Episode 10 - In-Air break ups, the miracle of Juliane Koepcke & the Comet Catastrophe

In this episode we’ll look at in-air breakups of aeroplanes – caused by poor flying, poor design, or poor maintenance and bad weather. In some cases all four of these together. However as with all things aviation, every accident leads to an equal and opposite reaction .. to misquote the great Sir Isaac Newton. That reaction luckily for us, is called Aviation safety standards. The terrible truth is that people die and then safety improves. So let’s start with the 32 year-old Charles Rolls. He was one half of the great Rolls-Royce engine company but his end was rather unfortunate. Probably the most famous of all in-air break ups involved the notorious de Havilland Comet. It took three catastrophic failures all within a year before the airliner was grounded. Launched by BOAC in 1952, the Comet was the world’s first jet airliner and was an attractive plane too. Aviation buffs swooned over its swept back look, the modern jet liner was born and it could fly right across the Atlantic without a stop. However, it had a serious flaw. The windows and doors. One of the most incredible in-air failures ended with almost everyone surviving. In April 1988, part of the fuselage of an Aloha 737 flying from Hilo to Honolulu shredded at 24,000ft. A flight attendant was swept overboard – everyone else survived. Imagine sitting in the open air with nothing between them and the ocean except for a safety belt. That may be so, but it took a 1991 accident to kick start a proper global culture of aviation safety. The mid-air break up of the Continental Express Flight 2574 – an Embraer 120 Brasilia, was a scheduled domestic passenger airline flight operated by Britt Airways from Laredo International Airport in Laredo, Texas, to Houston Intercontinental Airport or IAH in Houston, Texas. A break-up of a plane over Peru deserves special mention at this point. As you’ll hear in this series, there are many examples of a single person surviving a plane crash. And this is one of them. Today we hear about the extraordinary story of Juliane Koepcke. She was 17 years old and sitting in the window seat next to her mother on board a Lansa Aircraft flight 508 from Lima in Peru to Pucallpa in the middle of the Amazon Rain Forest. There’s another I have to mention and it involved something known as Clean Air Turbulence which led to an in-air breakup of a commercial airliner. In the case of BOAC flight 911 callsign Speedbird 911, clean air turbulence produced an estimated 7.5Gs that caused the Boeing to disintegrate over Mount Fuji in Japan on 5th March 1966. Clean Air turbulence will be covered in a future podcast, but needless to say there’s no warning. All 113 passengers and 11 crew perished.