How does a wet cloth really help (scientifically) to survive an airplane crash?

In article ,
micky wrote:


Okay. What about the rule against bringing your carry-on. I've assume
that is to save time, but I think I'd be willing to go last if I could
take my carry-on bag with me. I'd hug it so it wouldn't touch
anything.
Yeah, getting the carry on out of the overhead never has been shown
to slow things down (grin). Even getting it out from under the seat
would most likely get in the way of your aisle-mates getting ou. And if
you were last (and even the only one) how exactly do you stay out of
everyone else's way? Finally, you can't be last because then you are
endangering the FAs who can't leave until you do.
--
"Statistics are like bikinis. What they reveal is suggestive,
but what they conceal is vital."
-- Aaron Levenstein

On Mon, 19 May 2014 08:51:55 -0400, Kurt Ullman
wrote:

In article ,
micky wrote:


Okay. What about the rule against bringing your carry-on. I've assume
that is to save time, but I think I'd be willing to go last if I could
take my carry-on bag with me. I'd hug it so it wouldn't touch
anything.
Yeah, getting the carry on out of the overhead never has been shown
to slow things down (grin). Even getting it out from under the seat
would most likely get in the way of your aisle-mates getting ou. And if
you were last (and even the only one) how exactly do you stay out of
everyone else's way? Finally, you can't be last because then you are
endangering the FAs who can't leave until you do.

Oh, well. Maybe I'll get a wearable computer, just in case.

On Mon, 19 May 2014 08:22:01 -0400, micky
wrote:

On Mon, 19 May 2014 07:38:02 -0400, micky
wrote:

On Fri, 16 May 2014 14:00:46 +0000 (UTC), Ann Marie Brest
wrote:

On Fri, 16 May 2014 05:46:19 -0700, trader_4 wrote:

Just because someone writing a brief article doesn't specifically
mention something, doesn't constitute science.

Science isn't what you are I guess.
Science is what can be tested & proven.

I'd be glad if you can find a tested/proven article on airplane fires
which says that smoke particles, in and of themselves, constitute a
life-threatening danger in the time it takes to exit a burning airplane.

We found more than a half dozen sources, including scientific papers,
none of which said that the smoke particles were the immediate danger in
cabin fires - nor did we find anything that said a wet cloth filters them
out.

If we are to assume smoke particles are a life-threatening danger, we'd
have to find at least one scientific article that said that the
particulate matter itself could kill us in the time of a cabin fire.

If I read an article that said that, I wouldn't have to *assume*
anything. Relying on a seemingly competently-written article is not
assuming.

OTOH, if we are going to *assume* smoke particles are a life-threatening
danger, we don't need to read anything. We've already assumed it.

Bingo! You made two good points here.


Even then, we'd have to know that a wet towel would filter out those
particles.

....

On Mon, 19 May 2014 08:00:19 -0400, micky
wrote:

On Sat, 17 May 2014 20:02:50 -0400, micky
wrote:

On Sat, 17 May 2014 16:09:22 +0000 (UTC), Ann Marie Brest
wrote:

On Sat, 17 May 2014 02:06:44 -0400, micky wrote:

Why do you think all that
matters is if something is *immediately* dangerous?

You're joking right?

This line made me really angry.

You didn't answer the question. What's wrong with you?

Read trader for details.

We're talking about an airplane crash cabin fire.

And, you're saying all our conclusions are wrong because your

All *YOUR* conclusions. Not ours. No one here has agreed with your
nonsense.

aunt got cancer 30 years after moving downwind from a factory?

I apologize, but I don't get the connection at all.

And this 3-line sentence made me angrier. Snipping so readers could't
understand my point. And because you were making light of the death
of a woman I cared about.

If you don't see the connection, you're blind, or intentionally blind,
or lying, or stupid.

To try to make up for what Ms. Brest had snipped and to make my previous
post more clear: If you don't see the connection between my
brother's aunt's death because of where she lived but years after she
moved downwind from a steel plant and my ridiculing your insistence that
it only matters if something is *immediately* dangerous, you're blind,
or intentionally blind, or lying, or stupid.

She didn't want to die, and her family didn't want her to die from
mesothelioma, at all. Of course it didnt' happen immediately. It never
does with asbestos.

Maybe health insurance shouldn't pay expenses of someone who doesn't get
sick immediately? Maybe life insurance shouldn't pay when someone dies,
but not immediately. Heck, maybe we shouldn't even bury the people who
don't die immediately after the cause of their death. Because
immediate danger and death is all that matters, it seems, to you. None
of these is more stupid than your attitude.

Maybe when you're dying from some long term poison, you'll understand
it, but until you do, you're stupid.

Don't you think that's a little harsh. Even if she did spit on your
aunt, she can't help herself.

On Mon, 19 May 2014 07:55:41 -0400, micky
wrote:

On Fri, 16 May 2014 10:54:50 -0700, Ann Marie Brest
wrote:

On Fri, 16 May 2014 05:46:19 -0700 (PDT), trader_4 wrote:

As others have said, they focused on the main cause of deaths in fires
and that is the gases. That doesn't mean that particles are not also
dangerous and life threatening.

Nothing I found, so far, says that the particles are life
threatening.

The HCN gas can kill you in a couple of minutes, for example.

There was one reference which did say the wet cloth trapped particulate
matter:
http://wenku.baidu.com/view/8abb4621...fcc220e6f.html

So, we can safetly assume that a wet cloth does trap particles,
but, nobody has reported any real evidence that "smoke inhalation"
(presumably that means particulate inhalation) is either immediately
dangerous, or the *reason* for the wet cloth.

News reports of people who died from smoke inhalation, incuding
Ambassador Stevens, certainly count as real evidence.

I reed and hear such reports frequently but I'm not going to take the
time to find any now. If you want to read some, search the web. There
are plenty.


Based on the evidence repoted to date, the reason for the wet rag
seems to be to trap water soluble gases, of which HCN is the most
dangerous in a cabin fire (according to all the references).

Why do you worry only about the most dangerous gas? If 3 people mug
you, and one has a .45 caliber gun, another a rifle, and the third a
Derringer, with two small bullets, and you can stop the guy with the
rifle from shooting you, will you happily let the other two guys shoot
you?

That's a pretty good analogy.

On Sat, 17 May 2014 02:18:59 -0400, micky
wrote:

On Fri, 16 May 2014 10:50:13 -0700, Ann Marie Brest
wrote:

On Fri, 16 May 2014 07:48:32 -0400, micky wrote:

It is frequenty reported that someone dies of smoke inhalation.

It's frequently reported that people die of heartbreak also.

Give me a break. Now you're using nonsense to try to refute facts.

If you google smoke inhalation, you likely may read that the US
ambassador to Libya who died in the fire at the consulate in Bengazi,
Ambassador Stevens, did not die from burns but from smoke inhalation.
Do you think he really died of a broken heart, or that they just called
it smoke inhalation to mess up this thead for you?

And that Vikings wore horns on their helmets.
And that Moses parted the water of the Red Sea.
Or that George Washington had wooden teeth.
Or that Benjamin Franklin publicly proposed the wild turkey be
used (instead of the bald eagle) as the symbol of the US.
Or that Napoleon Bonaparte was shorter than the average
Frenchman of his time.
etc.

Lots of things are "frequently reported" and just as frequently
untrue. That's why I had asked for "scientific" answers.

Anyone can guess wrong.

No one's guessing, lady, except you.

You've lost this argument. Give it up. No matter what you might yet
successfullly show about fire deaths, you lost when you said that we
(meaning you) could safely assume something just because the opposite was
not written in a short article. You have to abandon that method of
thinking, or at least not bring it up here, and then you might have your
future posts taken more seriously.

Maybe she can do that.

"trader_4" wrote in message
news:df3d9f0d-cc7f-4640-a592- On Monday, May 19, 2014 7:17:35 AM UTC-4,
Robert Green wrote:
This thread has helped explain why I believe the missing Malaysia flight
might have suffered a cabin fire (that model plane had a known oxygen
supply
hose defect that caused a very serious fire on the ground in another
plane).

Again, that defect that occured in one other case, resulted in a
cockpit fire at the pilots seat, while the airplane was on the ground.
Let's say the same thing happened in MH370. How does that explain the
airplane flying for about an hour more under radar contact, making
precise turns, lining up with mormal flight paths toward India, and
then later, making at least one more course change that took it to
Australia? How does it miraculously result in the the transponder
and ACARS being lost. And all this just happened to occur in the
couple of minutes between being handed off by Malaysian ATC to Vietnam
ATC, ie the ideal small, ideal window for deliberate human action?

There's no explanation of events that can be proven or disproved until the
wreckage is found. The pandemonium that can occur with a cabin fire can
explain a lot of things that appear to be inexplicable. Reading about how
fast cabin fires spread and how lethal they can be still makes me suspect a
cabin fire because a pilot crashing a plane deliberately and silently
doesn't make sense. He would *want* to get credit for his actions. Your
small, ideal window could be total coincidence. There's just no way to know
from the few facts that are available.

If it was a cabin fire, there should be still some evidence recoverable to
support that theory. If the FDR and voice recorder unit are found, it may
prove your theory - or it may leave us with more clues but no firm answer
because the voice recorder overwrites old data every two hours and the plane
allegedly crashed 7 hours after takeoff. Critical voice information is most
likely gone unless the CVR lost power early on in the flight.

The most difficult part of the suicide scenario is that even Shakespeare's
often long-winded dramatic characters got it over relatively quickly.
People who survived jumping off the Golden Gate bridge change their minds
half way down. Search for the 2003 New Yorker article about Golden Gate
Bridge suicide jumpers. It's very enlightening.

I just don't know of a single case where a guy took 7 hours to kill himself.
It's an impulsive act that people want to get over with quickly. He left no
note, no radio contact, no reasons given. That's pretty unusual for a
suicide, especially one who appears as troubled as he's been made out to be.
And his demonization by the press and the Malaysian government also bothers
me. It's classic scapegoating. There are dozens of scenarios at this stage,
but allow me to prefer those that don't point a finger at the crew or the
pilot.

Pilot suicide just doesn't make a lot of sense to me whereas a cabin fire in
a plane KNOWN to have a serious oxygen hose defect seems far more likely.
There's no record or mention I can find of the oxygen hose problem being
corrected and I doubt Malaysia has a fully-functioning FAA equivalent to
enforce maintenance fixes. I am also always totally suspicious of airlines
and governments being quick to blame the pilots. It's an industry tradition
used to focus attention away from any possible gross negligence on their
part.

So then explain how the plane continued to make the many reported
course and altitute changes. Including ones an hour and beyone the
alleged fire.... It just doesn't fit.

"Reported course changes" really bothers me. If they had such detail course
information, why where they searching, without luck, huge swaths of ocean?
That model plane has not one but several automated systems that can fly the
plane and are dedicated to keeping it airborne. There's no main computer to
fail, like some "Star Trek" scenario. There are lots of independent systems
connected through data buses.

Considering how badly my PC acted up when the space heater accidentally
started blowing on it I have no problem believing a fire damaged autopilot
could do a lot of things that looked like a human was at the controls.
Since autopilots are capable of executing almost every command a pilot could
issue, changes in course don't prove there was a person issuing them.

If the cabin's filled with cyanide gas, death for everyone would occur
in
very short order.

That's not true. There are portable oxygen tanks for the crew to use.

You're forgetting that it was precisely those tanks and their fittings that
caused the disastrous oxygen-fed fire on a different plane of the same
model. A fire that would not have been survivable had it occurred aloft. A
fire that turned the cabin's electrical gear into a mass of fused plastic
and wire.

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2014/...70_634x478.jpg

Also the passengers have oxygen for long enough to bring the plane
down to 10,000.

Can *they* fly the plane if the pilots burned to death in a flash cabin
fire? Maybe one of them was poking around with the charred autopilot after
the flames were extinguished and those actions caused the alleged course
changes. We may never know. One thing's for certain: without the wreckage
there's never likely to be conclusive proof about what happened to that
airplane, so we're just spinning our wheels.

Just like you can't testify to the operation of someone's mind in court, you
can't determine if the pilot was suicidal or homicidal by counting the
number of course changes a plane *allegedly* made after radio contact was
lost. If there was a fire, the pilots would have tried to deactivate
cockpit components by pulling the electrical busses. That *easily* explains
why cockpit based systems failed first and other, more remote systems
continued to function. If it was the pilot's emergency oxygen supply that
caused the fire, then their chances for prolonged survival amidst toxic
fumes are very poor.

Without the data and voice recorders or forensic evidence from the wreckage,
it's all supposition. I base mine on a previous very serious oxygen fed
cabin fire in an identical model and on Payne Stewart's flight to nowhere
with a plane full of dead passengers. Yes, that plane flew in a straight
line after all the passengers and pilot died from a pressurization
malfunction, but the 777 has a far more sophisticated autopilot.

If the Apollo oxygen-fed (aka a "blowtorch") fire killed everyone in the
capsule in 17 seconds, a fire like that doesn't leave much time to call the
ATC tower and tell them about an event they couldn't do anything about
anyway from 100's of miles away. The pilot's primary duty at that point is
to keep the plane flying, not to alert ATC. Pilots have a mantra for
setting priorities in an emergency: aviate, navigate, communicate.

The worst part is that they may never find the wreck. It took two YEARS to
find the AirFrance wreck and they basically knew where it went down. But if
they do find MH370, we may see which one of us is the better guesser,
because that's all we can do. Guess. There just isn't enough information
available to reach any valid conclusions other than the plane is lost.

--
Bobby G.

On Tue, 20 May 2014 06:55:42 -0700, Robert Green
wrote:

...snip....

The most difficult part of the suicide scenario is that even
Shakespeare's
often long-winded dramatic characters got it over relatively quickly.
People who survived jumping off the Golden Gate bridge change their minds
half way down. Search for the 2003 New Yorker article about Golden Gate
Bridge suicide jumpers. It's very enlightening.
...snip...

Complicating are economic pressures:
Plane failed == extremely costly liability.
Pilot Error == no liability.

And from experience having a pilot friend accused of fuel exhaustion when
it was a casting flaw in the carburator suddenly appearing where he was
'guilty until proven innocent'; you'll see more Pilot Errors causing
crashes than mechanical failures.

On 21/05/14 02:30, RobertMacy wrote:
On Tue, 20 May 2014 06:55:42 -0700, Robert Green
wrote:

...snip....

The most difficult part of the suicide scenario is that even
Shakespeare's
often long-winded dramatic characters got it over relatively quickly.
People who survived jumping off the Golden Gate bridge change their minds
half way down. Search for the 2003 New Yorker article about Golden Gate
Bridge suicide jumpers. It's very enlightening.
...snip...

Complicating are economic pressures:
Plane failed == extremely costly liability.
Pilot Error == no liability.

And from experience having a pilot friend accused of fuel exhaustion
when it was a casting flaw in the carburator suddenly appearing where he
was 'guilty until proven innocent'; you'll see more Pilot Errors causing
crashes than mechanical failures.

Yup. Its always easier to blame the pilot as in most cases they're dead.
And sometimes the Accident Report is so wrong that the Coroners Report
is taken as being the truer record