior.

Could the air pressure be higher?

When planes get holes does the inside pressure equal the outside.

> When planes get holes does the inside pressure equal the outside.

Short answer: Yes

Long answer: It depends on the direction. If the hole is in the forward direction the pressure will be higher. If it's on the side or the back then the pressure will be lower. But fluid dynamic is hard so there may be weird exemptions. Anyway the difference can be measured but is small to be relevant in this case.

> say ~ +20° C vs exterior. Could the air pressure be higher?

If you have a sealed container and you increase the temperature ~ +20° C, the pressure will increase, somewhat like 7% (with a lot of guesses and approximations).

But if it's unsealed, when instead of raising the pressure the air will just escape slowly. You can test it with a microwave with a glass of water. When you open it after 1 minute the temperature inside is higher, but it will not hear a pop as a balloon.

The hot air will have the same relative O2 pressure but a lower absolute O2 pressure. I guess this is bad for the survival rate.

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