According to CNN, while en route between Hong Kong and Melbourne, Australia, earlier today, a Qantas B747-400 was forced to make an emergency landing in Manila after a large hole appeared in the fuselage and the cabin depressurized. Fortunately, there were no injuries reported among the 346 passengers and 19 crew members on board.
Looking at the picture of the leading edge of the wing, my mind immediately rewinds to several more catastrophic situations involving in-flight structural failures:
1. The cargo door of a United Airlines 747 blew off over the Pacific Ocean leaving a gaping hole in the side of the aircraft. The flight landed, but several people were sucked from the hole, and dozens more injured.
2. The front third of the top of an Aloha Airlines 737 peeled back during flight, sucking a flight attendant to her death.
3. Shortly after take-off from JFK in New York City, the vertical stabilizer and rudder of an American Airlines jet bound for Santo Domingo came off, resulting in a crash that killed all aboard.
Those incidents, and any that involve loss of life or dramatic photographs, grab headlines almost immediately. But Google “hole in fuselage,” and you’ll quickly tally up a goodly number of cases where holes have formed in-flight, resulting in safe emergency landings. And that doesn’t count situations where various pieces or parts fall off while flights are in the air.
Many of us are apprehensive about flying, and headlines and photographs like the ones about today’s Qantas flight only fuel that fire. The fact is, modern aircraft are amazingly resilient structures, and the facts behind Bernoulli’s Principle of Lift don’t lie.
